Continuing from a previous post about story telling with young children, this video describes how to use story telling to relax young children using massage.
Personally, I was curious about massage with young children as a way to calm a child’s body and mind. As a grandparent, Youtube videos are a great resource to learn about the latest in understanding media as an extension of our senses and brain.
How Early Life Experience is Written into DNA” is a TED talk…and TED talks can also be great resources. This one is very closely related to your curiosity about what effect something like massage might have on young children.
According to that talk, mother rats that lick their offspring a lot, actually change the way the DNA is implemented through the rest of life. DNA is not a static blueprint by itself, but is implemented in cells through a process that turns portions of genes on and off, and the researcher giving the talk shows how experiments revealed at least one way that happens.
Also has implications for what affect reading to children might have on their DNA implementation, and perhaps we can assume something even more impactful if a mother is reading while massaging. Or massaging while watching Sesame Street. And no doubt lots of additional environmental effects occur through similar biological pathways.