You can be a little lost when your child is left-handed, especially when you yourself are right-handed. Thanks to my experience as a left-handed person, this little advice will help your child to flourish better (and you can’t imagine how much we would like to see change on a daily basis).
In France, there are between 10 and 13% left-handers according to sources, or around 9 million. Having the left as a guiding hand has long been seen as a problem, so much so that the people concerned were “antagonized” in order to correct them. Fortunately, this is no longer the case, and left-handed people are now accepted. But the world remains largely designed for right-handed people, making everyday life more complicated…
Indeed, if your child is left-handed, know that he will have to learn to live in a world designed and created by right-handers: the gear lever in cars, ATMs, the can opener, follow his lessons at university when the seat only has a tablet on the right, the turnstiles in the metro… Even the doors are generally installed to suit right-handed people rather than left-handed people. And then, when we are a schoolboy, how many clothes do we stain with the ink on our notebook or the chalk on the board as we write with our left hand?
Your child will have to deal with it and if, at home, things can be adapted to him, it will be a real relief. I am obviously not telling you to dismantle all your doors to put them in the other direction, but to offer him a place in which he can flourish. This is why, as a left-handed person, I want to send a message to parents of left-handed children: adapt yourself and adapt your environment to your child.
To achieve this, he needs suitable equipment, whether academic or otherwise. For example, we avoid spiral notebooks, which often bother left-handed people. You can also ask that your child be seated on the left in class, to avoid exchanging elbows with their right-handed neighbors. I would say the most important item to buy is left-handed scissors (although universal scissors can work too). But remember that it is almost impossible to use right-handed scissors with your left hand (the opposite is also true).
There are also left-handed squares, left-handed morphological pens, etc. These may or may not be very useful. The same goes for the computer mouse: you can put it on the left by changing the settings, but perhaps you prefer it to be on the right. Because not everyone is the same: some left-handers are able to do things with their right hand while others are incapable of doing so, and it’s the same for right-handers. In fact, it completely depends on your child. So, observe him and listen to him to know what he really needs, he will thank you for it.