Youngsters losing hand co-ordination

Children are struggling at school because they don’t know if they are left or right-handed. The proportion of infants arriving at school not knowing whether they are right or left-handed has trebled in the past decade, researchers say. The situation has been made worse by excessive parental fears, driven by cot death, about letting them lie or crawl on their front.

Children of four and five are struggling to make advances in writing because of their stunted dexterity, made worse by shortening attention spans. The trend has raised concerns that children are developing more slowly than in past years, leading to “indelible” behavioural problems in adolescence.

Madeleine Portwood, a senior educational psychologist at Durham county council, said that from her observations of hundreds of children, the proportion of those who started school not knowing whether they were more comfortable holding a pencil in their left or right hands had grown from 10% a decade ago to 25%-30%.



“It’s important if you start formal education at 4½ and you are expected to hold an implement to write, that you know which hand to hold it in,” she said.

Portwood believes an important factor in the change is that some parents interpret advice that children should sleep on their backs to avoid cot death to mean that they should never be allowed on their fronts, even when awake and on the floor.

This means infants are less likely to crawl on their hands and knees and develop left-right coordination between arms and legs as they learn to stand and walk.