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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.
I wish I could say this tech-addicted story surprised me.
Circle the wagons and fire inward. Entropy increases without bounds.
Who says these kids are playing games? They are most likely watching youtube videos or similar. Even if they are playing games, on an iPad or smartphone the game is going to involve tapping or dragging, not using buttons and a directional pad like a Gameboy.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
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.
Then they'll develop the dexterity they need.
Using a game controller is completely different from using a touchscreen smart phone/tablet. That's what kids do today. The only thing they use their hands for are swiping from one YouTube video to the next.
Decades from now YouTube will be blamed for all of this. I mean hell, they're shifting their whole damn business model to cater to kids and push everyone else off. Gotta get that money and kids are easily addicted targets.
So why do you type and argue like a 12 year old?
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
At 40, like me, you would have learned to use a pencil first. We had Atari, we had Nintendo, we had C64, but they weren't quite as prevalent as smart-phones and iPads, which are what my kids grow up on.
My kids have definitely had issue with pencils and scissors in their early years. Of course, they got over it. These tests are designed to identify developmental disorders, and one failing one test in a series does not a developmental disorder make.
But, not shown are that kids are learning their letters and learning to read at a younger age. While my kids struggled a bit with using pencils, they both went in to pre-school, at 3 years of age knowing their alphabet and knowing how to read. My son in particular went in to kindergarten reading at a 7th grade level, he learned all of it from his iPad and learning to read to play games that he saw me playing.
So while kindergarten teachers may need to spend more time with pencils and scissors and developing hand strength, they will not need to spend as much time teaching the alphabet and reading, both of which are pretty much 90% of the kindergarten curriculum.
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
You can still put most of us 40+ against teens and we'll still win - if the controls are keyboard+mouse.
But me? I can't use these stupid tiny-ass analog thumbsticks. They're so bad that games need to have aim-assist built-in.
#DeleteFacebook
The other 10% being "do not eat glue".
#DeleteFacebook
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.
The vast majority of players are not professional eSports players.
#DeleteFacebook
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.
Do you have any evidence for that? I mean for the 40+ against teens.
I don't doubt that you don't do that well with thumbsticks as I've got my problems with them either (34). I do well with full sized joysticks, even when using one in each hand, which is what it takes when you play modern space sims with 6DoF flight. But I also play a bit of RTS and FPS games and know from experience that there's a high number of young players that do pretty well. It's especially true for those games that mostly favour twitch gameplay and are less focused on tactical thinking and or teamwork.
Where things could become problematic for teens is when they're mostly used to touchsceen input and sitting comfortable on a sofa or couch. They may not do very well with KB+M or full sized joysticks until they develop their motor memory for those devices.
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 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.
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
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
Whats the difference between hplding a stylis and holdind a pencil
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?
Kids don't have the hand dexterity to hold a pencil, this also translates to not having the hand dexterity to drive or operate power tools later in life.
To say nothing of hand tools like tweezers, chisels and knives, which are incredibly useful, but require precision and control.
I would say, having experience in the matter, "bathroom activities".
Crayon Shin Chan is seinen, meaning it's aimed at a teenage to adult audience.
COUNTLESS studies to IMPROVE DRAMATICALLY after a good amount of video game playing.
Indeed they have. All of these countless studies involved games that actually had hand eye co-ordination and fine motor skills, i.e. using a mouse / keyboard or a game controller.
Have you seen a child play on an iPad? They just smack the screen with their hand and get rewarded, that is assuming they are playing games at all. There is a big difference between playing with an iPad and working your way through an FPS game on an Xbox.
children have no use for pencils and pens anymore. Everything is typed out.
I don't even think this is remotely true. My first-grader does all her assignments in pencil. Also, both my kids have been enthusiastic about coloring since they could hold a crayon, at age 15. No, kidding, from age 1. Our modern world also has all kinds of things I couldn't get as a kid, like books with a coating of dark/flaky stuff that you scratch off with a wooden stylus (kind of like the lottery ticket gray stuff) to reveal pictures or make your own designs. Let me tell you, kids will go town on that stuff. Like, ignore instructions saying you could be making lines and patterns, and instead just scrape off every square centimeter of it.
