How can I help my child’s handwriting improve so that it starts from the margin?

 Are you looking at your child's handwriting and wondering why they cannot start each sentence from the left-hand margin when writing a line of text? Does your child's writing move further away from the margin with every sentence so the page looks like a triangle of text?

It’s a skill we easily take for granted and sometimes forget it is something we had to learn and practise to get right. However, if your child just doesn’t seem to be getting the hang of it, please know it is not their fault. Do not blame yourself either; no doubt you have done your best. The problem lies not with their handwriting specifically but is actually related to how they organise their entire body when it comes to doing a task like handwriting. By the end of this short blog, you will understand why it happens and what you can do to help them. Knowing about early development, and how it affects later skills, such as handwriting, will help you understand how to bridge the gaps.

Using both sides of the body

When your child was a baby, they would have gone through various developmental stages. One of the first of these would have been to use homolateral movements. Homolateral means the ability to use one side of the body.

For example, a newborn turns its head to feed, and its arm and leg on the same side also stretch out straight. This single-sided movement creates an implicit understanding of each side of their body. As they feed on both sides, their brains learn of a central line of symmetry that exists [the body midline]. However, this asymmetric/homolateral movement of the head and arm should only be in place for the first seven to eight months, no longer aiding the newborn in improving hand-eye coordination as their head follows their hands on each side during feeding.

The same coordination also helps with rolling their body over before they move to crawling. This body response or movement is called the Asymmetric Tonic Neck Reflex (ATNR), which has a huge implication in the first few months of life. ATNR is one of many survival reflexes parents should know about. It may seem a long line to draw from how a child feeds at such a young age to how they write years later, but how these reflexes develop are very much related.

What is the role of the Asymmetric Tonic Neck Reflex (ATNR)?

1.   Vision Development - The ATNR assists with hand-eye control, and this connection helps with depth perception and eye-tracking. When babies turn their head, they often reach to touch an object, which is the beginning of near vision development. As the infant starts to crawl, far vision develops.

2.   Muscle Tone & Movement - The ATNR stimulates homolateral (one-side) and cross-lateral (using both sides) movements such as rolling, creeping and crawling. These movements help develop muscle tone directly linked to cognition and the balance centres (vestibular system).

3.   Left & Right Brain Communication - Before the ATNR integrates (matures and recedes), it helps to develop the bundle of nerves between the left and right brain hemispheres called the corpus callosum; this helps information pass from one side of the brain to the other.

4.   Auditory Processing - ATNR in the unborn child, and in infancy, also develops auditory processing, which is essential for language development. As a baby turns its head to various sounds, it stimulates and trains both brain hemispheres to work together and develops their auditory skills.

When the ATNR does not recede, it becomes a Retained Primitive Reflex

After seven to eight months, the one-sided homolateral movement, ATNR, should recede to allow more advanced activity; the ATNR finishes its job and should not interfere with more advanced movement of using both sides of the body.

The ATNR-coupled connection of the head and the arm becomes a nuisance. The eyes' function and ability to work together (binocular vision) also become compromised as crossing the visual midline is difficult. What was an essential survival reflex now hinders the development of more complex skills. For example, those with active ATNR can be seen moving their heads instead of their eyes when reading, making the task far more difficult than it needs to be.

Which is why a retained ATNR is the reason for your child's writing style.

When a child writes, an unintegrated ATNR is the greatest challenge, because tasks which involve crossing the midline are very difficult – in this case, moving a pencil from the left over to the right in an organised and coordinated way. While many find it comfortable to rotate the paper by forty-five degrees in the opposite direction of the hand used for writing, children with retained ATNR will actually have to turn the page a full ninety degrees to avoid crossing the visual midline.

When not rotating the page this far, they will likely still start at the margin but, as they write, their heads turn to the right, and then the locked ATNR makes it very difficult to return to the left for the next line or sentence. So, they have to compromise, and come back in a little closer towards the midline again. This repeats every time, with the distance from the left margin growing every time.

This is why your child has trouble writing from the margin. As I explained before, this is very difficult for them, and it is not something they are aware of.

So, how can you help overcome a Retained ATNR Reflex?

The ATNR reflex needs to be integrated. Fortunately, there are ways to do this. With specific reflex integration exercises, we can break the coupled connection and allow children to move their eyes across the midline and use both their hands and eyes independently.

At Raviv Practice London, our reflex integration program of choice is MNRI Therapy, which stands for Masgatova Neuro-Motor-Sensory Reflex Integration. It is an evidence-based program that delivers fast results. It is a therapy which only recently (2020) arrived in the UK. However, we have been using it since 2015, having completed the training abroad in Slovenia.

If you're interested in using it to help your child, here is how the process works:

1.   Book an informal chat (free of charge) over Zoom

2.   We can talk informally or take a detailed history (you decide)

3.   Book for an assessment (includes a summary report)

4.   Follow-on sessions are done in blocks of 6 weeks at a time with weekly sessions and daily work (sometimes, the parents opt to return twice a week in severe cases).

5.   Reflexes integrate by 3 months (to 2 years, depending on the problem.)

Raviv Practice London helps assess and provide exercises to remediate the problem. Integrating the ATNR takes around 3 to 6 months of work, but we can start to see improvements in just a few weeks, helping your child to thrive at last.

To book an assessment, go to this page and book your child in for an  evaluation.

Dyslexia? Dyspraxia? ADHD? ASD? Speech & Language? Developmental Delay? Anxiety?

Is every school day a struggle? As a parent, you may feel exhausted and on this journey alone. Each year you see the gap getting wider. You need to do something - change the approach, help your child learn for themselves, find a way to turn this around - to help while you can - do this NOW. the first step is free.