Question

How would I describe the development of handedness of a child at age 6 months to when they enter kindergarten and the impact that culture and the child's environment have on the development of the child's handedness?

Answer 1

Handedness described in the following way dominance of one hand over the other or unequal distribution of motor skills between the right and left hands.

There are many factors influence the handedness includes the following neurological, biological, genetic, evolutionary and social and environmental factors.

Hand preferences in adults are related to differences in hemispheric specialization for language skills. A person’s handedness tends to indicate a specialized hemisphere on the brains opposite side, so that a right-handed person probably has a left-hemisphere language specialization, vice versa

Hand preference is the product of multifaceted developmental processes that begin before birth and expand during early infancy. It observed that a hand preference for acquiring objects starts manifesting before the age of 6 months, becomes prominent during 6–12 month period, and declines thereafter.

The left hand preference does not appear to be as robust as the right preference. In part, this may be a consequence of a maternal influence on the development of infant hand preferences.

Right-handed mothers engage the use of their infant’s right hand during object play. Thus, left preference infants of right-handed mothers are likely to be encouraged to use their right hand much more than right preference infants of left-handed mothers are encouraged to use their left hand.

There is always a certain amount of societal pressure on the development of handedness. Since most people are right-handed, this may lead parents or teachers or other figures of authority, whether knowingly or sub-consciously, to teach or encourage children to be right-handed so dominance was persist in righthandedness.

Handedness is in fact a behavior, which can be taught and learned like other behaviors. Societal and environmental pressures can dominate over any genetic or biological tendencies - which nurture wins over nature.

Some of the social factors like they are forced to switch to right handedness in younger age which was proved in America.