Converting Left-Handed Children

[Existing Alternatives]

Have you heard of practices of “converting” left-handed children into right-handed? Apparently, they are fairly common in some parts of the world and are performed for the “benefit” of the child. Left- vs. right-handedness seems to affiliate with certain character traits. I am looking for any research or indications of psychological impacts of these conversions on children.

[ThomasDoubts]

I tend to think of left handed people as a generally superior race. Had anyone tried to take away my superiority, I would not have been happy in the least.

 

 

In all seriousness, I'm fairly certain that left handed/abmidextrous children have a statistically more significant rate of being diagnosed with dyslexia. I would hypothesize that any efforts to convert children would be destructive and neglectful of the extra attention dyslexic children require in early development. It may be that converting would be viewed as a possible treatment, which of course is nonsense.

 

 

I've always done what comes natural, which in a right handed world, leads to plenty of conversion by necessity as it is. I'm all for abolishing the tyranny of the righties! With all that money, my school couldn't afford a pair of left handed scissors? Come on, man!

[MysterionMuffles]

I'm not sure of the impacts, but if I would have to guess, its a lot of stressful rewiring of the brain to what feels natural. I write with my left hand, but I play right hand guitar and pretty much throw balls, use knives, and just about everything else with my right hand. The fear of left handed users is an old religious thing that brands them as Satanists because they come from some reverse dimension or some stupid crap like that.

 

My advice is not to force a child to switch which hands they use for writing or anything else. What feels natural to them to use is what will feel natural and so that is why there IS Ned Flander's Left Hand Emporium. Just kidding, but there are a lot of accomodations for left hand users. Most notably is guitars crafted so that the strings are reversed in guage for left handers to use their dominant hand (the left, duh) to pluck the strings as opposed to the traditional right.

 

I don't think there's anything huge traumatic that happens to natural left handers who are forced to switch to using their right hand. If everything was meant to be right hand, we'd only have that one lol. My brother was born left handed but my parents forced him to write with his right hand, and its godawful messy. (Brilliant ideas though despite the chicken scratch!) I also have a friend who was born right handed, but he punched a window pretending to be Batman when he was a kid, and he had to learn how to write with his left hand.

 

As for me, even though I usually write with my left, from time to time I write with my right hand (because I hate my hand getting stuck in the middle of a notebook lol) and its just as neat, if not any neater. Hands are hands. We're free to use which one for whatever task we choose and shouldn't be a big deal. Take it from an ambidextrous guy!

[Wesley]

English is technically a right handed language. As you write with the right hand, your hand moves away from drying ink and doesn't block vision of the letters. The left hand can smudge and block what you are writing. Other languages go left or go down, which the proper writing hand may be different.

 

In all reality, it pretty much doesn't matter. People hardly even write anymore, you know, since computers... and the internet... forums.....

 

I think forcing the child to do something unnatural is far worse than any small potential or writing with the proper hand to prevent smudging in a world where anything outside of personal notes is typed.

[MaxM]

I am the same as in, right with my left hand and throw with my right. I went to a private christian school and was forced to right with my left hand for a short period of time. Someting about being devil hand or evil these "christians" are fucking insain. I became ambidextrous and could right quite well with both hands. After a plethora of lines my hand righting skills turned shit with both hands by age 15. Probably because I learned to get it over with as soon as possible at the cost of legability.

[Pepin]

There are some neurological effects of handedness and it seems like handedness might be determined in infancy. This is a complete amateur opinion, but I think most of the negative impact would be in the opportunity cost of the child having to retrain how they use their brain. It would be much more difficult to retrain the brain if wiring was already somewhat in place, and the average right handed wiring wouldn't likely be achievable.

[Kevin Beal]

Slightly off topic, but left handed boys have larger Corpus Callosums so that (like girls) they can recover from trauma more quickly.

 

I know a guy who is left handed but forced himself to write with his right hand when he was a kid so that he's essentially ambidextrous. I don't know what kind of effect it had tho...

[Existing Alternatives]

Thanks everyone for the input. Just for the record, I do not intend to “convert” my child. I am not sure what the actual practices are, but it does come across as a form of abuse. Especially, when the benefits aren’t quite that clear. My concern is that if left-handedness is indeed driven by some chemical / genetic peculiarity, wouldn’t reversing it affect such peculiarity.

 

 

I recently found out that I was a “beneficiary” of this “conversion.” I have zero recollection of this, so I must have been fairly young. As the result, I am as right-handed as they come.  Something must have snapped completely deep inside my brain.

