Peaceful Touch: Primary School Massage

Peaceful Touch—where teachers facilitate children touching other children with simple, nurturing strokes—is a revolution of sorts. Peaceful Touch is based on research that showed that nurturing touch for children elicits a similar response as breast-feeding does in babies, releasing oxytocin, the feel-good “cuddle hormone,” which promotes empathy, calmness and concentration. Today, more than 300,000 students in Europe have been recipients of Peaceful Touch, and it’s rare to find a preschool in Sweden that doesn’t implement it.