396. Why kids remember more when they write by hand: What screens might be costing your child’s brain with Dr. Audrey van der Meer

Dr. Audrey van der Meer (00:00:00):

I’m happy to do my bit with showing in hard science that handwriting is good brain stimulation. It’s this evolutionary ancient link between the brain, the hand, and the eye that we have to keep up to date. We have to keep practicing it.

Dr. Sarah Bren (00:00:23):

When it comes to learning, faster isn’t always better. Hi, I’m Dr. Sarah Bren, a clinical psychologist, mom of two, and the host of Securely Attached. Each week, I sit down with leading experts in psychology, neuroscience, medicine, and child development to translate complex research into practical, grounded insights that help you parent with more clarity and confidence. And today, I’m joined by Dr. Audrey van der Meer, a developmental neuroscientist and professor of neuropsychology at Norwegian University of Science and Technology. Dr. van der Meer studies human development across the lifespan and has a particular focus on how movement, learning, and brain development interact. Her research has taken her from studying infant motor milestones to using EEG technology to examine what actually happens inside the brain when children write by hand versus type on a keyboard. And what she found is striking. When we write by hand, larger networks in the brain light up, fine motor movements, sensory input, visual processing, and memory systems, they’re all activating and communicating with one another. When we type, far fewer of those systems are engaged. In other words, the physical act of forming letters by hand may be doing far more for learning and memory than we’ve really realized. In this conversation, we explore what the shift towards digital classrooms might mean for our children’s development of attention, executive functioning, and long-term brain development. We talk about the use it or lose it principle in neuroscience, why crawling and movement lay the foundation for later learning. We also talk about what research says about reading on paper versus screens and how parents can make thoughtful adjustments without throwing technology out the window.

(00:02:16):

Hello, Audrey. Welcome to the Securely Attached podcast. Thank you so much for being here.

Dr. Audrey van der Meer (00:02:28):

Hi.

Dr. Sarah Bren (00:02:31):

It’s so nice to get a chance to talk with you. You study human development from a lifespan perspective. So you’re looking at how development, learning and cognitive aging interact and how we can use that knowledge to better support learning and prevent problems over time.

Dr. Audrey van der Meer (00:02:50):

Exactly. Yes.

Dr. Sarah Bren (00:02:51):

Yeah. Can you talk to us a little bit about just the work that you … What drew you into this work and what’s been really exciting about it?

Dr. Audrey van der Meer (00:03:00):

Well, for us, as long as I can remember, I’ve been fascinated by the fact that if you hold a newborn baby for the first time, it can’t even hold up its own head. And then by the time a year has passed, that same baby is running up and down the stairs, it’s uttering its first words, and it has developed a whole personality of its own. So as a developmental psychologist and a developmental neuroscientist, I like to understand the underlying mechanisms that drive development forward.

Dr. Sarah Bren (00:03:36):

Yeah. I mean, I get just as much excitement from … I feel like the amount of development that happens in the first, certainly the first year, but I do a lot of work with parents of toddlers and it’s just … Where the kid is when we start to the kid is when we finish, just by a couple months of working together, completely notwithstanding any of the work that I’m doing with them, just the fact that they’re developing on their own so much changes. And I think that can actually contribute to a lot of anxiety in parenthood, I think, because they’re like, “As soon as I get my bearings, my child’s a completely different child. I have to learn completely new skills.”

Dr. Audrey van der Meer (00:04:18):

Yeah. Yeah. And especially when talking about toddlers, the number of words that they gain every single day, it’s up to 20 words or so. It’s just amazing how it goes in so fast during certain periods.

Dr. Sarah Bren (00:04:37):

Yeah. It’s humbling. It’s humbling to just see the rapid, just the rate of it all, which means I would imagine as doing the kind of research you do, that there’s infinite places to get sucked into and pulled in because there’s so much amazing stuff happening all the time throughout this lifespan, especially in the early years. As a brain researcher and a professor of neuropsychology, how do you decide what threads you’re going to pull? Because there’s so many.

