Some pre-school age children love to get dirty, and will touch just about anything and everything to explore its texture and feel. Children who are tactilely defensive however, may find playing with materials such as glue, sand, and soil in the classroom to be particularly frightening and will either avoid messy play or minimize contract with the offending substance. It is important for children to manipulate different textures with their hands and fingers in order to strengthen and develop the muscles used for handwriting and other fine motor tasks. Here are a few suggestions to help a tactilely defensive child better tolerate and explore his/her environment.

• Before any activity involving touch, prepare your child by telling him/her what materials will be used in the activity. Explain that he/she can start by touching something with one finger only. As he/she gets more comfortable with it, he/she can then touch it with two fingers, then with the whole hand, etc.
• Give your child disposable gloves to put on before the activity. This will allow him/her to explore a texture and exercise hand muscles without it directly touching his/her hands. Some disposable gloves come with different scents such as strawberry and grape (http://www.superduperinc.com), which can help make the activity more enjoyable.
  • As your child begins to tolerate a specific texture while wearing gloves, have him/her snip off one fingertip at a time on the glove to gradually expose each finger to the material. You may end up snipping off all of the fingertips, or eventually removing the gloves altogether.
• Have your child stick one or both of his/her hands inside a small Ziploc bag so that he/she can play with something without directly touching it.
• Use other implements, such as cookie cutters or a rolling pin, when manipulating textures such as Play Doh or baking dough.  Use a Popsicle stick to spread glue and shovels to plant or look for salamanders.

Share these suggestions with you child’s preschool teachers.

Blog by Rachel Romanoff, OTR & Chaye Lamm Warburg, MA., OTR