Common Causes of Dysgraphia

Hi, everyone. Mary Koska here with Ohana ot and this is our Handwriting Success coaching program. I'm going to go over with you some of the common causes of dysgraphia in general. There's no just one cause of dysgraphia. It's really a multifaceted disability. So I'm going to break down some of the different causes that we do know contribute to handwriting and why they're actually happening or why the child is struggling with these in the first place. We don't always know what's actually caused it, but we do know that these are all contributing factors. The first one is their gross motor skills. It if the child has not developed their core strength, their abdominal muscles, their back muscles, their neck muscles, and their just overall posture, if they're having trouble sitting comfortably with their head up while they're working at a table, then that is going to have a big impact on their ability to use their fingers and to use their eyes, because you.

Need that strong base of support, that foundation before you can use the smaller muscles.

And that is another area. The fine motor muscles need to be very mature. There's a lot of different components to.

How we use our hand. We have to actually separate the two sides of the hand for stability and mobility. We need to be able to have our hand, our wrist, extended back so that our fingers can move freely. We need to be able to move the fingers in small, controlled motions. We need to have a very strong pinch so that we can hang on to the pencil. So there's a lot of components to the fine motor skills. And then we need good ocular motor skills. We need to be able to shift our vision from near to far and to track and be able to accommodate looking in different places without getting confused as to where we are. Another really big, important and often overlooked area is that we need our primitive reflexes integrated. And a lot of people just don't think about these. But some common ones you might think of when you have a little baby is like a grasping reflex or a stepping reflex. We have a lot of reflexes that help us in our development to help.

Promote the motor actions that we want to have. And they're reflexive. So. So, for example, for the hand, if the palm is stroked, then the hand grasps. And then as the child learns to use their hand, it's not reactive to just if something touches their hand, they can just leave it open. So we have a lot of other reflexes like that that are primitive reflexes that really can impact the ability to write an example are the tonic neck reflexes. So there are some reflexes that when our head is down or up or turned one side or the other, that we will have overflow into our posture in our arms and our legs. So, for example, for one of them, if our head is down, it makes our hips want to straighten up, and that causes the bottom to slide out of the chair. There's another one where if the head is turned, it makes one arm want to straighten and the other arm want to bend. And then that can cause kids to lose their place when they're holding their pencil and their arm wants to bend. So it's this lack of isolated movement. One part of the body moves and then another part moves. And so the children need to have those motions not happening automatically anymore, that they have more control over their body's motions. Another common contributing factor, another cause, is their working memory. How much they're able to remember. When they look up to the board to copy, can they only remember one letter at a time? Can they remember five as they're trying to write it down? Their visual spatial skills, being able to look. If they have one line on the paper and they can look and they can estimate where they should start their letter. A lot of kids start from the bottom up because they don't have that spatial. They can estimate where that letter should start. And there's a whole lot of different areas in the visual perception area. And their language processing is another component. So if they're having difficulty just understanding language processing, language, obviously that's going to have a big impact. Handwriting. So those are some of the different causes. Like I said, the big root. You know, what is the one cause of dysgraphia? We don't really know specifically, but we do know that it's based in the brain. We do know that these different components that I mentioned, the gross motor, the fine motor, the eye hand coordination, the primitive reflexes, their working memory, their visual spatial skills, and language processing, all are contributing causes to dysgraphia. Hope that was helpful, and I'll see you in the next video.