Dr. Audrey van der Meer (00:05:17):

Yes, there are many indeed. No. I mean, first, when I started as a young researcher, we were confined to studying overt behavior. So we looked at reaching movements, at crawling behavior, all these motor skills that developed during the first year of life, and we tried to understand and link it to brain development. But we couldn’t do that directly because the technology didn’t exist to test awake baby’s brains in a lab setting. But in the early 2000s, we got this EEG system, which consists of 128 sensitive electrodes sewn together in the form of a hairnet that we can place on the baby’s head without much fuss, and we can start testing the baby immediately because the older systems, you actually had to glue one-on-one electrodes individually onto the baby’s scalp and you had to scrape a little bit in their scalp to improve the contact. And it was a lot of mess and babies simply wouldn’t put up with such a treatment before we even got to testing them. So with our new system, we were for the first time able to see what was happening inside a baby’s brain as it is developing.

Dr. Sarah Bren (00:06:53):

That is so cool

Dr. Audrey van der Meer (00:06:53):

And that is so exciting.

Dr. Sarah Bren (00:06:55):

It is. It really speaks to how much the advancement and the technology of brain science research really kind of dictates what we can and can’t know.

Dr. Audrey van der Meer (00:07:11):

Yeah, definitely. And as our technology improves, our babies are getting much smarter.

Dr. Sarah Bren (00:07:18):

Is there a bidirectional relationship there or are we just better at picking up on how smart they are?

Dr. Audrey van der Meer (00:07:23):

Yeah, that’s exactly what I’m trying to say, that we’re picking up on it better now. We are able to record and look inside baby’s brains as they are developing, which before wasn’t possible.

Dr. Sarah Bren (00:07:37):

And you’re finding that they are smarter than we thought?

Dr. Audrey van der Meer (00:07:40):

Yes, much smarter. And that they are born with a brain that is ready to learn from day one.

Dr. Sarah Bren (00:07:47):

That’s really valuable. I feel like how do … My mind is going in so many different directions. One, I’m super protective because I don’t want parents to feel this pressure that they now have to stimulate and enrich from day one because I already think that’s probably not so helpful and parents do too much of it. I think what I’m hearing you say is they’re ready to learn from day one innately on their own with no help from us. We just need to get out of the way a bit more.

Dr. Audrey van der Meer (00:08:23):

Yes. But the old traditional theories, they say that our babies are born with a brain that needs to undergo a lot of maturation in the first few months, which means that many parents who believe that this is the case, they don’t think that their baby will respond to their voice or to their face, and they don’t stimulate the baby at all. So it is important for parents to realize that their babies are born with a brain that is ready to learn from day one, so that they can actually start interacting and communicating with their babies from day one, because it will make life much nicer. It will be good for the baby’s brain and its development, but it will also be much nicer for the parents to realize that their very own newborn baby actually recognizes their voice, recognizes the shape of their face, and that they are truly sending out small signals to communicate from day one.

Dr. Sarah Bren (00:09:35):

Yeah. And I think … So that’s interesting because when I think about learning, quote, capital L learning, I think sometimes parents think about education, teaching them, like getting … I think when we’re talking about learning, we’re talking about this more immersive global learning in this such a four dimensional way, like interpersonal learning and gaze and the social connection.

Dr. Audrey van der Meer (00:10:05):

It has much to say how you perceive your own baby if you consider it to be an unfinished, rudimentary creature, rather than something that actually has a lot of potential and that will thrive by social interaction and by giving it experiences so that the baby can start using its brain properly.

Dr. Sarah Bren (00:10:34):

Yes. And so one of the things I really wanted to talk to you about today, which is actually much more relevant, I think, to families with older kids, is you’ve published some really fascinating research on handwriting, memory, and embodied learning, and I think it’s super relevant to today’s experience of children, because as kids are growing up in this world where the dexterity and the manualized work of learning is shifting over to digital spaces, I’m curious what your work on looking at sort of the impact of the connections made when we use our hands to be part of our learning experience and when that starts to fade, like what the impact could be. So first of all, maybe we could just start a little bit about you explaining some of the work you’ve been doing and what you’ve been finding.

