Only a few short decades ago, left-handed children were consistently forced to learn to write with their right hand. It was thought that uniformity of writing styles was more important than individuality. However, when a number of left-handed children began developing stutters and showing a lack of confidence in their school-work, the practice of forcing lefties to become honorary ‘righties’ was abandoned.
These days teachers may not force left-handed children into a right-handed mould, and neither should parents. However there are still some factors with left-handed children that need to be considered.
If your child or pupil shows a preference for using the left hand for a variety of tasks, quite apart from handwriting, do encourage the child in that use. Our tendency is to think that handwriting is the only big issue with small lefthanded children; in fact there are a variety of areas where they will find difficulties.
Craft areas. The obvious difficulty here is the use of scissors, which are basically made for right-handed use. Do make sure your home or classroom has enough left-handed scissors available; they are now readily available from good stationery shops. (There have been left-handed scissors for about twenty years – but many people don’t know about them.) By the way, not all left-handed children use their left-hand for scissor work – just to keep you on your toes!
Proper left-handed scissors need to be used only by left-handers. If they are used by the right-handed children, the blades will start to loosen, because the pressure from the thumb is affecting the wrong blade. (The same will apply, of course, if left-handed children use right-handed scissors for any length of time.)
But scissors aren’t the only problem. If you as the adult demonstrate a way of doing some craft that requires manipulation of tools be aware that the left-handed child will have to rethink your process. Try seeing it from their point of view. You will find it as difficult to use the tools ‘back to front’ as he or she finds it difficult to translate your manipulation of them into his or her ‘language.’ It requires more than a little skill and some tolerance to give the leftie time to work the process out in their own way.
When you are playing sports with the children, be aware that the left-handed ones may not see things your way at all. This is particularly important in sports where the player has to hit a ball with a bat or racquet or baseball, for example. If you know a child is left-handed, then make sure that they understand that it’s just as acceptable to hit the ball from the left side as from the right. (In fact, in both baseball and cricket left-handedness is regarded as an asset rather than a liability. And many adults use left-handed golf clubs.)
And here’s something else to consider: just as some left-handed children have no problem with right-handed scissors, some right-handed children find it easier to hit from the left. There are far fewer totally left or right-handed people than we think.
Though left-handed scissors have made the grade in a ‘right-handed world,’ many other useful items for students are not readily available. These range from spiral notebooks that open from the "opposite" side, pens and pencils that do not smear, and rulers numbered from right to left. (For older students and adults there are also portfolios with the writing tablet on the left side, and address books and date books that open from right to left instead of left to right.) The value of these right to left models is that they make it easier for left-handed children to write properly. Part of the problem for these children when they learn to write is that books do not fold open conveniently. Folders with spirals are also a problem, since those that have the spiral on the left, the ‘normal’ way, make it quite difficult for the left-handed student to overcome the ‘bump’ in his or her way.
With many children using computers at school another difficulty arises for the left-handed child. Keyboards are geared towards the right-handed user, with most of the function keys on the right. If a school has only these kind of keyboards, it makes it more difficult for left-handed children to use the computers easily. Left-handed keyboards are now available: they are basically the same in every respect to the ordinary keyboard, but the numeric keypad and the cursor and function keys are all situated on the left. There are also left-handed joysticks and computer mouses available.
