5 Ways Handwriting Can Affect Brain Development

We all remember learning to write our ABCs in both print and cursive, and reaching the key milestone of writing out complete words and sentences. However, that’s more to handwriting than just putting letters and words on paper. Surprisingly, there are more benefits of handwriting than you might have realized – and it actually plays a key role in brain development.

While we continue to move further towards smartphones and keyboards for communicating and writing, it’s understandable to think less about the importance of handwriting. However, there’s plenty of research that demonstrates how handwriting can help our brains develop at a young age, so it’s a skill that both teachers and parents should focus on as a priority. This is an important reason not to neglect handwriting and cursive education, even in a world that’s rapidly becoming digital.

Read on the learn the ways handwriting can affect brain development in children, and why it’s an important skill for parents to encourage and foster.

1. Handwriting Can Improve Memory
There are interesting links between handwriting and memory; put simply, writing things down helps us remember them. If a student is taking notes in class by hand, the act of forming each word and putting it to paper makes what they’re learning more memorable than if they were typing the same words. Essentially, our memory retention improves if we write something down by hand. This is why writing a grocery shopping list can help you remember what you need to buy, even if you accidentally leave the list at home!

When we write something down, our brains process it more deeply, while we retain information more briefly when we type it. Improved memory can help children improve performance across every school subject, as it makes it easier to learn, retain, and communicate to others.

2. It Assists With Cognitive Function
Handwriting is useful in both children and adults for improving cognitive function in the brain. Sequential hand movements, which we make when we write, are linked to skills like language and thinking. If you’re wondering what part of the brain controls handwriting, it’s the left side, beginning in the frontal lobes. Even the simple act of writing a single sentence activates multiple areas of our brain, with the frontal lobes signaling to other areas of the brain to spring into action.

Essentially, handwriting ‘fires up’ the brain, keeping it active and functioning. This means handwriting keeps our brains active, doing everything from deciding what word we want to write to sending the command through our spinal cord to the hand, ordering it to write. This means frequent handwriting is good for our brains, since it helps keep them sharp. This is true even as we age; handwriting can help seniors keep their brains active, as it has a similar result on our minds as brain games such as puzzles and crosswords.

3. Handwriting Is Linked to Literacy
Literacy is an essential skill for every child, but it can be harder for some than others. Patience, repetition, and reading to your children will go a long way, but handwriting can help as well. It’s been demonstrated that there’s a link between handwriting and literacy; kids who practice handwriting regularly tend to do better and reading and spelling.

The English language is complex, so it makes sense that taking the time to form out new words and letters would be beneficial when it comes to learning to read. If your child is struggling with literacy, you might find that dedicated time to work on handwriting can make an impact.

4. Writing Can Unleash Creativity
All parents want their children to grow up to be creative, independent-thinking adults. To help with this, it can pay to focus on handwriting early in life.

Writing words by hand is able to help our creative juices flow – it’s why some famous writers, like Ernest Hemingway, were known to favor pen and paper over a typewriter. It’s thought that writing words by hands activates more of our brains than using a keyboard, which might help us feel more inspired and creative as we write.

Creativity and innovation can be a huge role in being successful in life, so it’s something you want to encourage in children from an early age.

5. Handwriting Can Help Children Slow Down and Focus
So how does handwriting affect the brain? It actually increases neural activity in certain areas, producing a similar impact on the brain as meditation. And in a hectic world, with computer games and digital entertainment driving down our attention spans, handwriting has an even more essential role: it can help kids learn to focus on one task at a time, slow down, and concentrate.

Sitting down and writing things out by hand can have a calming, relaxing influence on both children and adults, which is why journaling is a popular way to de-stress after a long day. If your child has problems sitting still, you might want to see if additional handwriting exercises can make a difference.

Does handwriting help brain development? Absolutely. Learning handwriting should be a major focus when teaching children, since it has so many advantages that will help them throughout their educational career. As a parent, you can help your child thrive in school by placing an emphasis on handwriting. Over time, with the right guidance, your child will start seeing the benefits of handwriting on their brain development and cognitive function.

Featured image by Drew Perales on Unsplash