There's also: using silverware to feed themselves, learning how to tie shoes, getting themselves dressed, working with kid versions of tools (mine have toy screwdrivers and hammers, at least), and even things like doing puzzles, which doesn't take much strength, but definitely requires precision. All of this is normal kid activity, as far as I'm concerned.
The Quirkz Handbook of Self-Improvement for People Who Are Already Pretty Okay
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...
Do you know about penisland?
#DeleteFacebook
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?
Children grow up differently. There's the parental aspect, and then there's just DNA. My son, while smart and picking up knowledge and thinking abstractly, really doesn't do well sitting down to learn unless it captures his attention. He's extremely active (as any boy would be), but loves sports more than anything. I'm thinking he might actually be ADHD, but so long as his grades don't suffer, i'm going to chalk this up to him being a normal human being (damn the labels of conformity). It's quite a setback from me having an INTJ personality; being more introverted and all that. He's the exact opposite. He's far more extroverted than I was at that age. I'd say he's more extroverted even in my adult age now.
My overall point is simply that people are dynamic, as is their development. As parents, our jobs is to guide and assist with any deficiencies children grow up with so they can cope and adapt. For anything else, just accept them for who they are, not what you want them to be. A child is his/her own person. They're not machines you can program and expect a perfect result.
Life is not for the lazy.
Are we all going to become brain surgeons? So what's the point? Can you explain why " Hand / Eye Coordination " would be an important metric?
- You stepped on a splinter. Are you going to use a sharp knife and pincers to remove it without breaking it, or are you going to sit down, cry and wait for an ambulance?
- A wire came lose in your expensive keyboard, amplifier, headphones, vaporizer, guitar or whatever. Are you going to spend a minute with a soldering iron fixing it, or spend hours looking for somewhere that can repair it, or toss it and buy new?
- Your child comes crying with a broken toy and asks if you can fix it.
- You received a hand written invitation in the mail, marked RSVP.
There are so many different scenarios where hand coordination is important that you're bound to encounter them regularly. I don't expect my dog to be able to do detail work, but are you a dog?
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 have probably never seen any of those things, due to the health and safety risk.
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
give them a box of crayons and a coloring book, that should fix it
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
No, we tend to have real jobs.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
As you have already correctly identified, twitch-based games put us old folks at a disadvantage. But the more tactical and psychological a game gets, the more we manage to complete or out-compete younger players. We tend to excel at games where stealth and planning along with "playing the players" is the road to winning.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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
paintbrushes. Watercolors are still a thing, right?
At 40, like me, you would have learned to use a pencil first. We had Atari, we had Nintendo, we had C64, but they weren't quite as prevalent as smart-phones and iPads, which are what my kids grow up on.
My kids have definitely had issue with pencils and scissors in their early years. Of course, they got over it. These tests are designed to identify developmental disorders, and one failing one test in a series does not a developmental disorder make.
We also played with legos and erector sets.
We'll make great pets
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
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!
Ya, but you grew up with video games where you had real buttons so you could use them without having to watch your hands.
Now days the touch screen has the controls on the display and you always have to keep checking your positioning to make sure you are hitting the right thing.
hand coordination can be learned a myriad of better ways without holding a thin rod with a few fingers (which is provably harmful). what a stupid notion this article is trying to reinforce
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.
Have you seen what passes for art these days?
wtf? Black holes are hard core science, and you're saying that's not news for nerds?
This isn't Tom's fucking Hardware.
Argh!
I've seen tons of poor spellers use "loose" (not tight or secure) when they should use "lose" (opposite of win), but this is one of the very few I've seen that was wrong the other way.
It would never have happened had I written with a pen...
I'd just like to point out we've officially reached the point where Millennials are looking down their noses at "kids these days" for being too lazy and not playing video games like they did as kids.
Congrats, and welcome to old.
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.
You give them a bunch of pron. Hand strength will come, don't worry.
I tend to rant.
is that where the expertsexchange.com is hosted?
The Quirkz Handbook of Self-Improvement for People Who Are Already Pretty Okay
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.
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