 

 

In all seriousness, I'm fairly certain that left handed/abmidextrous children have a statistically more significant rate of being diagnosed with dyslexia. I would hypothesize that any efforts to convert children would be destructive and neglectful of the extra attention dyslexic children require in early development. It may be that converting would be viewed as a possible treatment, which of course is nonsense.

 

 I did not know about dyslexia. It is indeed sad and outright neglectful to focus on some inconsequential “side effect” instead of the much serious problem.

 

I'm not sure of the impacts, but if I would have to guess, its a lot of stressful rewiring of the brain to what feels natural.

 

...is why there IS Ned Flander's Left Hand Emporium...

 

That whole “re-wiring of the brain” is what concerns me. There has got to be some issues coming as the result.

 

Btw, didn’t Flanders’s Left Handed Emporium go broke and Libertarian party HQ moved into the property? (Ned: “I hope they have better luck”)

 

English is technically a right handed language. As you write with the right hand, your hand moves away from drying ink and doesn't block vision of the letters. The left hand can smudge and block what you are writing. Other languages go left or go down, which the proper writing hand may be different.

 

In all reality, it pretty much doesn't matter. People hardly even write anymore, you know, since computers... and the internet... forums.....

 

I think forcing the child to do something unnatural is far worse than any small potential or writing with the proper hand to prevent smudging in a world where anything outside of personal notes is typed.

 

Indeed, “smudging” seems to be the most important reason for this abuse. And yes, in this day and age even personal notes are entered into the smartphone.

 

 

I am the same as in, right with my left hand and throw with my right. I went to a private christian school and was forced to right with my left hand for a short period of time. Someting about being devil hand or evil these "christians" are fucking insain.

 

Did they actually use “left is satan” BS?

 

There are some neurological effects of handedness and it seems like handedness might be determined in infancy. This is a complete amateur opinion, but I think most of the negative impact would be in the opportunity cost of the child having to retrain how they use their brain. It would be much more difficult to retrain the brain if wiring was already somewhat in place, and the average right handed wiring wouldn't likely be achievable.

 

I guess, Wikipedia should have been a good place to start, thanks. Spending time retraining can actually be considered a benefit. I heard somewhere that in general doing things with your less-dominant hand (yes, I went there) actually stimulates and develop other areas of your brain.

 

Slightly off topic, but left handed boys have larger Corpus Callosums so that (like girls) they can recover from trauma more quickly.

 

I had to look it up, but that’s an interesting fact. Now this is the real question, whether Corpus Callosum is affected as the child gets remolded into more society approved orientation.

[Kevin Beal]

 

 

Now this is the real question, whether Corpus Callosum is affected as the child gets remolded into more society approved orientation.

 

The corpus callosum shrinks with neglect and abuse compounding the problem. So right handed boys who are abused/neglected have the smallest corpus callosums and take the longest to recover from abuse. The Psychohistory podcast stef narrates on the Origins of Male Violence goes into some detail about this.

[Pepin]

I guess, Wikipedia should have been a good place to start, thanks. Spending time retraining can actually be considered a benefit. I heard somewhere that in general doing things with your less-dominant hand (yes, I went there) actually stimulates and develop other areas of your brain.

 

Would the question then come down to the difference between the effects the child wanting to use their other hand and not wanting to yet still being forced to? Personally, I would think there would be a difference based on activities that were derived through the a similar argument in my schooling. As an example, in music class it was suggested to work on your rhythm to sing it as opposed to playing it with an instrument. This technique never worked for me as a child because I didn't want to do it and found it to be quite dumb, but as an adult I find that the technique is of great value.

[AdamC]

Having been converted, I'm very interested in this topic but haven't found any research to share.

 

Though I have no memory of it, apparently, at age 5, I was forced to write with my right hand by the teachers at school.

 

About 10 years ago I rediscovered my original handedness via the stepping off a curb test, and after resolute practice, am now ambidextrous.

 

Slightly off topic, but left handed boys have larger Corpus Callosums so that (like girls) they can recover from trauma more quickly.

 

Very interesting. Thanks for sharing this.

[Kevin Beal]

About 10 years ago I rediscovered my original handedness via the stepping off a curb test, and after resolute practice, am now ambidextrous.

 

Your link doesn't work. It seems to be a private book or something. It shows a strange error with yellow highlighted sections in the background, but no text

 

Also, if you liked my post you could upvote it

[st434u]

Left handedness is genetic. About 10% of the population is left handed. It offers some advantages in the wild, as well as in modern life. 

 

Noticeably in sports, particularly tennis or boxing or other 1v1 sports, left-handed people have a clear advantage as they will always have most of their practice against right-handed people, but right-handed people will also have most of their practice against other right-handed people. This means that the left-handed player will be very experienced in countering and reacting to the moves of their right-handed opponent, but the right-handed player facing the left handed won't be.

