Probably not, or at least not in the way the advice means it. The study people reach for on handwriting did not measure squeeze strength at all. It measured two other things: moving a small object around inside one hand, and copying a shape onto paper. A later, smaller study did measure strength and found a modest link. The two skills that carried the weight, though, are things a two-year-old already does badly, every day, at the lunch table.
Here is the movement, before any study. Watch an adult take a coin out of a pocket. The coin lands in the palm, walks out to the fingertips without the other hand helping, then gets turned the right way round. A two-year-old cannot do that. He fetches it out with his other hand, or drops the lot on the floor. Same at the jam jar: one hand holds while the other turns, and for a while it simply does not.
Almost none of what follows costs anything. The phrase parents get handed is "build his hand strength first", and I could not find a study that tests that instruction directly.
What the handwriting studies measured
It is an old, small study. In 1996 Heather Cornhill and Jane Case-Smith tested 48 first graders, some identified as good handwriters and some as poor. The battery included a motor accuracy test, a visual-motor integration test (look at a shape, copy it), and two in-hand manipulation tasks: translation, which is moving an object between the palm and the fingertips, and rotation, turning it around inside the hand.
Translation, visual-motor integration and rotation together accounted for around 73% of the variance in handwriting scores. That is a lot of explaining for three small tasks.
There was no grip-strength test in that battery. The authors did not treat squeeze as one of the things worth measuring, which is not the same as showing it does not matter. And the children were six and seven, already writing daily. Nothing there says a three-year-old who rotates a peg becomes a neat writer at six. It says the two travel together at six, which is a much smaller claim.
One study did measure strength. In 2015 Michele Alaniz and colleagues tested 51 children, some autistic and some not, on grip and pinch strength alongside handwriting legibility and pencil control. Strength correlated with pencil control in both groups, and with legibility in the typically developing children. Fifty-one children, correlational, and no claim that training grip changes anything.
I think of strength as a floor. A child needs enough of it to hold a pencil without the hand giving up, and nearly every child gets that from ordinary life: carrying, climbing, pulling his own socks off, hauling a full watering can. Above that floor, more squeezing does not appear to buy more handwriting. Play dough gets recommended for this constantly, and I have no study saying it helps or that it does not. Put it on the table anyway.
What to watch at four
The larger study is Cameron and colleagues, published in Child Development in 2012, with 213 children tested the year before kindergarten, average age just under five. They took several fine-motor measures and then followed the children into the school year.
Design copy, which means looking at a shape and reproducing it on paper, was the strongest fine-motor predictor of how children scored in the fall on letter and word identification, passage comprehension and sound awareness, and of how much they gained across the year. Block building and draw-a-person barely predicted anything, which surprised me more than the headline did.
It is correlational. Nobody randomly assigned half the children to copy shapes, so copying a cross may be a sign of something else that helps rather than the help itself.
It is the cheapest thing here to check. Draw a vertical line, a circle, a cross and a square on a piece of paper, then hand over the pencil. Those shapes tend to arrive in that order, and that ordering comes from practitioner charts rather than from the study above. Children vary enormously. If a four-year-old cannot get near any of them, that is a question for your pediatrician. Our shelf for four and five-year-olds leans towards this kind of work rather than towards letters.
In-hand manipulation is the skill with the ugly name
Two clinical words for one ordinary thing, and the coin in your pocket is the whole of it. Translation, then rotation. This is what the 1996 study kept landing on, and it trains itself in the least formal way imaginable. Things that ask for it:
- A coin bank or slot box. Give a small handful, not one disc at a time. The work is getting the second disc from palm to fingertips while the first one is still going in. Handing them over singly removes the entire exercise.
- Screw lids. One hand holds the jar still while the other turns. Jam jars do this for free, and so does most of what sits on the practical life shelf.
- Threading and lacing. Slow, quiet, and it demands a pinch and a turn in the same second. Most of what we stock for this is on the fine motor shelf.
- Pegs into a board. A peg only goes in one way up, so he has to rotate it in his hand instead of passing it to you.
- His own coat. Zips, poppers, the toggle that has to be turned before it goes through. It takes far longer than doing it for him, which is the entire cost.
Between two and three, most of this is failure with the occasional success, which is the correct ratio. The two-year-old shelf is built around single-purpose objects for that reason.
The gesture is the initial visual sign that contains the child's future writing as an acorn contains a future oak. Gestures, it has been correctly said, are writing in air, and written signs frequently are simply gestures that have been fixed.
