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Backstory:

Many of my relatives were subjected by their parents to a "training process" to "prevent" left-hand-dominance. This method started at a very young age and basically consisted of politely instructing the child to switch hands whenever they reached for an object with the left hand. Now, as adults, everyone that went through this process—most of whom admit that they are genetically left-handed—uses their right hand for almost all tasks. Some have even developed ambidextrousness, which I guess is an added benefit.

Now, as my young daughter is reaching the age where this "process" should start, I wonder if I should resist my family members' suggestions to do the same for her.

Skepticism:

All of the parenting advice I've found on the Internet (e.g., pages like this) claim that forcing genetically left-handed children to use their right hand is bad. Most of their arguments, however, take the form of, "It isn't so bad to be left-handed, so why resist?" Or pseudo-medical claims that forcing right-handedness will conflict with the child's left-vs.-right brain dominance.

Question:

Is there medical/psychological/scientific evidence on whether forcing or re-teaching handedness is harmful vs. beneficial to a child's development?

I am not looking for opinions on whether it is a good idea to do this to one's child; that's why I'm asking this here as opposed to Parenting.SE.

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ESultanik
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    I believe forcing someone to learn something one doesn't need is harmuf per se due to wasted time and so on. –  Dec 18 '11 at 18:22
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    Is it a waste of time for a New Yorker to learn how to drive a car? I am right-handed, but I could see how using one's right hand for certain tasks might be easier (given that so many objects/tools are designed for right-handed users). – ESultanik Dec 18 '11 at 19:47
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    @ESultanik: In an automobile-dependent society, where most people own or rent cars, learning how to drive a motor vehicle is a "need" for many of its members. However, attempting to get someone to learn to use their non-dominant hand for typically-dominant-hand activities (such as hand-writing) is, in my view, far better-classified as a "want" [by the parents, teachers, etc.] (not a "need"). – Randolf Richardson Dec 19 '11 at 04:59
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    @ESultanik: Are you talking about conditioning the child "just in case" or have you verified a predisposition for using the left hand? – Zano Dec 19 '11 at 13:38
  • @Zano: Mostly conditioning "just in case", but in the event that the child shows a predisposition to using the left hand then the "method" becomes less of a conditioning and more of a restriction from using the left hand. I'm not really interested in the method, though; I'm skeptical of the websites' claims that switching handedness—regardless of the method—is harmful. – ESultanik Dec 19 '11 at 14:06
  • @RandolfRichardson: That's exactly why I used New York as an example: You don't need a car to live there; many people in NYC never learn to drive. Perhaps that was a bad analogy, though. My point was that sometimes forcing someone to learn something that he or she doesn't *currently* need isn't necessarily harmful or a waste of time. – ESultanik Dec 19 '11 at 14:11
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    I wasn't talking about driving in NY, I was talking about learning to do things with the right hand when you are lefty. No one should force others to do it on the grounds of "maybe perhaps you will need it sometime in the future... probably.. I guess". –  Dec 19 '11 at 14:34
  • There is one way in which left-handed people [may be at a disadvantage](http://travel.stackexchange.com/questions/3087/dealing-with-the-unclean-hand-when-travelling-if-youre-left-handed). – Beofett Dec 19 '11 at 18:04
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    my mother was so forced, having her left hand literally tied behind her back after having it beaten with a stick every morning at school. She's still traumatised 60 years later... – jwenting Dec 21 '11 at 06:25
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    @jwenting: My sister was beaten by her primary school teachers (Irish nuns) because she was left handed. It took intervention from my left handed father before they would stop. – Binary Worrier Dec 22 '11 at 13:34
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    my grandfather was deployed overseas on military duty, my mother's stepmother couldn't care less (she too beat her regularly) :( It did luckily cause my parents to fully support both me and my sister when our school tried to force us to "make the switch" (though there was no physical restraint there, 30 years later). – jwenting Dec 23 '11 at 06:54
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    Studies on the effects of beating children are pretty firmly against it. The OP isn't necessarily talking about beating the child, however; the question was about gentler training methods. – Yamikuronue Dec 27 '11 at 19:54
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    This question has a nice symmetry. Why don't we teach (force) right handed people to use their obviously better left-handed skills? – oɔɯǝɹ Jan 03 '12 at 00:04
  • While trying to think about where to search for research on this, I've been thinking about how difficult it would be to do research on this. (Correlation isn't causation - maybe any troubles or successes re-trained left-handers have in life can be better ascribed to having strict parenting/education?) Which leads to the question: What would you consider to be suitable evidence to support or deny the claim? – Oddthinking Feb 10 '12 at 16:24
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    @Oddthinking I'd be happy to see any evidence that there are adverse affects to re-training handedness that are independent of the method used. For example, I've found some studies that show a correlation between stuttering and people that have been re-trained from left-handed to right-handed. I'm interested to know, for example, if the causes of correlations like that are due to the method used or the mere fact that you are fighting against biological impulses. – ESultanik Feb 10 '12 at 16:49
  • Personally, I'm fairly ambidextrous - stronger on right side but more dextrous with left. Which side I prefer depends on activity (right footed for Football, but Snowboard goofy). The one comment I would make is that while I write right handed, I've never been comfortable doing so - never learnt to write left handed but suspected it would be more comfortable. – Jon Egerton Feb 25 '12 at 22:59

