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Children Struggle To Hold Pencils Due To Too Much Tech, Doctors Say (theguardian.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Children are increasingly finding it hard to hold pens and pencils because of an excessive use of technology, senior pediatric doctors have warned. An overuse of touchscreen phones and tablets is preventing children's finger muscles from developing sufficiently to enable them to hold a pencil correctly, they say. "Children are not coming into school with the hand strength and dexterity they had 10 years ago," said Sally Payne, the head pediatric occupational therapist at the Heart of England foundation NHS Trust. "Children coming into school are being given a pencil but are increasingly not be able to hold it because they don't have the fundamental movement skills. "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." Payne said the nature of play had changed. "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."
Perhaps the need to hold a pencil will not be needed in the future. This is an early sign of a biological change.
This is the biggest load of BS. Hand / Eye Coordination and muscular definition have been shown in COUNTLESS studies to IMPROVE DRAMATICALLY after a good amount of video game playing. Pretty much the opposite of this "Study" I grew up with a gameboy in my hand, and have better reflexes and coordination at 40, than most of the people half my age. And can STILL game better than 75% of them, type 120wpm, and... Wait for it.... USE A FREAKIN PENCIL! :-D
I wish I could say this tech-addicted story surprised me.
Circle the wagons and fire inward. Entropy increases without bounds.
they're not developing the underlying foundation skills they need to grip and hold a pencil.
Those boys are going to have a bigger problem when they hit puberty.
All those shows where people used thumb prints to sign things was an unexpected pointer to the problem of tech in schools. Apparently most of them couldn't hold a pencil/pen to the real world.
As the newfangled quill became more popular, we began to see more and more children lack the hand strength to use a hammer and chisel. Sadly, we have yet to recover from such a blow to society. Once again technology has degraded our quality of life.
Montessori methods. Especially the physical manifestation of the foundations of arithmetic: the beads, etc.
Then they'll develop the dexterity they need.
I'm guessing in the end they just need more practice. It does make me wonder if well before they would ever use a pencil children already have a little bit of practice in because they watch their parents writing things out, and they mimic that as best as they can. I have an 11 month old daughter and I've noticed that she presses buttons on her toy with her thumb, I'm thinking that she's watching my my wife and I interact with our smart phones.
Then again, I wonder how much coloring kids are doing these days.
Pencils are going the way of the Dodo. Not saying that is good (I don't actually think it is, there are a lot of other instruments that are basically similar to hold like a pencil), but that seems to be what is happening.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
It might be just because I'm a very kinaesthetic person, but this is something I find in general computer tech has failed to grasp: How important it is to hold something, to touch something, to feel something touching you.
Among other things, this is the primary reason most keyboards on the market suck, and why VR still hasn't taken off. We techies tend to believe too much that 80% of the human perception is visual, and that is just plain out wrong. The largest sensory organ in your body is your skin.
Computers make great toys for kids, they allow so much creativity and agency, and there are so many skills you can develop with them. But kids should also play with sticks, with Legos, with tools, with wood and metal and stone.
And, frankly speaking, if you don't give your child real, physical books to read, IMHO you should be locked up for child abuse.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
I heard there was a problem with using offline styluses but the clickbait was unclear.
They'll be fine. Whenever I had to write cursive, it grated by wrist bones after a while. Like most physical adjustments for a task, you do a little damage, your body heals, and over a couple of weeks you're a halfway-capable writing machine.
Writing isn't going away even in some far flung future - but it's understandable why kids don't want to use it constantly anymore compared with alternatives.
That particular kind of bone pain involved with mashing those wrist bones into shapes is validly a
thing that makes you not want to practice writing.
But kids would still end up doing it, even if there aren't lesson plans. If there stuck somewhere and want to make a crude sign, they're not going to be unable to. They'll still write words in the sand with s a stick, and countless other interactions with language we're drawn to.
The kids will be fine. It's the adults we should really be worried about - there's some things really wrong with them.
Ryan Fenton
Has it not occurred to anyone that you don't even start writing until you're five or six? Everyone has this same weakness in their hands at this time in life. It has nothing to do with technology, unless tablets and smartphones can travel through time and occupy our hands when we were kids.
