Flash Post 273!

Button, a worrisome bit of news has appeared in today’s Times Of India.

Worrisome? Why?

The report says that young school-going children are losing the muscle-strength and movement skill in their fingers to enable them to hold pencils and pens because of excessive use of iPhones and tablets.

That’s not nice at all.

I remember how handwriting played a major role when we were growing up and to achieve that, we were made to practice our hand-writing on specially ruled hand-writing books that had two blue narrow lines in the centre and one each of red or blue line above and below the two blue lines so the body of the alphabet could be written in-between the two blue lines and the extended bit of the alphabet of say the ‘f’ in ‘fat’ or the ‘p’ in ‘cap’ was carried up or down to touch the blue lines.  See the fifth sentence in the image below:

I understand what you are trying to say.

This generation is so starved for time that it’s easier to hand over a phone or tablet to a child than encourage him to play muscle-building games like building blocks or solving the Rubic’s cube or cutting and sticking or even pulling toys and pulling ropes like in a game or Tug-of-War.

Is there some solution?

Yes. One way to achieve both– the strengthening of the finger muscles and familiarising the child about operating the iPhone and iPad which one cannot do without because of the advancement of technology– is to get children to do both.

So they get strength in their finger muscles to help them hold objects as well as gain preliminary knowledge about how to operate these machines.