1 Answers1

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Reasons for switching?

Generally today, in the western world, left-handed people are equally accepted as right-handed people and should not experience any major drawbacks. Today, a child can easily work with the left hand. Thanks to some tools such as scissors, writing pads and pens for left-handed no problems are expected. If a child does have bad deal, because it has, for example, an unfavorable position when writing, there are recognized and specially-trained occupational therapists who can help.

What does switching accomplish?

So like you can read in the article "Can Left-Handedness be Switched? Insights from an Early Switch of Handwriting" from The Journal of Neuroscience, 18 July 2007:

These results suggest two distinct neuronal correlates of handedness in human sensorimotor cortex. Although those in executive sensorimotor cortex (i.e., SM1 and adjacent PMd) depend on the hand used throughout life, those in higher-order sensorimotor areas (i.e., inferior parietal cortex and rostrolateral PMd) are invariant and thus cannot be switched to the nondominant hemisphere by educational training.

Which says that the areas that are directly involved in movement control will move increasingly to the left in the brain, which is the dominant half in right-handers. But the larger regions that participate in the planning and control of movement remain all life in the same place.

Paradoxly those planning and control areas were even more stressed in retrained persons than in normal left-handers.

Problems of switching?

Even as early as 1918 [1] observations were made, were

[retraining]... may result in speech-hesitation. [...] Taking it all in all, this investigation seems proof conclusive that left-handed children should not be forced to use the right hand.

And a lot more studies from that time period (1930s) were linking stuttering to forced left-hand retrainment.

But since then no more professional studies have been made to investigate eventual problems with retrainment[2]. One of the reason for that is that left-handedness was long seen as a deviation from the norm and medical treatment or research was conducted purely from this perspective. Also many studies provide statements that refer to very different groups of people: generally assessed left-handed people, learned left handed and the subgroup of trauma-induced left-handed were all mixed together and no reasonable conclusions can be made.

Summary

So while it is not proven at this point that retraining is leading to serious problems (apart from the increased brain load) there are is also no point in doing it. All studies and logical reasoning hint for an exclusion of such practices.

