This inquiry explores young children’s distress management in situ, centering on situations of crying and caregivers’ embodied—haptic—soothing responses in preschools in Sweden. The adults’ replies to crying imply embraces, stroking, and patting. Haptic soothing is managed by calibrating the bodily proximity and postural orientations between the participants, covering haptic—embracing or face-to-face—formations that are coordinated with specific forms of talk. Haptic formations configure specific affordances for embodied participation by actualizing the availability of tactile, aural, and visual modalities. The interactional organization of soothing in an embracing formation implies: an initiation/invitation and answer, submergence of two bodies into a close haptic contact, and coordinated withdrawal from haptic contact. The embracing formation provisionally interrupts the requirements for the distressed person to behave like a responsive listener and speaker. The caregiver employs the face-to-face formation to restore conditions for the child’s interactional co-presence. Data are in Swedish and English translation.