Dr. Audrey van der Meer (00:11:40):

Yeah. So basically we’ve been using those nets, those electrode nets that I was describing earlier on subjects of all ages, also students and 12 year old children and 16 year old children. And we kind of play the game pictionary with them. So they receive words, written words, and they either have to type the word on the keyboard, or they have to write the word with a digital pen on a tablet, or they have to draw the word with the same digital pen on a tablet. And we are looking inside the brain at the brain activity, the emerging brain activity, and we see that the brain is much more active, much larger parts of the brain are active when you’re actually writing by hand or drawing by hand, as opposed to when you’re using a keyboard. And the underlying idea is that when you are typing, you are only making very simple finger movements that are identical for all the letters that you want to type.

(00:13:01):

Whereas when you’re drawing or writing by hand, the underlying intricate fine motor patterns are very important to stimulate the brain because the brain really has to work to get those intricate patterns using your fine motor skills on paper and it uses the senses much more. And when more parts of the brain are active during a given task, the brain is in need of communicating important information between those active parts. And that is what kind of puts the brain in some kind of position or state that touches upon the learning and the memory centers in the brain, and which makes it much easier for the brain to learn and remember. So the more you use of your brain, the more the brain is in need of communicating important information, and that touches upon the memory and learning centers of the brain. So it is important for people all ages to put your brain in that kind of state, to challenge your brain, to perform these kind of fine motor skills.

Dr. Sarah Bren (00:14:27):

Okay. So what I’m … I’m going to try to pick out a few things that I heard you say that I think I have questions about that I think are really interesting. It’s all really interesting, but I want to translate a little bit of what I just heard you say, and correct me if I’m not getting this right. So when we use different parts of our brain, so for example, when we’re using a lot of fine motor skills, that’s turning on certain parts of our brain that may or may not be related to learning, right? That’s fine motor parts of our brain, which is different than maybe our prefrontal cortex, which is like our learning, thinking part of our brain. But if we turn on more lights in the house, let’s say, like let’s say different parts of our brain are … Think of the brain as like a house and different parts of our brain that are connected to different functions are like rooms.

(00:15:22):

And if you turn on the lights in one room by like activating fine motor skills for fine motor muscle movements, and then you turn on the other part, that requires you to turn on a different light of the brain to coordinate, right? So the coordination of the fine muscle movement is different than the fine muscle parts of the brain, different rooms. Two lights are now on. I’m imagining there’s a bunch of other lights on in different rooms that I’m not even … That I don’t know yet. But then the more lights that are on in the house, the more likely we are to turn on like the big rooms, like the learning centers or the memory centers, so that it all becomes this coordinated system of communicating rooms because all the lights are turned on and that’s where learning takes place. But the fewer lights on in the house, the sleepier the house is, the quieter the house is, and we’re not getting this whole network to light up and communicate together and is less likely that we’re going to really like turn on the learning centers or the memory centers, which is where our big goal is with kids.

(00:16:35):

And we want the whole point I’m assuming of like maybe writing, like practicing your letters or writing out sentences isn’t to have good handwriting, it’s to learn a concept or to like build skills that we can build upon and make more complex learning available to our kids in the future.

Dr. Audrey van der Meer (00:16:57):

Yes. I think you could very well say that in the way you just did, because it’s all about these active networks and there need to be a functional connection between all these networks and that kind of makes it easier to learn and to remember. The more you use of your brain and the more these functional connections are in place and maintained, the easier it becomes to learn and remember.

Dr. Sarah Bren (00:17:29):

So simplifying some of the processes, maybe oversimplifying some of the processes by which we are engaging in learning settings, right? Like typing or utilizing screens maybe, are we seeing that that … Are you looking at ways that education is shifting towards more of a screen-based model or more typing and are you seeing changes in outcomes?

Dr. Audrey van der Meer (00:17:58):

Yes, because our research has now shown over the past 10 years that writing by hand or drawing using your hand is excellent brain stimulation and the brain follows this principle of use it or lose it. So if you are not using networks that are there, they will eventually disappear to make place for networks that are being used. So if you have learned to write by hand, for example, and those networks exist and they’re all these functional connections through brainwaves and what have you, but if you’re not using them anymore because you’ve become completely digital on your phone or on your tablet, then those networks will disappear. So it’s actually exactly the same as a modern road network. You first have to build the roads, but you also have to maintain them because if you don’t maintain the roads or the networks, they will disappear again.