Lev VygotskyMind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes, ed. Cole, John-Steiner, Scribner & Souberman (Harvard University Press, 1978), chapter 8, "The Prehistory of Written Language," section "Gestures and Visual Signs," p. 107
The grip you keep correcting
Nearly every parent I speak to has been told their child holds the pencil wrong. In 2012 Heidi Schwellnus and colleagues took 120 typically developing fourth graders, sorted their pencil grasps into six patterns, and measured handwriting speed and legibility. Grasp pattern did not affect either one.
The limits are real ones. Fourth graders are fluent writers with years of habit behind them, so this tells you nothing about whether it is worth showing a four-year-old how to hold a crayon. It measured speed and legibility. Pain and fatigue, the reasons an occupational therapist looks at a grip at all, are a separate question.
What I take from it is smaller. If your five-year-old writes legibly at a reasonable speed with a grip that looks strange, the grip is not the emergency it has been made into. If writing is slow, painful or quietly avoided, that is worth a real assessment, and a therapist will look at far more than the fingers.
My own habit here comes from Montessori practice rather than from any of these studies: break the crayon in half. A stub cannot be held in a fist. Small hands find their way to the fingertips on their own when the object is too short for anything else.
What I would actually do between two and four
Marr and colleagues counted what school asks of the hands, back in 2003. Between 36% and 66% of the kindergarten day went on fine-motor tasks, averaging 46%, and 42% of that was paper and pencil. That is why the question carries heat.
Most of what the studies above point at comes down to a handful of habits, none of which look like handwriting practice.
- Two hands doing different jobs. One holds the bowl still, the other stirs. That is practitioner guidance and my own reading rather than a finding from any study here. It shows up remarkably rarely in the toys sold as fine-motor toys.
- Put out small things. A fistful of pegs asks more of a hand than a large chunky puzzle ever will, and it takes up less shelf.
- Draw shapes before four, and leave letters alone. A line, a circle, a cross. If you are wondering whether letters ought to come earlier, we went through that in does a 4-year-old need to write letters before kindergarten.
- Stop rescuing the lid. The second you take the jar and open it, the repetition that was doing all the work stops.
None of that is strength training, and none of it requires buying anything. We sell threading sets and peg boards, and the coat and the jam jar still do most of the job.
The hard part is the waiting. A two-year-old getting one bead onto a lace is slow enough that from across the room it looks like nothing at all is happening. It is the most useful nothing in the day. Every time I have watched it fall apart, an adult had reached in early.
Where this came from
- Cornhill, H., & Case-Smith, J. (1996). Factors that relate to good and poor handwriting. American Journal of Occupational Therapy, 50(9), 732-739. Forty-eight first graders in one study, already writing daily, and no strength measure was in the battery at all, so it shows what travels with good handwriting at six rather than what causes it at three.
- Cameron, C. E., Brock, L. L., Murrah, W. M., Bell, L. H., Worzalla, S. L., Grissmer, D., & Morrison, F. J. (2012). Fine motor skills and executive function both contribute to kindergarten achievement. Child Development, 83(4), 1229-1244. Correlational, with 213 children tested the year before kindergarten at an average age just under five, so copying practice was never shown to raise anybody's scores.
- Schwellnus, H., Carnahan, H., Kushki, A., Polatajko, H., Missiuna, C., & Chau, T. (2012). Effect of pencil grasp on the speed and legibility of handwriting in children. American Journal of Occupational Therapy, 66(6), 718-726. One hundred and twenty typically developing fourth graders, which means it says nothing about preschoolers, and speed and legibility were what it measured.
- Alaniz, M. L., Galit, E., Necesito, C. I., & Rosario, E. R. (2015). Hand strength, handwriting, and functional skills in children with autism. American Journal of Occupational Therapy, 69(4), 6904220030p1-6904220030p9. Fifty-one children across two groups and a correlation rather than a trial, which is weak evidence for something you are being told to train.
- Marr, D., Cermak, S., Cohn, E. S., & Henderson, A. (2003). Fine motor activities in Head Start and kindergarten classrooms. American Journal of Occupational Therapy, 57(5), 550-557. An observational count in a small number of classrooms more than twenty years ago, describing what school asks of children's hands rather than what anyone should do at home.
- The shape-copying order (line, circle, cross, square), the broken-crayon habit, the two-hands-doing-different-jobs point and everything in the last section are practitioner guidance and our own judgement from watching these toys get used, not findings from the studies above. Where the two disagree, the studies win.