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
Chopsticks
Would were! Should is! Could be! And live a hundred times three.
This story seems like complete, made-up bullshit. It has:
- Doctors and scientists making a claim that seems ridiculous on it's face
- Focuses on children and learning for reader and interest
- A bogeyman
- No actual scientific study mentioned
- An audience ready to believe
If you are allowing your child to reach school age and they've only used tech ... then quite honestly, you suck as a parent.
I see way too many kids who are just given the phone to shut them up, and I'm hearing about way too many kids who lack even basic skills you'd expect.
If you child lack the strength and dexterity to hold a fucking pencil, you don't deserve to be a parent. Unfortunately, any moron can be a parent.
My friend's kids all read, write, and pretty much everything well above their peers. And it's not because they're baby geniuses, it's because their parents made damned sure to actually parent and teach the fundamental stuff ... the younger kid has just read the books and played with the toys of the older kid, so he's catching up to his sister as she moves up to more advanced stuff. They've just given their kids every opportunity to learn and grow, and made sure that tech is a fairly low part of that.
I've lost count of the number of times I've seen some mother standing in a store negotiating with a 3 year old, or just giving the child the phone to shut it up.
Apparently this is the consequence of that.
Reminds me of a conversation with my doctor - where he dreams he is assigned to a nursing home as a physical rehab clinician. The primary rehab issue is getting the old people help and retraining to overcome the crippling arthritis of their thumbs resulting from a lifetime of thumb button pushing and swiping on their mobile phones . . .
redneck geek
Have your child play a musical instrument.
We'll make great pets
"Children adapt to best adjust to what they need to do."
Handwriting is dead. The writing is on the wall. (Sorry!)
These kids have 4 years of touchscreen and keyboard skills before they go to school now and we're teaching them to use pencils? Why? A lot of schools are issuing tablets to individual pupils from a young age and most certainly they still teach ICT skills.
We had to be taught how to write because it's not natural and "you'll need to be able to write when you grow up."
They need to be taught how to use a keyboard / touchscreen because it's not natural and "you'll need to be able to type when you grow up"
For myself, I literally have had NO NEED of handwriting beyond block capitals for the entirety of my adult life. Sure, I can do it. But I don't need it. And I have a degree and still didn't need it. In fact, I would argue that my degree is in one of the few areas where touchscreens and computers are useless for transcribing information - mathematics. I can out-formula anyone using LaTeX or equivalent by hand. But that's because I was made to use my hand, rather than a computer language with a GUI for laying out maths equations.
Rather than force these kids to hurt themselves (building up muscles like that is done by tearing and healing, tearing and healing enough that they strengthen the right areas - do you not remember wrist-pain when writing in school, because I do, yet I've never suffered from RSI even a tiny bit), to learn an outdated, obsolete and (to them) secondary skill, let them use the skills they ALREADY HAVE by the time they hit school, on a lot more relevant technology, which is much closer to what they'll require when they are older.
Fact is, I work in prep schools* - these kids are literally entering school able to type on QWERTY and do every swipe, sweep, drag, drop, tap and hold they will need until at least adulthood. And then we sit them in the ICT suite and try to teach them "home keys" (an outdated concept once you are able to type at any speed at all, like telling a rally driver to keep his hands on the ten-to-two position). And then we sit them in the English classes and force them to write with a stick for YEARS on end until they've learned to break their hands enough to hold the stick just right so that they don't have illegible scrawl but proper joined-up writing that they will NEVER NEED TO READ in their life (how much of what you read is printed or screen typefaces only? Almost everything).
No matter how much you disagree with abolishing handwriting, it's a stupid suggestion to forcibly train kids on an alternative older technology when they are so accustomed to the current technology that it comes natural to them anyway.
*Private education, age 3-13. The headmaster's 3-year-old son smashed their laptop screen because he assumed it was touchscreen like EVERYTHING ELSE he's used in his life and so kept applying pressure when it didn't respond to touch. I'm not even joking. And if the live-in son of the live-in headmaster of an exclusive expensive prep school (who still do "pen licences" for handwriting, etc. and teach Latin) is already that familiar with touchscreens, you can be sure that most people have that skill.
