Mother-Infant Sleeping Arrangements and Night-Time Touch Behaviors

Abstract Affective touch is interpersonal touch which carries an emotional valence and is important to humans and other primates for stress resilience and social bonding. It is acknowledged that infants who sleep in close proximity to a caregiver receive more touch. However, mother-infant night-time touch has not been investigated with an understanding of affective touch mechanisms and with infant night-time location treated as a continuous rather than categorical variable. In a secondary data analysis of sleep laboratory observations of 13 UK mother-infant dyads, some for multiple nights (19 total observations, averaged within participants), we used continuous coding to quantify the amount and type of touch that infants received, and how it related to the amount of time they spent in different locations during the night. At the time of the observations, infants were four months old or younger, except one infant who was observed three times, with the last observation being at 6 months of age. We found that infants who spent more time in the adult bed received significantly more touch overall, and specifically more static touch. However, the time the infants spent in the adult bed was not significantly associated with the amount of stroking touch the infants received, with very little stroking touch recorded overall. We propose that static touch received in the night-time environment during bed-sharing can be a type of affective touch, as it may communicate safety to the infant through the presence of a responsible adult caregiver.