For Intelligent Children With Autism, Handwriting Is Barrier

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

For many children with autism, though -- even those with higher IQs than most -- handwriting becomes an arduous chore, because the very act of writing letters takes them so long to do.

A new study out this week in the journal Neurology explains some of the reasons for that phenomenon -- and why bad handwriting might even lead to nonverbal communication problems.

While researchers may have realized that many autistic children have bad handwriting, they did not know if it related to their autism, or whether it was a problem understanding the forming of words, or whether it had to do with motor skills.

Barbara Wagner, a mother of two boys with autism spectrum disorders, enrolled her older son, Austin, 14, in the study, although she knew beforehand there was something different about how he wrote.

"When they print, they don't like you and I do," she said. "They actually draw their letters. It's really slow," explaining that when she watches her son, he is very deliberate.

Wagner said enrolling her son in the study will help with the rest of his education. She has had conflicts in the past with administrators at Austin's school over his Individualized Education Program -- a set of goals for a child with a disability. She said the study has helped get more attention paid to occupational therapy and improving Austin's writing.

Additionally, Wagner said she has started her younger son, Ian, 7, on occupational therapy to help him avoid having similar handwriting problems later on.

For the study, which was done at the Kennedy Krieger Institute in Baltimore, researchers gave a handwriting test to 14 children with autism (ages 8 to 13) who had normal IQs and 14 children with normal development.

"What we were interested in is understanding whether a problem of something as important as handwriting, which folks need for school and general life, whether that deficit is really due to a problem with controlling movement, versus some other problem," said Amy Bastian, an author of the study and director of the motion analysis lab at Kennedy Krieger. "What we found is these kids have handwriting problems that really correlate with their motor findings."

While handwriting may seem a relatively minor problem, it can greatly affect an autistic child who is otherwise functioning at the expected or a better-than-expected level.

"We've not had any kind of educational issues," said Wagner of Austin, who is in tenth grade, a year ahead of other 14-year-olds. But handwriting can set him back.

However, she wrote in a statement to Kennedy Krieger, "An assignment that would take him 15-20 minutes if he could dictate the answers would often take up to an hour and a half to two hours if he was required to do the physical writing himself (versus keyboarding or allowing me to act as his scribe). To this day, Austin swears that he simply cannot print."