Parents are often seen forcing the decade old methods on their new age kids. Instead of pushing him/her to do something, learn how to make things more interesting and see them enjoy and learn quickly.
My child does not like to write with a pencil. It’s very hard to make him write even few lines. The teacher also complains that he writes very slowly and that he is lazy. What will happen if he never learns to write properly? – mother of 6 year old child.
Scores of children across the country continue to be harassed because they can’t write cursive or write in poor handwriting. The emphasis on handwriting is really misplaced in today’s world. How many of us write letters to each other by hand? When was the last time that you wrote a letter by hand? Not only we spend our time texting and typing, we hardly have any occasion to read cursive texts. All that you read in print (letters, books, bills, newspapers, smses, etc.) around you is never in cursive!
Forcing a child to write in cursive is like asking us to take a chisel and engrave on stone tablets. Today’s tablet is the iPad. Even the external mouse is going to become extinct soon, with the new technologies, we will only have to speak and the typed text will appear on the screen.This of course exists with some softwares but the technology nerds predict that this will become the norm with the new generation iPads for example. Writing by hand then will have less value.
If a child does not have a neat handwriting, no need to fret too much. If you feel it is a worry, encourage the child to draw and paint. The fine motor skills are sufficiently and even better developed through art rather than copying sentences in a notebook.
The new skills require children to read faster and type well. Good language skills in terms of communication are important especially in English as an international language of business and communication. But if a child makes some mistakes in spelling, don’t lose sleep over it. The spell check is a good tool provided we are acquainted with the correct usage.
Also, the development graph of each child is so different. Humans as a society tend to function in normative ways. So each parent or a teacher compares a child to others in the class and decide on ‘benchmarks.’ But research shows that just as children grow at diverse rates physically, so do they in terms of mental growth. A child may dislike writing due to several reasons: the fine motor skills are not sufficiently developed, the child feels no real need to write, the child is frightened, the hand hurts, the act of writing is boring or even rendered traumatic due to school and so on. Believe me, kids are smart.When they feel there is a real need to learn, they learn fast.
There could be a neurological reason but that is rare. In many cases, children find writing boring but they enjoy painting. So all that we have to do is to tap on their interests. Don’t just ask what your child can do, but what you can do for the child to make the task interesting.
We would love to hear your thoughts and experiences of making your child’s tasks interesting. Please leave us a comment and share your views with us.