Dr. Sarah Bren (00:19:11):

And so in some ways, like obviously typing might feel more efficient because it might be faster and in some ways the efficiency might be a red herring, right? It might be a bit of a misguided benefit and I’m using benefits in air quotes because it might not actually be that beneficial because in bypassing the more effortful practice of writing things out, we’re kind of also bypassing, turning on all the lights.

Dr. Audrey van der Meer (00:19:46):

Exactly.

Dr. Sarah Bren (00:19:46):

And so, yes, we’re getting all the information on the document, but it’s not going into the brain, which is not, I think the function ultimately, we can all agree when we’re … I’m even thinking like when I was in school, like in high school, I wrote things out by hand. In college, I wrote notes out by hand. By the time I went to grad school, I was typing notes on my computer in class. I was also probably very distracted in class and looking at other stuff on my computer. And I know that that is still a problem, right? So that’s a whole other issue. But just the act of thinking, “Oh, I’m typing faster, I’m getting more on the page, I’m quote, being efficient.” I might have actually been sort of bypassing some of my internalizing of the information I was typing whereas … And actually this is interesting.

(00:20:43):

I want to ask you this question because I’ve always described this personally, and I don’t know if it’s a thing or if it’s just a me thing, but when I would study for tests in college, my strategy was to rewrite all of my notes for the test by hand. And then one of the things I was able to do in the class when I was taking the test is I could remember … It’s like I had muscle memory. I could like remember the page, I could see it again in my mind of where I wrote what note. I could remember like where on the page it even was. And is that something that you find that people when they write notes, they have like an easier recall of like where and how they physically wrote it? Is part of the writing it out like mapping it onto the brain in some way?

Dr. Audrey van der Meer (00:21:32):

Yeah, I definitely think so. I mean, you have to remember that we’re not saying that you should write everything by hand, but when it comes to … And we’re not saying that we should go back to the Stone Age because we live in a digital world and the digital technology is here to stay. But what we have found with our research is that when you take notes by hand in a lecture situation, then it’s much easier to remember your notes and to learn from your notes than when you’re typing your notes. Because the problem is when you’re typing lecture notes, then it’s very tempting to type down everything the professor is saying or the teacher is saying, but it is a full security because you’re almost typing in the blind. You’re hearing the information coming in through your ears and it’s going out through your fingertips, but you’re not processing the information actively that you want to learn.

(00:22:40):

But when you’re taking your notes by hand, you can’t write down everything that is being said. So you actively have to work with the incoming information. You can only write down certain keywords, you can draw some boxes and arrows and underlinings, but what you’re actively doing during the lecture, during listening to the new information that you want to learn, is linking it to knowledge that you already have. So notes per definition are very personal. And so it doesn’t help if you can’t make it to a lecture to send your mate to the lecturer or to class because his or her notes will not make any sense. So it’s the active working with your notes during acquiring new information that makes it so useful. And also you were like talking about muscle memory, that is exactly you use more of your senses and you use your body when rewriting or writing your notes by hand, and that causes you to … That it sticks much better.

Dr. Sarah Bren (00:24:01):

More lights, get lit up, right?

Dr. Audrey van der Meer (00:24:03):

Yes.

Dr. Sarah Bren (00:24:04):

Because it’s also not … Yeah, it’s not just the lights in the brain, it’s the lights in the nervous system too, right? You were saying your sensory input also matters.

Dr. Audrey van der Meer (00:24:12):

Yes.

Dr. Sarah Bren (00:24:19):

Parenting in today’s world is complex. We are inundated with social media, societal expectations, information overload, and the pressure to always quote, get it right, all while trying to raise thoughtful, regulated, and confident kids. It can be a lot. And sometimes, even when you’re listening to podcasts like this and being intentional in the way you parent, you can still feel stuck in patterns that don’t work for your family. So maybe it’s ongoing power struggles around screens, maybe it’s defiance, outbursts, or overwhelm, or maybe you’re parenting a child with ADHD, autism, or a learning difference, and you’re just not sure what the right next step is. Whatever you’re navigating right now, our virtual parent coaching at Upshur Bren Psychology Group is here to support you. Our sessions are personalized, practical, and grounded in evidence-based care. It’s tailored to your specific child and your specific family. These sessions can be one-time strategy session where you come in with a focused challenge like navigating screen limits, managing meltdowns, or supporting executive functioning, and you leave with a clear and practical plan, or it can be longer term support where we help you shift deeper patterns, strengthen your relationship with your child, and feel more confident and grounded in your parenting over time.

