How to Make Life Easier For Your Left-Handed Child
Supporting the youth in a right-dominant world.
Leonardo Da Vinci, Nicole Kidman, Lewis Carroll, Joan of Arc, and eight US presidents all have something in common with a surprisingly high number of other successful leaders and artists — they are left-handed. Left-handers only make up 10% of the population but they dominate in certain fields.
In my family, three out of six of us are left-handed. I noticed, when my youngest daughter was around 3, that she preferred to hold her pen in her left hand. As an ex-teacher, I had met a few left-handed kids who struggled with writing and I wanted to know the best way to help her, so I started to research.
I ended up discovering there’s more to left-handedness than I expected.
Forced to be Right
It seems strange, doesn’t it, that only a few years ago teachers were forcing children to write with their right hands, even if they were left-handed. Even stranger is the fact that in world history (and some countries still today) anything left was considered evil, untrustworthy, unclean or sneaky. The proper name for left-handedness, sinistrality, comes from the Latin word sinistra and — as you’ve probably worked out — is where we get our word sinister from.