It is a large part of what makes us human: the ability to handle tools I have to wonder what the larger loss is if children do not learn to be experts in hand control early in life because not only is hand control necessary in interacting with this complex society, but use of our bodies also forms our brains. If they are not touching the things they would be using with their hands their brains are not getting experience with the textures and physics of the real world. Computers and video games are also taking children away from other physical activities like jumping, running, pulling, pushing, climbing etc. in the real world and this is how we learn the rules of the real world and how we shape our bodies and minds for the real world. Are we making "virtual humans?" Are people becoming Matrix-like? You would not really be able to be born into a computer simulation, disconnect, and interact just fine in the real world as they do in the movie.
E Proelio Veritas.
I think juggling should be a required course. Would have helped me earlier/sooner.
My understanding is they have been hard core into training "penmanship" due to Japanese Kanji characters and such. It is not a surprise to me that a ton of people in Japan are good at drawing. This study makes me think the opposite is going to happen in America or wherever kids are using iPads to both learn and waste time instead of using a pencil or crayons.
I struggle to hold a pen for more than 30 minutes or so. This is because I haven't had to do it in over 20 years. I bet I wouldn't be much good writing cuneiform with a hamer and chisel on stone tablets either.
I was a huge tech kid in the 80's wrote several games in 6510 assembly on my c64 when I was 11 years old. My degree is in CS, my job is infosec. I'm in tech 24/7. I have 2 kids, and I can tell you I see the impact of bad tech parenting all them time when I see my kids friends. My kids are 12 and 7 and their whole lives they have only had limited exposure to "screens". I didn't even let them look at a TV/ipad etc until after they were 2 years old. And then their time using any system ( including TV ) is limited to 1-2 hours on weekdays and 3-4 on weekends. I do this because no one thing should dominate your life and lazy parenting ( or moire likely over committed lifestyles ) cause parents to just give into the magic compliance box. A tablet and a tv are not babysitters. Kids need to feel, touch, play, run, experience things... and experience each other. I still meet parents that think their 3 year old is smart because he can use their iPad and find his own Youtube videos. They have such high hopes for him. Don't buy into the myth that technology equals intelligence.
And for slashdotters in particular, don't pray to the gods of technology so blindly. Technology is meant to help you achieve greater things in the human experience, not *be* the human experience. I know YOU love tech, and you bathe yourself in "cool" ... just step back and ask yourself how is it affecting your life? Do you have any other dreams, or are you a permanent consumer? It's great that you have your reputation in EVE or Overwatch or DOTA. Or that you have that new smartwatch that is totally awesome... until next year. Don't be consumed by tech. Find balance.
Don't start your kids off when they are 3 on something you didn't experience until your 20's.
Having read the article, I have to ask:
1) where are the references backing up these claims
2) where are the peer-reviewed papers backing up these claims?
3) what was the sample set? how was it controlled for external factors?
There are many and good arguments both for, and against, computer/ipad/console ("games") time. As ever, a polarised, Mobius view would most likely not reflect the full balance and nuance of this. Development is less of a pathway more of a landscape: there are many avenues for advance, and many pitfalls. Children should be guided in this.
Yes: "games" in moderation could likely help develop visual acuity and stimulus/response times
No: an upbringing heavy in "games" is not likely to be be beneficial without other activities to balance
And I figure it was the same for many others who like to type. This goes to show how we have something of a regime of handwriting nazis going on. My mother made me copywrite books to improve my handwriting. Still hate her for that. It was torture.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
I misread the title as "Children Struggle To Hold Penis...".
A skill that was once necessary for learning and communication no longer is.
Electronic media has replaced pen and paper, so the skill to hold a pen isn't particular useful,
except perhaps as an input device to aid in artistic creativity.... I don't see graphics artists turning in their stylus and drawing tablets for a touchscreen,
but other than that.... Pens are soon to be extinct
Elders Struggle With Tech Due to Outdated Notions About What's Important
Whats the difference between hplding a stylis and holdind a pencil
And no, masturbating will not grow larger hands. Your kids WILL have tiny Trump hands in less than a generation.
It's true, I can't hold a pencil due to my use of fire, agriculture, and the wheel.