(00:25:39):

To learn more about our supportive resources for parents, along with our services for individuals, children, couples, co-parents, and families, you can visit our website at upshurbren.com or just schedule a free 30 minute consultation call to talk with a member of our highly trained care team. You don’t need to know what you need, just that you want support, and we will guide you from there. So just go to the episode description wherever you’re streaming this podcast to get a link to Upshur Bren Psychology Group, or go to upshurbren.com. That’s U-P-S-H-U-R-B-R-E-N.com to learn more. Okay, now back to my conversation with Dr. Audrey van der Meer.

(00:26:26):

So you’re right, we’re not going backwards. We are in a digital age. We have kids who are in school and they’re on Chromebooks and they are doing everything in the cloud. What do we do? What do we do? What can we do in the parameters? What are you finding to be helpful within the parameters that we’re faced as parents of kids who … The school is doing it one way. Can we do things at home or is helping our kids understand some of the functions of these things? What have you been finding helpful in, okay, I have this data, now how do I translate it into useful recommendations for families out there in the world?

Dr. Audrey van der Meer (00:27:14):

Well, we have been recommending the Norwegian government to introduce at least a minimum of handwriting tuition into the curriculum. And we’re not saying that it’s easy for a six year old overactive and difficult to sit still and to learn this tedious process, but it’s simply so good for their brains. It’s really good brain stimulation. And on the basis of our research, almost 25 states in the United States have since the beginning of 2024, decided to reintroduce handwriting tuition into the curriculum. So for parents, it’s important to … And for teachers and for the children themselves, it’s important that they practice and challenge the brain by drawing or forming these letters on paper. But that also means that our Norwegian teachers are now primary one teachers. They are complaining that they receive six year olds in class who barely know how to hold a pencil, which means that in kindergarten and nursery school, they haven’t been doing all those things that when I was a kid, we were doing, we were drawing, we were coloring, we were laying puzzles, we were doing all those fine motor skills that form the basis for later handwriting, which is a difficult skill, but it’s very useful to have not only as in the form of brain stimulation, but also because I really feel that the next generation should be able to write a poem or a love letter or even just a grocery list by hand, because it’s really part of being human to be able to write by hand.

Dr. Sarah Bren (00:29:16):

Yeah. I mean, it makes me think even at the very beginning of our conversation, you were saying the beginning of this work was looking at gross motor development in babies. And the reality is, from my understanding, and please correct me if I get anything wrong, but that we start movement in the world from like the … It goes big to small, right? The babies are starting with reflexes and then it’s like, then there’s intentional gross motor torso movement and then we can get some more coordination in our limbs and I can reach and grab, I can start to crawl, right? But all of our growth It’s motor development. We think of it as parents and babies of these milestones like, oh, my baby rolled over, my baby crawled, my baby walks. But those aren’t separate, distinct events. They’re all part of a sequential, very coordinated process of coordinated development.

(00:30:28):

One thing stacks upon the other for each to happen. It’s super sequential. And that gross motor coordination leads the way to find motor coordination, right? Or maybe those are separate structures. But all of this to say that what is happening in your baby from the first week of birth, all the way to your six year old trying to write a sentence in their first grade classroom by hand, they’re connected. If we think of all these developmental milestones in silos and we kind of think we can take one out, we can skip over that one. That one’s not so important. Let’s just take that one off the curriculum, so to speak. And it won’t have any downward issue later on. But what I think you’re saying is these are all part of a very coordinated sequence of development. And if we skip over pieces of it completely, we leave massive gaps that maybe can’t be jumped over and will have impacts on a lot of other stuff later downline and things that might be invisible like brain function, learning, memory.

Dr. Audrey van der Meer (00:31:39):

Yeah. I would even like to put it stronger than what you were just saying, that we find in our infant research that as soon as babies start crawling, we see a massive boost in their brain development as well. And it makes sense because if you’re only capable of lying on your back, staring up at the ceiling, you don’t need important networks that inform you about distance, speed, and time to collision, for instance. But as soon as the baby is capable of crawling around its environment, then you need those networks that inform you about when something is going to hit you where.

