There are many reasons your child’s hand may hurt when practicing handwriting. Typically, it is from decreased strength. The hard part is that the strength isn’t just from the hand. It is from the core, shoulder, forearm, wrist, and then hand.

All of those areas need to get strengthened. Check out, Mary Benbow. She is a very early proponent of neuro-kinesthetic handwriting treatment.

Reduce Handwriting Pain By Increasing Strength

Overall, you wanna work on things that include strengthening 3 major areas:

Shoulders– Prolonged use of the arms in a vertical fashion- think throwing a ball against the house multiple times without bringing it down or using a zoom ball between two people.
Forearm muscles-For example, coloring on a vertical surface or laying down (face up) on the floor and then coloring or painting on paper taped underneath a table.
Intrinsic hand muscles– these are the hand muscles that support the pencil as it moves dynamically by the fingers. So, yes-therapy putty. But also games that involve dice, holding medicine balls in your hand and moving them in a circle, or working with clothes pins.

Want the TRUTH??—The more you practice writing, the less handwriting will hurt. YUCK.
Need some fun ideas to help your kid practice their handwriting? Check out my blog post for some ideas!

Sadly, it is a double edge sword. The mere fact that we have keyboards and we don’t write as much is just dragging our poor little hand muscles down.
So, basically, if you’re typing a lot; you’re going to have hand pain when writing a lot.

So make a habit of writing a little bit everyday-poems, journaling, copy something you’ve always wanted to learn.