> My understanding is they have been hard core into training "penmanship" due to Japanese Kanji characters and such. It is not a surprise to me that a ton of people in Japan are good at drawing.
There actually is a long-running anime series titled "Crayon shin-chan" which is aimed at the youngest japanese generation.
(Although Tomoko Kuroki has recently disclosed that the entire voice-actor staff of the Crayon shin-chan franchise has also participated in ecchi, hentai and eroge themed productions, which shocked many. If you don't know what those genres are, just feel happy and lucky, really!)
If you found a bunch of third world illiterates who never learned to write, with pencil or any other way, would they have reduced fine motor skills compared to people with pretty handwriting?
Crayon Shin Chan is seinen, meaning it's aimed at a teenage to adult audience.
If you don't know what those genres are, look into it.
FTFY.
If they had been designed from the start with support for (and actually included, and had a slot to store) an active stylus, and the industry had managed to standardize an interface for such, I might actually own one of these things... still struggling to understand the appeal of a machine that is, for seemingly any given generation, less usable (and an order of magnitude more expensive) than an 8-year-old touch screen laptop with a broken keyboard. Seems like a reasonable stylus interface would've likely made this topic a relative non-issue, also.
There is no XUL, only WebExtensions...
I collect fountain pens and build my own keyboards (you insensitive clod!). I don't see any reason why somebody wouldn't want to be skilled at both handwriting and typing. It does seem like both are on the decline, though.
Is there anybody left who doesn't know what hentai is?
Still hate her for that.
You need to get over that. She was trying to give you a good life.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
they can't hold a hammer and drive nail in wood either..
give them a box of crayons and a coloring book, that should fix it
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
I don't get it, this isn't april.
When did slashdot turn into the dailymail full of weird silly stories meant to be click bait?
I saw another one about something stupid with black holes...and another about politics and I just...What the fuck?
I want to hear about robots and advances in technology, things that could change my life and the lives of others. This fluff crap needs to cease.
I give /. one more day, if there are no new stories concerning technology which are of value to me, then my bookmark for the site is being deleted. After all if I wanted to read garbage I'd go read rags off the grocery store checkout line shelfs.
Minor point and interesting fact: human fingers do not have any muscles. (Well, aside from the tiny muscles that make your hair stand on end.) Everything your fingers do are controlled by muscles in your hand and forearm.
Sounds like a confessional from you. Your kids probably loathe you assuming you can actually get a woman pregnant.
Learning to play the Guitar is hard, can't a computer fake it for me!
...but they can hold the shit out of a game controller or Smartphone though! Pathetic. And it's only the beginning. I'm waiting for the thumb and finger/hand problems to start being reported.
It seems to me that there are plenty of fine motor skills involved in using tech, maybe we should adapt handwriting technique to embrace those skills. It's not like controlling a pencil has just one aspect to it.
For all I know the conventional pencil grasp between the thumb and first two fingertips is degraded but the ability to control the pencil when it is sandwiched between the first two fingers is improved.
Or what about non-dominant hand writing, maybe tech has improved the spread of motor skills between dominant and non-dominant hand. I don't notice myself typing right-handedly.
Nullius in verba
No really. Use a stylus for this stuff with your kids.
And obviously don't let them play games on tablets so much. Give them some coloring books. Learning to color within the lines is an excellent way to develop the dexterity for writing.
Struggling to write in school is going to be stressful for your kid. Being challenged by something that the rest of us consider so simple is completely demoralizing for a child and can impact how they view school for the rest of their lives.
Mouse-shaped pencil holder. User cups holder in hand and manipulates it much like a computer mouse. Buttons to raise lower an assortment of pen/pencil tips.
Have gnu, will travel.
...you're suggesting that just tossing your kid on the couch with an iPad is NOT a successful parenting strategy?
Next you're going to tell me they're going to end up antisocial web-leeches that don't know how to actually interact with other humans.
On the bright side, though, if there's ever an evolutionary advantage to the skills for playing Kandy Krush they're fucking SET.
-Styopa
Children in China have no problem using chopsticks...
holding a thin rod for hours isn't natural, I remember cramps and blisters from having to write for hours. maybe we we've been abusing children for decades making them do that!
