I was just reading up on the new autism and news and stumbled across an article called Children With Autism More Likely To Have Handwriting Problems. It caught my interest as Dakota has problems with his writing. I don’t want to say it’s very sloppy but his fine motor for writing makes it difficult for him to write.

The article stated that children with autism may have lower quality handwriting and trouble forming letters compared to children with out autism.

The study included 28 children, half of them with autism and half of them with no developmental disorder, psychiatric, or brain disorders. All children had normal range perceptual reasoning on a IQ test. The kids were asked to copy a sentence exactly the way it was given in shape and letter form. The sentence was “the brown jumped lazy fox quick dogs over.” They were scored on five different categories: legibility, form, alignment, size and spacing. The children’s motor skills were also observed based on timing and movements.

The study found that half of the autistic children earned less than 80 percent of the total possible points on the handwriting assessment compared to only 1 child in the group without autism. 9 of the 14 children with autism scored below 80 percent on the form category on the hand writiting assessment compared to 2 of the 14 children without autism.

They suggest therapies that target motor skills to help children with their handwriting. Some suggestions were letter formations and general training of fine motor control.

Which if I stop and think about this and what the school is doing as far as his handwriting and fine motor skills for Occupational therapy this is nothing I didn’t already know. I know they have tried weighted pencils, different grips for Dakota’s pencils and other things. I do know that the OT is working on Dakota’s fine motor.

I just found this article interesting and thought I would pass it on.

Related posts:

1. Mothers Of Children With Autism Have Higher Parental Stress, Psychological Distress
2. Speaking Out For Our Children
3. Do Siblings of A Child With Autism Often Have Subtler Problems? – Not In My Case as far as I can See
4. My Autistic Son
5. Having An Autistic Brother – Pros and Cons

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