(00:32:27):

So it’s important to help our babies out of the boring supine position and give them plenty of tummy time because that allows them to build neck muscles that are strong enough to carry their own heavy head. And it’s also a natural crawling position. And we see that motor development is linked to cognitive development because babies, as soon as they start crawling, they also experience a boost in cognitive development because now they can, for the first time, they can see what the world looks like from under the table and from up in the curtains. So it’s very … Because if you’re not capable of moving around the environment yourself, then it’s very difficult to really grasp these cognitive concepts such as over and under and in front of and behind. But as soon as babies start crawling, they’re finding out with their bodies for themselves about these difficult concepts.

Dr. Sarah Bren (00:33:40):

Right. I mean, their world becomes this much more three dimensional, four dimensional map. It becomes this truly interactive space. And what I’m struck by is the brain is connected to and reciprocally influencing and being influenced by everything that we do with our bodies. The brain and the body is super connected. And so when we take away a part of the learning experience that utilizes high motor and sensory contribution, we’re really turning off a lot of lights in the brain house metaphor, but we’re doing that with the … I guess it’s almost like this is false. We need people to understand … I don’t think people realize that that’s happening and so they don’t see the risk in that. So in helping people … I think this work is so important because helping people understand the more sensory and physical movement that’s involved in the learning experience, and this can goes way beyond handwriting. I mean, this is about getting kids outside and getting kids moving and having a much more interactive and educational environment where they’re not just sitting at a desk all day either.

(00:35:07):

I would imagine there’s stuff that research could point to as well, like interactive, tactile, sensory rich learning environments versus like some of the environments that are, again, more digital, more sedentary, more secondhand, like watching someone do … I had a kid in my practice who was telling me that in his gym class, they were watching videos about volleyball. I was like, I can’t even just give the kid a volleyball.

Dr. Audrey van der Meer (00:35:43):

Yeah. My response, exactly.

Dr. Sarah Bren (00:35:47):

But I think we’re over indexing on screens to the detriment of brain development. And I think we think the narrative is, at least, that it’s more efficient, it’s more helpful, it’s actually helping learning, but it just doesn’t feel like it fits with what we know about brain science at all.

Dr. Audrey van der Meer (00:36:07):

You have to remember that the link between the eye and the hand and the brain is evolutionary, very ancient. So instead of helping a kid or a person to develop or learn by making the motor component less important, by, for instance, replacing intricate motor patterns or forming letters on paper by simple finger movements, touching the keyboard or the keys on the keyboard, we’re not doing the brain any favor because the brains haven’t evolved to feel and think, but they have evolved to produce behavior, proper behavior. So the more we take away the motor component and the sensory component of a given task, we’re actually not involving the brain in the task as much as it should be, and that is what is detrimental.

Dr. Sarah Bren (00:37:19):

So it sounds like some schools are understanding, at least the handwriting piece needs to come back. Are you seeing a shift in any other academic sort of norms at this point based on the research that you’re publishing?

Dr. Audrey van der Meer (00:37:37):

Well, there is some research on reading, which now also shows that reading, you learn much more from reading a text on paper than from scanning on a phone or even on a tablet, because there is something about the physical presence of the letters on the paper where you can underline and you can page forward and backwards again. And there’s something about the physical presence of those words on paper that makes it so important to be reading, not throw out all our textbooks and not throw out our paper, but have some tasks while writing and reading on real paper.

Dr. Sarah Bren (00:38:30):

Is it in part even just the simple act of turning the page because that is a fine motor and gross motor movement and there’s tactile sensory input, like something as simple as turning a page, would you say that that lights up more lights?

Dr. Audrey van der Meer (00:38:47):

Yeah. Yeah, I think so. But it’s also known that, okay, on a phone you can read short texts quite reasonably and learn from them, but as soon as it is about more difficult texts or reading a long article or even books, it’s much better. You learn much more from reading it on paper rather than on a phone, which is very … Yeah, I don’t know. I can’t think of the word. It’s very fleeting.

