My Child May Be Silently Struggling With Handwriting. What is my next step?

Handwriting Requires a Complex Set of Skills

Handwriting requires the development of a complex set of skills for the hand to write with a pencil easily.  Each of the skills described on this page contributes significantly to success with handwriting.

Overall legibility and ease of writing, as well as the development of a correct pencil grip, are all impacted by the skills covered here. The intricacies of handwriting are often overlooked and misunderstood.  Often, parents think, “How can such a “low tech” activity like handwriting be so challenging for kids?”

As a parent, you have extensive experience with typical developmental milestones such as sitting, crawling, walking, and saying their first word.

However, what you may not be aware of is that there is a sequence of more refined skills that should develop between ages 1-5. If these refined skills do not develop properly, it can make things harder on your child when they start school.

Fine Motor Skills

There are fifteen fine motor skills, which are the building blocks that allow your child’s hand to do many things, including:

• Performing everyday tasks (e.g., buttoning, zipping, tying shoes, using utensils for eating, turning the pages of a book)
• Accomplishing academic skills (e.g., writing, drawing/coloring, using scissors, holding a pencil correctly, using a ruler, and even keyboarding).

Mastering these skills requires precision and coordination of the small muscles of the fingers, hand, and wrist, which influence the efficiency, speed, and quality of the completion of tasks. If your child is not proficient with their fine motor skills, their self-esteem, independence, and academic performance will suffer. Fine motor skills directly impact your child’s ability to demonstrate what they’ve learned.  For instance, being able to write down what they know or filing in a box to answer a multiple-choice test question.

Developing fine motor skills is a complex process that typically begins in early infancy and matures between age 5 to 6 years old; the age when most children are starting Kindergarten. Although children develop at different rates, if your child has not developed all 15 fine motors skills by this age, it could signify a delay in development that will follow them throughout their academic career and beyond.

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Motor Planning and Coordination

Motor planning is a skill that helps you think about, remember, and perform steps to make body movement occur. Motor planning and coordination are essential for executing movements automatically with reliability and proficiency.  It’s your brain’s way of figuring out how to do the task at hand using eye-hand coordination, internal awareness of your body, and understanding the relationship of the objects all around you.

When your child begins to develop motor planning and coordination, tasks can be slow and inefficient. For example, when learning to write letters.

At first, it is difficult to control the pencil within a given boundary, such as writing within the lines on paper. Letters are formed incorrectly, usually with varied sizes and are placed all over the page. With practice, feedback, and repeated adjustment, your child will eventually start to refine their motor planning and coordination so they can write letters quickly and accurately on lined paper.

If your child has poor motor planning and coordination, they may appear clumsy and seem to take “forever” to learn basic tasks.

Poor motor planning and coordination can affect a child’s performance in school. You will notice signs and symptoms like:

• Taking more time than allowed to complete tasks.
• Falling behind or having to take work home.
• Rushing through things, such as written work, because no matter how hard your child tries to control their pencil, the result is always the same, so why put in the effort.

Struggling with these issues leads to having to redo work over again, which leads to frustration.

Handwriting Development

Handwriting is one of the most complex skills a child can perform. The reason is that handwriting requires the coordination of multiple centers of the brain. Your child starts to develop this multifaceted skill around 10-15 months old with scribbling. From scribbling, your child slowly progresses to copying simple shapes such as vertical and horizontal lines.

Then they move to more intricate shapes with curves, directional changes, and diagonal lines that cross the midline, such as when your child writes the letter X. Scientifically, handwriting has a fascinating effect on your child’s brain development, proving that it is one of the building blocks for learning.

In a study conducted by Indiana University, researchers used high-tech MRI scans to test a child’s brain activity when participating in a variety of tasks. They found that children who practiced writing letters independently with a pencil showed higher neural activity than those who looked at letters or typed letters on a keyboard.

At Scribble 2 Script, we believe that handwriting is not just about legibility. It is about readability combined with functionality. In other words, when using handwriting for homework, journaling, taking notes, and classroom work, handwriting needs to be quick and legible to be functional. It’s not enough to have “nice” handwriting. Our proven, multi-step process turns a child’s messy handwriting into legible writing with speed and efficiency using a variety of age-appropriate lined paper.

Your Child May Be Silently Struggling with Frustration and Lack of Confidence

Fine motor skills, motor planning, and coordination lay the foundation for handwriting to be easy and successful. When these skills are not fully developed, your child will experience frustration, and their confidence can take a turn for the worse. Frustration and lack of confidence can turn into unwanted “signs and symptoms,” which impacts your child’s ability to learn effectively and perform at their highest level in school.

Now that you understand the complexities of handwriting, there is no need to continue to fight this battle on your own. It’s not a matter of “practice makes perfect” and doing worksheet after worksheet. Your child needs a dynamic approach to address handwriting legibility by focusing on the underlying challenges that are initially causing them to struggle.

Scribble 2 Script’s team of professionals will start with a comprehensive evaluation to “peel away the “layers of the onion” and discover how well your child is developing these skills. Then, we create an individualized plan of action to resolve your child’s challenges with handwriting by comprehensively addressing their “unseen” needs. Children love Scribble 2 Script’s interactive Handwriting Therapy program.

Your child can participate in our signature Hand Gym activities to develop fine motor skills. They will learn age-appropriate techniques to improve their handwriting.

Your child’s motor control will be enhanced using:

• Squiggle pens
• Blacklight writers
• Liquid chalk
• And more tools they will be excited to tell you about when they get home.