[Wesley]

Your link doesn't work. It seems to be a private book or something. It shows a strange error with yellow highlighted sections in the background, but no text

 

Also, if you liked my post you could upvote it

Donor status allows upvoting. He is not a donor.

 

I will upvote your post for him. 

[MysterionMuffles]

LOL did Flander's really story get replaced by a Libertarian HQ? I do not remember that episode.

[Existing Alternatives]

LOL did Flander's really story get replaced by a Libertarian HQ? I do not remember that episode.

 

http://simpsons.wikia.com/wiki/When_Flanders_Failed/Quotes Season 3 Episode 38

[shirgall]

Have you heard of practices of “converting” left-handed children into right-handed? 

 

Sounds sinister.

[MaxM]

Thanks everyone for the input. Just for the record, I do not intend to “convert” my child. I am not sure what the actual practices are, but it does come across as a form of abuse. Especially, when the benefits aren’t quite that clear. My concern is that if left-handedness is indeed driven by some chemical / genetic peculiarity, wouldn’t reversing it affect such peculiarity.

 

 

I recently found out that I was a “beneficiary” of this “conversion.” I have zero recollection of this, so I must have been fairly young. As the result, I am as right-handed as they come.  Something must have snapped completely deep inside my brain.

 

 

 

 I did not know about dyslexia. It is indeed sad and outright neglectful to focus on some inconsequential “side effect” instead of the much serious problem.

 

 

That whole “re-wiring of the brain” is what concerns me. There has got to be some issues coming as the result.

 

Btw, didn’t Flanders’s Left Handed Emporium go broke and Libertarian party HQ moved into the property? (Ned: “I hope they have better luck”)

 

 

Indeed, “smudging” seems to be the most important reason for this abuse. And yes, in this day and age even personal notes are entered into the smartphone.

 

 

 

Did they actually use “left is satan” BS?

 

 

I guess, Wikipedia should have been a good place to start, thanks. Spending time retraining can actually be considered a benefit. I heard somewhere that in general doing things with your less-dominant hand (yes, I went there) actually stimulates and develop other areas of your brain.

 

 

I had to look it up, but that’s an interesting fact. Now this is the real question, whether Corpus Callosum is affected as the child gets remolded into more society approved orientation.

They sure did. Private christian school. Also if anyones interested im think left handedness is genetic. my biological brother whom i'v never met is the same as me, bats right handed writes left handed.

[Shqiptar]

My cousin who is about 28 had the left handedness beat out of him as a child. His parents legitimately thought is was "evil". His mother has since apologized and his father has been out of the picture for the last 15 years of his life.

[A.I.]

It's immoral. There's no need to do studies. I can tell you from experience, it effects the brain the same as any other type of abuse.

[MysterionMuffles]

AI, can you elaborate? I want to know what makes you so sure that it is equivelant to any other abuse. Especially if you have personal experience in the matter. Not disagreeing btw, just curious.

[A.I.]

AI, can you elaborate? I want to know what makes you so sure that it is equivelant to any other abuse. Especially if you have personal experience in the matter. Not disagreeing btw, just curious.

 

Sorry, I'm still new to posting and the format. Absolutely, Morse Code. I can elaborate and how!

 

It's telling the children what he was born with, a dominant left hand, means he is evil or wrong. He did not choose it, so morals cannot apply. Where there is no choice, there can be no morality, but the parent/teacher is using the argument from morality. (S)he is telling the child he is evil when that is in fact a lie and just a commonly used tactic to bully children into compliance. That is an immoral act and traumatic. The child is receiving the message "Change your nature or you will be disowned, discarded, killed, etc." I hope that helps. Please let me know what you think.

 

Edit** I was going to post this last night, but damn storm knocked the power out.

[Wesley]

Definitely forcing a child to write with a different hand would be at the absolute best questionably immoral/a waste of time. I think there may be a way to convince a child of the benefits of doing a task with a particular hand and allowing either to occur. As I stated before, I think it is completely unnecessary to do in a modern age, but I do not feel that teaching a skill as best done a certain way is necessarily bad.

 

As a kid I thought it would be cool to write with both hands and practiced with my left in order to satisfy my boredom. I ended up losing the skill, but I would not have considered it negative to learn with either hand. Forcing me to learn with one would obviously be wrong.

[Existing Alternatives]

It's immoral. There's no need to do studies. I can tell you from experience, it effects the brain the same as any other type of abuse.

 

The immorality of calling a child evil or forcing him to do anything is not in question. My concern is more about the psychological impacts after the fact. If there is some kind of effect on corpus callosum, as @kevin_beal, or maybe something else. I hope somebody somewhere did a study to show what happens to those little brains. 

