For Intelligent Children With Autism, Handwriting Is Barrier

For some kids with autism, penmanship is their biggest enemy in the classroom.

Nov. 10, 2009— -- For most kids, learning handwriting can be dull and repetitive, but it's a task mastered midway through elementary school.













Motors and Mirrors




Bastian cautioned that while it was an interesting theory, it was far from proven.

Lori Warner, a psychologist and director of the HOPE center for autism at Beaumont Children's Hospital in Royal Oak, Mich., said that studies have gone both ways on mirror neuron theories.

While many of the children she works with are younger than the children in the Baltimore study, she said they have fine motor problems too. They have trouble coloring pictures and lacing beads.

To be sure, while many children with autism have poor penmanship, some do not. Warner pointed out that some people who have autism also have incredible artistic and writing abilities.

"I don't think you could say every single child with autism is going to have poor handwriting," she said.

Skills to Succeed

While many parents of a child on the autism spectrum would say handwriting is a low priority, it is a bigger issue for relatively high-functioning children. It may be one of the biggest obstacles to their full integration into the classroom.

"It's really more of a question of how functional is this person going to be," said Warner. "We find that we're working on lots of skills that aren't core autistic features."

And having a study may also provide ammunition to parents like Barbara Wagner, who have trouble getting schools to address all of their concerns.

"When you have a disconnect between a parent's priority…and the school's priority, I think it is important to have something to back you up," said Warner, who has dealt with many schools with widely-varying approaches to autism. "It gives you more of a stronger position to talk to the school from."

Bastian said that variability may allow some kids to succeed, but others will be left behind if educators don't notice that handwriting can present a big obstacle to an intelligent, autistic child.

"In some schools, kids with autism are given a keyboard or a computer, and that helps them as well, but not all kids have these opportunities," she said. "And if they're having to focus so hard on handwriting…it's hard for them to listen in class, understand, and interact. And so this is actually a pretty serious problem in a group that is already in a vulnerable position."