Are you ticklish? My kids certainly are, and I only have to move my hands towards them in a threatening manner to have both of them giggling on the floor in laughter. My Japanese wife, however, isn’t the slightest bit ticklish, and you could spend hours rubbing feathers over her body and not get the slightest response. I know nothing about the physiology of ticklishness or where it comes from, but my own pet theory is that stimulation of the body during a young age causes the nerve endings to become more sensitive, which results in ticklish bodies when the kids get older. When my kids were babies, we did caress them and touch them a lot, something the Japanese wisely call skinship, yet my wife says that it’s very un-Japanese to touch your children so much, and insists that she was never held or played with that closely when she was small. I’ve always believed that my wife’s being raised in a traditional Japanese environment which had a lot less warm parent-to-child touching (imagine the planet Vulcan basically) led to her never becoming ticklish. Do you think people raised in happy, loving households are more ticklish as a result?
