Mary Kostka shows how to spot a tight pencil grip in kids: check for blanched skin, bent wrist, and fingers doing all the work. A simple rocking horse exercise, ten times each side, can help loosen it by integrating a reflex that's still active.
The asymmetrical tonic neck reflex (ATNR).
10 times on each side.
Skin blanching (skin turning white) where pressure is applied.
Hi, I'm Mary Koska here with Ohana OT and I help kids with succeed in handwriting, which is important because it helps them succeed in school, it helps them feel more confident, and it speaks to that underlying desire to just feel like a regular kid. So in this video, what I'll be doing is showing you what are some problems and how to alleviate a really tight grasp, which causes fatigue and slow writing. So the first thing that I want you to do is kind of a pre test is observe your child and just look at their grasp. Look and see, are there arms on the table? Is their wrist, is the wrist down or is it popped up? And when they're holding, are they holding with all their fingers or do they have a tripod grasp? Do the last two fingers stabilize, hold down? But more importantly, do they move their hand as a unit or do they move their fingers? All those little observations will be important to kind of help to figure out how to help them. So the other thing you can look at is if they're squeezing so tight that their skin is blanching. You see how I'm pushing hard and my skin's turning white. That's definitely a sign of holding it too hard, which is causing the fatigue and the slow riding. So one thing you can do, just a basic thing you can do if they're not holding it right, is teach them how to hold it with the pinch and flip. So what you do is you just have the, your brain utensil. Let's see, I'll just hold it like this since it's a little hard to see. And you have them, it's on the table, but you have them pinch, tuck these fingers and flip all the way back. And I like to call this part the hammock. So you want to make sure that you teach them how to hold it properly in the first place. And that can help. One thing that really helps a lot, these fingers often don't know what to do. So they just end up on the, on the marker and then they can't get a really good efficient grasp going is find something. I have my little dinosaur here. You can use anything, a pom pom cotton ball. This is maybe a little on the big side. I have a big hand and you have them hold on to something and that creates a lot of stability and it allows these fingers to just kind of, just kind of relax and then they can move. If you're still having trouble after that and they're just really, really tight, you might want to test them for the asymmetrical tonic neck reflex. And that is a reflex that causes this grasp to be really tight. So I'm going to move the camera, we're going to get on the floor. I'm going to show you how to test for that. So what you'll want to do is get on the floor with them. I'll go this way. And then if your, if their arms are really, really, really locked, try to get them to relax them a little so you can really see if they have the reflex or not. And then you're going to turn their head to the side. Now if, when you turn the head to the side, the elbow bends, then they have a retained primitive reflex called the asymmetrical tonic neck reflex, which is the 18R. So what you'd rather see them be able to do is just to turn freely like that with no overflow of movement. The reason that's a problem is because when they're holding on to the pencil and they look to copy, their arm wants to move, the elbow wants to bend, and so they end up getting a tight grip just to kind of stabilize. So an exercise that you can do, have them do to kind of help alleviate that tight grip and integrate the reflex is to have them do the rocking horse. So what you would have them do is turn their head to the side and rock their shoulders past their hands and repeat that 10 times on each side. I'm going to go back up to the table now. So that's one thing you can do. Okay, so if there's improvement with those tips, fantastic. If not, give us a call and. Or click on the link below for some more information. We have additional videos available. This is first of a three part series. In the second part we're going to go over do's and don'ts and watch out for an email because we'll send you an email with a link for that video. And in the third video at the end there will be a special gift for you. So be sure to watch the second and the third videos. Thanks for watching.