My cousin who is about 28 had the left handedness beat out of him as a child. His parents legitimately thought is was "evil". His mother has since apologized and his father has been out of the picture for the last 15 years of his life.

 

Beating is one of those conventional methods, unfortunately. It would probably be difficult to separate the impacts of the "correction" from beating.

They sure did. Private christian school.

 

Funny, wouldn't christians consider all children "evil", simply because of the "original sin"? Why single the lefties out?

Definitely forcing a child to write with a different hand would be at the absolute best questionably immoral/a waste of time. I think there may be a way to convince a child of the benefits of doing a task with a particular hand and allowing either to occur. As I stated before, I think it is completely unnecessary to do in a modern age, but I do not feel that teaching a skill as best done a certain way is necessarily bad.As a kid I thought it would be cool to write with both hands and practiced with my left in order to satisfy my boredom. I ended up losing the skill, but I would not have considered it negative to learn with either hand. Forcing me to learn with one would obviously be wrong.

 

The problem isn't with acquiring a "useful skill", but rather forcefully changing one's possibly genetic predesposition. This is why I am looking for psychological or physiological impacts of such actions. On top of that, you can gather from the posts above the methods of the conversion are usually quite violent and abusive.

[Wesley]

The problem isn't with acquiring a "useful skill", but rather forcefully changing one's possibly genetic predesposition. This is why I am looking for psychological or physiological impacts of such actions. On top of that, you can gather from the posts above the methods of the conversion are usually quite violent and abusive.

I understand this. I also am saying that writing with a different hand is not necessarily bad. However, forcibly making a child do something that they do not want or is unnatural would be. That is the differentiation I am intentionally making. Looking at the past, it may not be relevant, but it may be relevant to the future of when a child learns to write you can explain what some benefits or drawbacks may be and then let them choose or do what they want.

 

Obviously telling a child they are evil or wrong for doing what comes naturally is terribly abusive.

[Existing Alternatives]

I understand this. I also am saying that writing with a different hand is not necessarily bad. However, forcibly making a child do something that they do not want or is unnatural would be. That is the differentiation I am intentionally making. Looking at the past, it may not be relevant, but it may be relevant to the future of when a child learns to write you can explain what some benefits or drawbacks may be and then let them choose or do what they want.

 

You could be right. Aside from violent and abusive methods, this could be just about getting an important life skill. I mean, some parents do get quite abusive when it comes to learning violin or something like that. At the same time, the fact that there appears to be a link between behavioural traits and handedness leaves me suspicious that there is more to it than just a way of holding a pen. This is why I am looking for an actual study either supporting or debunking the link.

[MaxM]

The immorality of calling a child evil or forcing him to do anything is not in question. My concern is more about the psychological impacts after the fact. If there is some kind of effect on corpus callosum, as @kevin_beal, or maybe something else. I hope somebody somewhere did a study to show what happens to those little brains. 

 

Beating is one of those conventional methods, unfortunately. It would probably be difficult to separate the impacts of the "correction" from beating.

 

Funny, wouldn't christians consider all children "evil", simply because of the "original sin"? Why single the lefties out?

 

The problem isn't with acquiring a "useful skill", but rather forcefully changing one's possibly genetic predesposition. This is why I am looking for psychological or physiological impacts of such actions. On top of that, you can gather from the posts above the methods of the conversion are usually quite violent and abusive.

Lol if theres one thing christians are more than anything else it's hypocrites. Don't hit people its bad. Next minute hit child for for hitting another child. It's like this from birth in a christian house.

[AdamC]

YouTube: The Mystery of the Left Hand

 

Thesis: Left-handedness is due to elevated levels of testosterone in utero.

 

00:32:00: Left-handedness check: Height of left and right testicles.

[Existing Alternatives]

A lighter perspective on the subject from Cracked (one of my most favourite non-philosophical websites). Interestingly enough, the lefties are much likelier to have schizophrenia (among many other negative things), which apparently is caused by “confusion between the two halves of the brain.” Now, what happens when that “confusion” is further confused by “the correction procedure.”

[Dylan Lawrence Moore]

I'm not sure of the impacts, but if I would have to guess, its a lot of stressful rewiring of the brain to what feels natural. I write with my left hand, but I play right hand guitar and pretty much throw balls, use knives, and just about everything else with my right hand. The fear of left handed users is an old religious thing that brands them as Satanists because they come from some reverse dimension or some stupid crap like that.

