by Michael Smith (Veshengro)
Experts say that children lack the muscle strength required to write.
All number of things – from intricate finger movement to hand-eye coordination – have to go right before someone can actually write.
Children spend so much time swiping iPad screens that they cannot hold a pencil anymore. Senior paediatricians in the United Kingdom say that many children start school lacking the muscle strength to grip a pencil, which affects their ability to learn how to write properly.
"To be able to grip a pencil and move it, you need strong control of the fine muscles in your fingers. Children need lots of opportunity to develop those skills."
I would also say that they haven't got the faintest idea what a pencil or pen is in the first place having spent probably several years already playing around on their parents' and probably even their own iPads or such devices.
Developing finger, arm, and shoulder strength is something that happened naturally in the past, when children drew, colored, cut paper and did crafts for entertainment and participated more actively in household chores. But the spread of handheld devices has changed the nature of play.
As Payne said, "It's easier to give a child an iPad than encouraging them to do muscle-building play such as building blocks, cutting and sticking, or pulling toys and ropes. Because of this, they're not developing the underlying foundation skills they need to grip and hold a pencil."
And the ability of proper finger skills and hand-eye-coordination is not just important for writing by hand but also and especially for so many other tasks.
While some may say that handwriting belongs to an antiquated education system and is no longer relevant to today's texting, typing generation, this problem goes beyond not being able to form words on paper. This shows that kids' actual physical development is being stunted by too much sedentary screen-swiping, and that's very alarming. If a child's hand isn't strong enough to hold a pencil, imagine how weak their entire body must be, if the child has spent that much time sitting still, rather than running around the backyard or climbing trees.
While cursive, aka joint-up, writing might not be too important – I never got on with it myself – learning to write by hand and actually doing so is very important indeed, also for note-taking in class, as that action transfers the knowledge better than typing.
We should not be too quick to write off handwriting as a useless skill. Even if we do not write on paper as much as we used to, subjects like math and geography and art will always require the use of one's hand, particularly in early years. And who knows what schools will be like by the time today's kindergarteners reach university. Some lecture halls are banning laptops from classrooms, not only because they are distracting, but also because students are known to retain information better if it is copied down by hand. And that is because this “copying down by hand” is actually more a case of rewriting the words of lecturer into the student's own, thus already taking the material on board without even thinking about it.
We are doing our children a great disservice by handing them an electronic device (too early) before they have mastered other much more important skills than typing or swiping a finger across a screen. They also will not always be able to have a device handy later when needing to write something down, or the device may be out of power, etc. So what then?
On the other hand being unable to hold and push a pencil due to lack of muscle strength and coordination ability may also impede other activities, including the proper use of cutlery and using a knife for cutting tasks. I dread to think what kind of generation we are creating.
© 2018