Mommy bought them velcro shoes.
One kid I know didn't learn to tie his shoes until he was 14 or 15. And even now it takes huge concentration and effort on his part, like Chief Brody in Jaws. He's not stupid, he just never did anything in his life that required that kind of manipulation. And yep, his handwriting is like a caveman holding a stick. Chopsticks? Hell no, seeing him use a knife and fork looks like Vikings eating in the meadhall.
I have high school tutoring students that cannot fit their handwriting on college-ruled paper. It's very interesting to see. My 5th grade son has basically the same handwriting skill that he had in 2nd grade. I remember spending like 20% of 3rd grade on handwriting; now the schools don't seem to teach it at any level. I don't think it's the fault of "technology" that curricula have morphed into a handwriting-free zone.
On the one hand, I think that spending hours each day practicing cursive was probably overkill. On the other hand, if a student can't tell whether he has just written x^7 or y^2 because his handwriting is THAT bad, it makes it hard to succeed. It seems like there should be some middle-of-the-road option that doesn't cause hand cramps. The really strange thing is that it's not like they have eschewed handwriting in favor of typing. They teach a little bit of typing, but not much.
In trying to convince my son the need for nice penmanship, I mentioned to that we used to pass notes in class. I was trying to imply that girls like it when boys have nice handwriting. He pointed out that nobody does that anymore. They just text each other.
The ones with Jungle Gyms (adult-sized or tyke sized) will be fun for the whole family. Who had problems with pencils, again? Remember to go outdoors with them, too.
You give them a bunch of pron. Hand strength will come, don't worry.
I tend to rant.
You are raising an entire generation of limp-wristed pansies, no wonder they all want to turn gay and get sex-change operations to go with their anxiety meds.
We had a kindergarten teacher tell us that they were seeing kids with a 5 year gap between the least adept to most adept in kindergarten, and that it carried through to high school where the gap was still at least 2-3 years. Tech is a cheap babysitter for many, and the children never learn anything other than pushing buttons.
It all starts at home where basic learning or lack three of takes place.
From the summary:
developing sufficiently to...hold a pencil correctly
So we used to have an unnatural process of holding a pencil for an extended period of use, and it was so taxing that it required we strengthen certain muscles just for the task. Now that we have more ergonomic methods of writing, we only use pencils for short periods of time, and we don't have to adapt to them.
I don't see anything wrong with this.
I mean with touch screens becoming so popular on phones and tablets, I have to wonder if any of them have any difficulty using a keyboard and mouse.
Is there anyone who is a teacher out there?
I'm surprised my wrist isn't permanently damaged by playing "Summer Games" with the "designed to flout ergonomics" Wico "The Boss" joystick on the Commodore 64 when I was a kid.
Why is this a problem? I stopped writing after I graduated school, the next generation is growing up with even more tech than I had. If they're poor enough, they'll write and have the finger muscles.
...due to not needing one.
More time playing with toys and coloring books. In other news, water is wet.
So in addition to being the worst general purpose input device to hit the mass market since the trackpoint, touch-screens are now the epicenter of a pediatric health crisis. Great!
By the way, this is damage these children will likely never, ever recover from. What you do during your formative years stays with you for the rest of your life. I would be shocked if any of these kids suffering from these problems now grow up to have what is considered normal hand-eye coordination and manual dexterity for people today.
Please, for the love of humanity, do not give your kids a pad or a smartphone, and keep your kids off the Internet until they're at least in their teens. Your negligence is crippling them for life.
> If you don't know what those genres are, look into it.
Do you really wish more people could learn about e.g. the imouto, netorare and tentacle sub-genres of hentai? That's because you wish Japan be nuked for a third and a fourth time?
Clickasaurs and chknlittlesaurs are up in arms over, once again, nothing.
Isn't school a place where children go to learn, not just academically, but socially and physically? Or, are you saying that tech has irreparably harmed these children and that they will never be able to hold a pen or pencil?
Something don't pass the sniff test on this one.
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I knew it all along. Parents should have been buying their kids Galaxy Note phones instead of stupid, muscle-atrophying iPhones.