 

Just to add something to this point, the frowning upon left-handedness goes far beyond the Christian/Abrahamic world. In Buddhist traditions the left hand is considered impure and children are generally corrected in Asian countries as well. This is interesting for whoever mentioned that Europeans languages write left-to-right. Traditionally Chinese and Japanese writing goes right-to-left.

 

Also in Africa (I don't know in what parts or how large of an area), in areas without toilet paper, you wipe your ass with your left and hand and eat with your right. Thus your left hand is literally unclean and it would be an insult to touch something sensitive with it.

 

Anyone know anything about other cultures?

[Luirru]

I can tell you that it helps to unhinge the mind, I remember reading a study done and that is one of the reason Lewis Carroll was as crazy as he was. It also can get very confusing for me as this is what happened to me when I was young, the catholic school nuns would swat me each time I used my left hand. For me it manefeists most when I am trying to describe certain things verbally and fail to find the proper words, also my handwriting has not improved since I was forced to write with my right-hand and I have yet (30 years later) to learn to write cursive.

[Existing Alternatives]

I can tell you that it helps to unhinge the mind, I remember reading a study done and that is one of the reason Lewis Carroll was as crazy as he was. It also can get very confusing for me as this is what happened to me when I was young, the catholic school nuns would swat me each time I used my left hand. For me it manefeists most when I am trying to describe certain things verbally and fail to find the proper words, also my handwriting has not improved since I was forced to write with my right-hand and I have yet (30 years later) to learn to write cursive.

 

This is horrible! Sorry to hear you went through this. Hopefully in today's world keyboard typing normalises some of this pain...

[st434u]

A lighter perspective on the subject from Cracked (one of my most favourite non-philosophical websites). Interestingly enough, the lefties are much likelier to have schizophrenia (among many other negative things), which apparently is caused by “confusion between the two halves of the brain.” Now, what happens when that “confusion” is further confused by “the correction procedure.”

Research by Lloyd deMause suggests that schizophrenia is largely caused by what he calls the infanticidal mode of childrearing. In this mode, the caretakers use constant threats to convince the children that they may be murdered at any moment, usually to enforce obedience. This is sometimes, but not always, actually carried out, and witnessing siblings or other children in the community being murdered for disobedience or other reasons strenghtens the paranoid-schizophrenic mindset.

 

The voices that schizophrenics hear in their heads are generally their caretaker's voices. The reason they hear these voices is because it reminds them of what must and what must not be done to avoid being murdered.

 

Left-handed children are often made to behave as if they were right-handed, and this could increase the level of abuse needed to get them to behave according to the wishes of the caretakers, when compared to their right-handed peers. Within a partially infanticidal culture, it could make sense to expect that left-handed children are abused more, and thus have a higher rate of schizophrenia. Furthermore, and because left-handedness is partially hereditary, it could make sense to expect left-handed parents to have been abused more as children on average, and thus tend to be more abusive to their own children than right-handed parents. So this could carry on through generations even after an anti-left-handed bias in parenting strategies is gone. If this was the case, we would expect left-handed people to show other signs of having been abused more than their right-handed counterparts, and not just a higher incidence of schizophrenia. And in fact, that is the case, statistics say. Left-handed people are more likely to have all sorts of problems from autism to communism to alcoholism to even homosexuality.

 

Then again, it could just be that being left-handed is an evolutionary tradeoff, which would explain why only about 10% of the population has the trait. You get worse stats for most things, but win out by being different. That is further corroborated by the fact that men are slightly more likely than women to be left-handed (evolutionarily speaking, for men variance pays out more than for women)

 

Or it could be a combination of both of the effects.

[villagewisdom]

Just to add something to this point, the frowning upon left-handedness goes far beyond the Christian/Abrahamic world. In Buddhist traditions the left hand is considered impure and children are generally corrected in Asian countries as well. This is interesting for whoever mentioned that Europeans languages write left-to-right. Traditionally Chinese and Japanese writing goes right-to-left.

 

Also in Africa (I don't know in what parts or how large of an area), in areas without toilet paper, you wipe your ass with your left and hand and eat with your right. Thus your left hand is literally unclean and it would be an insult to touch something sensitive with it.

 

Anyone know anything about other cultures?

 

Wipe your ass with left hand in India as well. So anyone seeing you use your left hand for eating would be disgusted and shy away from anything you touched. I'm sure it made hygienic sense to them at the time. Now it is just another part of their society and I believe it is still enforced to this day. 

[Existing Alternatives]

Came across these two interesting articles on the subject. The comment section is even better than the article itself.

http://wasioabbasi.wordpress.com/2011/08/08/never-force-left-handed-child-to-be-right-handed/

http://www.anythinglefthanded.co.uk/children/changing-left-to-right.html