Is Your Child Left-Brained or Right-Brained?

Quite a few years ago, our family had an interesting conversation at our breakfast table with a guest staying at our house.  We were discussing the nature of the brain, dreams, and how people think.  I said that I have conversations in my dreams, and our guest immediately disputed me:  “No one dreams words!  People only dream images!”  He was pretty adamant.   I remember thinking, “Is this guy actually going to argue with me about my own dreams??  I don’t even think Daniel and Nebuchadnezzar had this conversation!”

                  

I don’t mean to shake up anyone’s world, but it’s really true:  My dreams have words in them.  In fact, I think words all the time.  It’s a characteristic of being extremely left-brained.  I can’t find my way out of a rest area without guided assistance, but I can write a blog while driving down the road and just put it on paper when I get home.   I think words, with images sprinkled in.   

 

Unfortunately, most of us forget that others don’t think exactly like we do.  Like the guest who vehemently denied that I could have a conversation with the bad guy in my nightmare, most of us think that everyone else is thinking in the same patterns we are.  This can produce an obstacle to good education—and especially in homeschooling, where the educational environment sometimes consists of only one teacher for thirteen years! 

 

As a homeschool mom, I am intrigued by how the mind works.  I have six kids who are uniquely different, with various talents and different skill sets.  For many years in the past, educators measured children almost exclusively by left-brain dominant skills (reading, talking, memorizing, test-taking, and categorizing).  I am sad to think of how many children felt “stupid” growing up, although they were probably more gifted than the teachers who made them feel that way.  By understanding how our children’s minds work, we are better able to help them retain information and use their skills for the Lord. 

 

I have enjoyed researching this subject (especially with the book The Gift of Dyslexia, by Ronald Davis), although none of us are really “experts.”  The brain is far more complex than what any of us can summarize in a book.  At risk of being dangerously over-simplistic on this issue, let me explain right/left brain dominance this way:  The left hemisphere of the brain is the speech region of the mind.  The right-hemisphere of the brain is the image region.  The left hemisphere tends to accumulate facts through language, and then organize its information in a linear fashion (think:  “on paper”), in what usually appears at first glance to be a symmetrical, orderly fashion.  The right hemisphere tends to cull information by "sweeping" from the world around us, using spacial reasoning and all five senses, in what often appears random and haphazard.  Most of us show dominance one way or the other—although we all use both sides.  The better our hemispheres interact, the more we are able to access and develop our stored information.  If you can clap your hands together without falling over, you are using both hemispheres.  Extreme use of the right-hemisphere, at the expense of the left-hemisphere, often results in dyslexia or dysgraphia.  Extreme use of the left-brain results in . . . whatever I am:  a lost mother, wandering for days in the Walmart parking lot because I was so busy “mental blogging” that I picked up ZERO visual clues on my way into the store, and thus have no idea where my van is parked.  Thankfully, we can exercise our brains and develop stronger synapses between the hemispheres. 

 

It’s good to know which side dominates our children’s brains so that we can help them learn.  Those of us who are dominantly left-brained (a common trait of many elementary teachers, just by nature of the demands of the profession) often overlook the clues into how right-brained kids think.  Is it possible that your child’s grades are not telling you the whole story? 

*Does your creative, artistic child feel “stupid” because he struggles with reading? 

*Are you using strictly left-brain skills (writing, copying, memorizing) to teach him new information, instead of accessing his memory center through the right hemisphere (actions, songs, movement, and tactile exercises that stimulate nerve endings in the skin)?  

*Are you punishing bad grades with more left-brain solutions (“Copy those math facts 50 times.  And no playing outside until you have learned them!”) instead of delving into the root cause of the struggle?

*Does your child constantly depend on non-specific words (such as “thing” and “stuff”), gestures, and onomatopoeia (sound effect words)—not out of laziness, but just because it just takes so long for his brain to finally spit out the correct word?

*Are you focusing exclusively on the “what” questions (“What is the capital of China?  What is the square root of 49?”) and overlooking the “why” questions (“Why does grass feel wet on a summer morning?”)? 

Left-brained kids compile data; right-brained kids are intrigued with processes.  The left-brained guy says, “There’s a word for that!”  The right-brained guy says, “There’s an app for that—and I created it.”   We left-brained folks like to remember all the rules, but it was our right-brained friends who discovered them in the first place. 

 

How can we decipher whether our kids are predominantly right or left-brained?  While I’m not a “purist” when it comes to video games (we own a Wii), it helps to turn off the video games, phones, and TV regularly.  Those devices tend to direct the brain into certain veins of thought, rather than letting the child create and solve his own dilemmas. 

*What do your kids daydream about when it’s quiet? 

*When they are staring out the car window, what is floating around in their heads:  words, songs, numbers, stories, images--or a combination of all those things?

*Where does your child tend to be correct in his hunches?  Is he a good guesser of distance, weight, and time (right brain), or is he a good guesser of spelling and pronunciation (left brain)? 

*Can you ask your child to organize a drawer (left-brain), or is it better to leave that drawer alone and ask him to figure out why the DVD player isn’t working (right brain)?

*Does your child organize his possessions symmetrically (left-brained), or artistically (right-brained)?  (Or not at all?  J )   

*Does your child do a good job reproducing and reciting information someone already created (left-brained) or does he tend to play the piano by ear and create new, wild stories at play time and crazy doodles when he picks up a pencil (right-brained)?

 

Because the brain hemispheres control opposite sides of the body, hand dominance can offer another clue-- although it is more complicated than just the question, “Are you lefty or righty?”  Some people are left-hand dominant for both gross (large) motion as well as fine (small) motion.  Other people switch dominance, depending on whether they are writing (fine motor) or swinging a bat (gross motor).  Our son bats with his right hand and throws with his left; writes with his left hand but holds his fork with his right.  Another quality to look for is eye and foot dominance.  A right-handed child can show left-eye dominance (which complicates gun sighting for several members of our family!), or vice-versa.  A left-handed child can use his right foot as his starter foot for running, and vice versa.  (*To find foot dominance, have the child stand with his eyes closed.  Give a gentle shove from the back, and whichever foot jumps out first to support him is his dominant foot.)  Those “mix-and-match” kids are just demonstrating that both hemispheres are at work—an excellent quality to have.  Those of us who are 100% single side dominant (eye, foot, and hand) for both gross and fine motor skills might be relying pretty heavily on one hemisphere at the expense of the other. 

 

In my next blog, my daughter Jessica will be sharing some things she learned about using art to help her mind retain information, and understanding the complexity of her right-side dominant brain.