What should you do if your child is left-handed?

"Your child is left-handed." "What should we do now?" - this question worries many parents. Why does the child's left-handedness cause such concern? Left-handed people are often looked at with undisguised interest, and it is easy to imagine what a person feels who is forced to feel unnecessary and sometimes inappropriate attention from others all his life. Usually, parents react quite anxiously to the appearance of signs of left-handedness in their child. Often, in his presence, they discuss the emerging prospects, worrying about the child's future. From an early age, he begins to be imbued with an inferiority complex, trying to hide his left-handedness, as if it were some kind of sin.

It may be recalled that in the distant past, due to the ignorance and fanaticism of people, left-handed people were persecuted and ostracized, and the devil was always represented as left-handed.

Apparently, these prejudices are the root of the remnants of people's consciousness, an echo of which is the wary attitude towards left-handed people today. It is not without reason that the words "left-handed", "left" in many languages have remained synonyms for ineptitude, incorrectness, hackwork. But at all times, as history shows, there have been many outstanding personalities among left-handed people (Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci, Charlie Chaplin and the physiologist I. Pavlov, the compiler of the famous dictionary V. Dahl, etc.)

What is left-handedness? According to modern concepts, it is a relatively rare variant of laterality (one-sidedness) of motor behavior, when a person consistently prefers to use the left hand in all his actions. Both left-handedness and right-handedness are based on the peculiarities of the functioning of the brain - functional asymmetry (in the motor analyzer system). The manifestation of laterality is associated with the asymmetry of the brain - the allocation of the leading hand, ear, eye and other manifestations of such one-sidedness. Formed in the prenatal period of development, left-handedness is subsequently fixed in the course of age-related changes in the child, with environmental factors also playing a certain role. It is well known that the majority of the population are right-handed (90-95%), and if right-handedness is considered one of the species-specific characteristics of a person, then left-handedness is a deviation in this characteristic. However, it is not pathological in itself, but is a variant of the norm.

Ambidexterity is as rare as left-handedness. This phenomenon is characterized by the absence of a stable preference for any of the hands or the use of only the right hand for some actions, and only the left hand for others. In the most ancient historical eras, as evidenced by rock paintings, frescoes and papyri, there were approximately five to eight left-handers per hundred. These figures are generally close to today's. In different regions of the former USSR, left-handers accounted for 2-3 to 7-8% of the adult population. It is interesting to note that left-handedness in boys, as a rule, occurs twice as often as in girls. And a survey of 800 Moscow schoolchildren of different age groups showed that among them, at the age of 7-9, there were about 11% left-handers. True, with age, the number of left-handers decreases (by 16-17 years old it is already 3.4%, which coincides with the data obtained during the survey of adults).

What is the reason for the decrease in the number of left-handed people with age? After all, many factors indicate that people are born with left-handedness. This may be due to the delayed development of the preferred hand (in this case, the right), in some children, in other words, with "false" left-handedness. However, the main reason for the "melting" of numbers is, apparently, the still persistent retraining of left-handed people, especially in elementary school.

Forced retraining of left-handed children, and thus forced change of the existing system of brain work, leads, as a rule, to undesirable consequences. True, some children endure retraining almost painlessly, but many pay a high price for it. Thus, parents of left-handed children often complain about the change in their child's condition: "He suddenly became irritable, hot-tempered, capricious, whiny, sleeps and eats poorly, especially in the morning. These troubles began soon after they began to retrain him." In addition to emotional disturbances, retraining is often accompanied by other complications: stuttering, nocturnal enuresis, skin diseases. Complaints of headaches, fatigue in the right hand, increased fatigue and decreased performance appear. Such children suffer from neuroses five to six times more often. Usually enthusiastically starting their studies in the first grade, the child soon encounters a number of difficulties, first of all in mastering the skills of writing with the right hand. As a rule, they write slowly, without observing the rules of calligraphy, with visible physical effort, repeatedly pronouncing each word to themselves. These children usually lag behind their right-handed peers in completing written assignments both in class and at home. Sometimes they lag behind in acquiring reading skills, as they unconsciously try to guess a word by the first two letters, rather than read it by syllables. Other sensorimotor signs of left-handedness accompanying left-handedness intensify these manifestations. Poor academic performance and inappropriate behavior of others can lead to the fact that the retrained left-handed first-grader loses the desire to study. An aversion to writing, a desire to avoid classes, even truancy, may arise. Over time, however, most retrained children gradually master the skills of writing with their right hand, and the severity of neurotic reactions and experiences is somewhat smoothed out. It would seem that success justifies retraining? But this success is often achieved at too high a price: the tension in many does not pass without a trace. Intrusion into the delicate mechanism of nervous activity can cause a delay in the child's mental development.

