Improving Your Child's Hand-Eye Coordination

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From penmanship to tying a shoelace, hand-eye coordination a highly important skill. It's something your child will use every single day for the rest of his or her life.

Think about it: the ability to use hands and eyes together to perform a task (say, button a shirt or pick up a pencil) requires kids to synchronize vision, touch, movement, and cognition — quite a complex feat!

Every child develops at his or her own pace. However, most hand skills are learned and will improve with repetition. Most everyday activities — getting dressed, eating breakfast, doing assignments at school — automatically help kids to improve their fine motor skills.

All children can benefit from some coordination-building activities, especially those who are lagging behind. Kids with poor coordination often avoid activities that require fine motor skills, preferring the swing set to building sets or coloring books.

Unfortunately, avoiding fine motor activities just makes the problem worse over time. Legible handwriting, for example, is crucial to success in school and beyond. Other successes — in sports, in music, in artistic pursuits — build self-esteem and give kids a healthy focus that can keep them out of trouble later.

The best approach is to start building better coordination now, so it doesn't become a lifelong hurdle. The good news is, many well-loved play activities help kids fine tune hand-eye coordination — like building a sand castle, dressing a doll, and even playing video games.

You can give your child's coordination a boost by introducing toys that require manipulative play — i.e., toys that call for grasping, aiming, tracing, digging, and fitting pieces together, for starters. Here's a list of varied coordination-building activities and specific toys that encourage them.

Coordination-Building Activities Suggested Toys

Drawing, Tracing, Coloring, Painting