Peter
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    What does a left-handed pen look like? All the pens I'm familiar with are symmetrical, with no obvious handedness-related features. – Mason Wheeler Feb 25 '12 at 22:05
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    +1, specially for : `All studies and logical reasoning hint for an exclusion of such practices.` – Zenon Feb 25 '12 at 22:07
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    @MasonWheeler One can optimize pens in basically two ways. You can change its shape so that the font is not obliterated by the hand or the nib is changed to support a push motion as opposed to a pulling motion. – Peter Feb 26 '12 at 11:45
  • I was going to comment on the increased mortality risk for left-handers, but apparently that's a myth born of bad statistical modeling. http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-23988352 – Sean Duggan Jun 11 '14 at 12:18
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    Truth be said, not needing to look for special left handed or symmetric tools is quite the advantage for left handed people. Right handed tools are not only a lot cheaper, but also far more common. – David Mulder Jun 11 '14 at 12:57
  • Hmm... and even the studies stating that mortality is pretty much the same between the two groups indicate that the rate of injuries when it comes to power tools is 1.2 to 1.8 times that of right-handed people. – Sean Duggan Jun 11 '14 at 15:29
  • @DavidMulder This probably varies a lot from country to country, or even city to city. I never had any trouble at all finding left-handed equipment - or, to be more precise, almost everything is ambidextrous. I tend to use different hands for different tasks, but there's no definite "right hand is better". In Europe, things tend to be done in the mindset of "one size fits all", and it applies here as well (even though left-handers are a definite minority). And of course, driving a stick is easier for a left hander - you're not wasting your dominant hand on shifting :) – Luaan Sep 23 '15 at 11:45
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    @Luaan Ehm, in Europe at least things like scissors, mice, quality pens, kitchen utensils, etc. are all made to fit the right hand. Sure, I can find left-handed mice, but e.g. in the biggest Dutch tech product aggregation service they have 4 times as many options for right handed mice as they have for left handed mice. And if I go to the supermarket the only have a single model right handed scissors. Of course if you only buy the very very cheapest things they might be one-size-fits-all, but that's not true for the majority of oft-used tools. – David Mulder Sep 23 '15 at 12:21
  • Oops, in my first comment I meant 'right handed people' in the first sentence. – David Mulder Sep 23 '15 at 12:23
  • @DavidMulder That's *very* weird. It's something quite uncommon in the Czech Republic - I have trouble *imagining* right-handed scissors. It's true that higher end mice typicaly are made for one hand, but the left-handed variant costs the same as the right handed one (joysticks are a different matter entirely, though - but those are often ambidextrous). The only pens I've seen that are not ambidextrous tend to be "healthy" pen for children - and they are dreadful for both left-handers and right-handers. – Luaan Sep 23 '15 at 12:23
  • @Luaan I went scavenging around the house and the only ambidextrous scissors I found where some really crappy cheap ones. If you want to use normal scissors like these https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/18/Skalm_2.JPG with your left hand... well, I don't even know what to say. And yeah, you just have a smaller selection of choices and when you don't have your own tools with you it can be uncomfortable. Life as a left-handed individual is quite possible, but it's easier when you don't need to carry your own mouse around when you wish to fix something on someone else's computer. – David Mulder Sep 23 '15 at 12:44
  • And for that matter, it's not just higher end mice, it's even cheap mice. I mean, true, the cheapest right handed mice I was able to find on that site where 4 euros whilst the left handed ones where 8 euros, but that's still both incredibly cheap. – David Mulder Sep 23 '15 at 12:45
  • @DavidMulder Oh, I see, they have that weird angling there. I've never seen any scissors like that before. Even tailor's scissors I've worked with work great for both hands (they're angled on both sides), and they're used 8+ hours a day. Though looking closely, the ones you posted seem distinctly *left*-handed. – Luaan Sep 23 '15 at 12:57
  • Let us [continue this discussion in chat](http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/29439/discussion-between-david-mulder-and-luaan). – David Mulder Sep 23 '15 at 13:13
  • @Mason Wheeler in the days of fountain pens with ink in them, this was a thing. The point (nib) of some makes of pen had a slope for easier writing for right-handers, so they needed a left-handed version too. – RedSonja Sep 22 '16 at 07:54
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    Most "ambidextrous" scissors still have a preference to be held in the right hand. The top blade coming down is on the right side of every pair of scissors I've seen. Makes easier to see the cut if you're holding them in the right hand, and causes the squeezing of the hand to push the blades apart if used in the left hand. – PGnome May 04 '17 at 22:41
  • Finding symmetric joysticks can be quite difficult, and anything but the cheapest computer mouse will have some breaking of symmetry (forward/back buttons are often where the right thumb is, at the very least). Can openers are inherently handed. Screwdrivers aren't handed, but the screws are. Most people don't think about how many things are really "handed". Even most left handers don't really think about it, just sort of deal with it. I "left-click" with my middle finger, and didn't think anything of it being weird until I was in college, for example. – PGnome May 04 '17 at 22:44