According to Russian and foreign scientists, undesirable changes associated with the period of retraining are fixed in the personality of such left-handed children, and in their intellectual and mnestic abilities they are inferior to both the remaining left-handed and right-handed children. The results of studying the characteristics of left-handed people performing written tasks with their right and left hands showed that when working with the right hand, all left-handed people (including those who have already begun to consider it their leading hand when writing) perform written tasks more slowly and with a large number of errors. At the same time, tension was noted in various muscle groups that were not used when writing, increased heart rate, and short-term increases in blood pressure were observed. Sometimes it ended with the children interrupting the written task. With their left hand, they acted more dexterously and successfully: there were significantly fewer errors, and writing did not cause unpleasant emotions. Using the left hand in left-handed children in the first and second grades of school increases the quality of written work by 20-30%. Their left hand is often more "literate" than their right hand.

All the facts presented show that there is no need to fight left-handedness and retrain a left-hander, it is necessary to be tolerant of left-handed writing and create a favorable environment in the environment of left-handers. Retraining a left-handed child entails many negative consequences. Thus, in an unexpected, stressful situation, a retrained left-hander will instinctively stretch out his left hand, but it has already lost its former dexterity, it is detrained.

Parents and teachers of preschool institutions are the first to encounter the fact that a child prefers the left hand. They should take into account that most children up to three to five years of age have periods of false left-handedness (pseudoambidexterity), when they use both hands in play and self-care, without giving preference to any of them. This period reflects a certain stage of development of the nervous system (in particular, the motor analyzer). At this time, you can still carefully try to teach the supposed ambidexter to act with your right hand. However, these attempts should take place without any violence, dictatorship, shouting. If the child constantly resists these attempts, they should be abandoned.

Parents or caregivers should inform the pediatrician of any signs of left-handedness noticed in a child as soon as possible. A left-handed person should be consulted by a pediatric neurologist. He or she will decide whether the child's left-handedness is natural or the result of a disorder of the central nervous system, requiring the earliest possible special treatment. The question of a child's left-handedness becomes especially acute before he or she enters school. Therefore, at the age of six, a more detailed special diagnosis of left-handedness is carried out. What should be done if left-handedness is discovered in a child? Much depends on the parents. It is necessary to maintain a calm atmosphere in the family, family members should discuss this fact in the absence of the child, without involving him or her in adult discussions, it is necessary to focus as little attention as possible on his or her unusualness or exceptionality, come to the child's aid if children in the yard tease and humiliate him or her, and, if possible, defuse the situation.

Everywhere - in the family, preschool and school institutions, it is necessary to encourage left-handed children to use their dominant hand when mastering writing, drawing, modeling, when learning work skills. It is necessary to allocate a place on the left side of the table or desk for a left-handed child so that he does not collide with the right elbow of his neighbor. In work lessons, safety precautions are needed at the workplace based on left-handed students. At home, when organizing a place for studying, doing homework, it is necessary to make sure that the light from the window or table lamp falls from the right side.

It is noteworthy that some left-handed children who already have a sufficient outlook, satisfactory memory, and good command of oral speech, show signs of "mirror" thinking. It is expressed in the inverse, reversed, right-to-left writing of individual letters and whole words, in the rearrangement of numbers when performing arithmetic operations. This includes persistent reading of words from right to left, and with closed eyes - better guessing of letters in "mirror writing". Such children also show late differentiation of the concepts of "right" and "left", difficulty in orientation on the ground, difficulty in planning their behavior.

It is extremely important to be tolerant of such manifestations both in the family and at school. It is necessary to reduce the requirements for the calligraphic side of the handwriting of left-handed children - allow vertical writing of letters, a tilt of handwriting to the left. Parents often ask the question: how to teach left-handed children to write with their left hand, are there any rules here? There are no special rules yet. However, there are mainly two manners of left-handed writing. In the more common one, the left hand is in a position similar to how they write with the right hand. In this case, the sheet of paper is located along the left hand with a tilt to the right, while the writer's hand is under the line. In the other, so-called inverse manner of writing, the sheet of paper is tilted to the left in relation to the writer's chest, the hand and pen are above the line, and the wrist is turned towards the chest. When teaching writing, a left-handed child should be offered to choose the manner of writing in which he does not lag behind in writing speed from right-handed people and which is more convenient for him.

In the play environment of a preschooler and in extracurricular activities, it is necessary to take into account the peculiarities of the temperament of left-handed children - increased emotionality with a weakening of inhibitory processes.

To retrain or not to retrain left-handed children? The main thing is not to create a stressful situation for the child. And it is always necessary to retrain, or rather, to adapt the child to future life. After all, the whole world around us is designed with right-handedness in mind: special equipment, machines, devices, household items. There are a number of known cases when left-handers were forced to leave work because they could not adapt to the equipment.