Dr. Sarah Bren (00:39:28):

Yeah. Yeah. I feel like there’s also, and it depends also the size of the device, I would imagine maybe, but like a phone that you have to scroll and I’m guilty of this too. I’ll scroll too fast and then I just don’t go back up. I just come like, you know what I mean? I feel like there’s also like more user error when you’re on your phone, but that’s interesting and …

Dr. Audrey van der Meer (00:39:50):

And the distraction part, of course, that is what many teachers, they’re facing this that by giving kids a phone or a tablet, you also give them a playground of a digital playground where they can wander off in and not do the work that you’re expecting of them.

Dr. Sarah Bren (00:40:15):

Right. It is. I think I see this a lot. So I’m a therapist. I work with a lot of kids and parents and I have a lot of kids in my practice that have ADHD or executive functioning challenges and I find that I’m always trying to understand what their day is like at school and they’re almost all on Chromebooks for most of the day, for most of their classes and for homework at night. And the whole use of like Google Classroom for all of their assignments, even that, which is I guess totally separate from this idea of like having it be more, like lighting up more parts of the brain. But like, I even think that there’s value in getting a paper planner and having them write their assignments because just seeing them all in a digital space, it’s hard for the brain to organize it in more spatial, like understand the spatial quality of it.

(00:41:21):

I always have kids really map out because I use a lot of time blocking as a strategy and like I don’t think that the way that we teach kids, and this is true for kids who don’t have ADHD too, like executive functioning skills, all kids need to develop these. And I think a lot of the ways that the academic world is being moved to the digital space, like with all the assignments on some sort of like digital blackboard, it doesn’t require kids to kind of decide, okay, how much time will this task take? What day is it due? I see them in this sequential order. I actually can look at them like this assignment is this big, right? Like, what size is this assignment? How much time does it take up in my planner that I need to kind of allot it? And then what order do they go in?

(00:42:18):

It’s all just like a list on a screen and doesn’t have the same weight. And I think it’s making it really hard for kids to understand time, like sequencing, planning, organization skills, like a lot of executive functioning skills are getting kind of like atrophied, like you say, use it or lose it. It’s not going to happen in the way it’s being delivered. And so we have to supplement it, I think, or forego the systems, but I don’t think that’s as realistic or accessible to that many families. Is that a thing in … Are you seeing that where you are in schools? I know in America that’s a big issue, is that all the schools are using digital, like Google Classroom or Chromebooks, and everything’s very virtual in the physical room. It’s not virtual learning, they’re in the classroom, but they all are on their computers all day.

Dr. Audrey van der Meer (00:43:27):

Yeah. We see that a lot. I mean, 10 years ago in 2015, the first completely digital schools popped up in Norway and with a lot of hype and enthusiasm and that those schools implied that six year olds on their first day of school would receive a tablet or a computer, and they would learn to read, write, and count on the tablet. And then they would take the tablet home to do their homework, as you were saying earlier, and then they maybe spend some time watching children’s TV or use the tablet to play some games or whatever, but all in all, it’s an awful lot of hours behind the screen for these developing bodies. And these, especially young children before school age, they should be running around in the real world. They should be using their bodies and all of their senses to explore the real world rather than being presented or bombarded even with experiences on a screen.

(00:44:39):

I mean, screens don’t smell, you don’t feel anything. They have some color and some motion, but it’s important for the, especially very young children, kindergarten age, that they are out there in the real world using their bodies and they simply cannot afford to spend much of their time sitting still behind a screen, being delivered experiences. They have to be out there and using their bodies and all of their senses. It’s so important.

Dr. Sarah Bren (00:45:17):

Yeah. And I feel like so at home, what we can do, I would imagine, is to offer more opportunities for tactile sensory and movement based experiential opportunities for kids, whether that’s just like really AKA let them play, like give them time and space and an environment that’s accessible for them to explore and play as much as possible. Even elementary aged kids, even adolescents, like it never stops being an important thing. Play might evolve how they do it, but physical space to play and time to play is really important. I guess I feel a little bit more stuck when it comes to school, like as a parent. Other than like trying to petition schools to change their policies on ed tech, like, what can parents do? What are you seeing in the families that participate in this research that learn this stuff? What are they doing to change that?

Dr. Audrey van der Meer (00:46:29):

Well, there is now a big parent movement going on in Norway after 10 years with these completely digital schools. And the argument has always been to give, when you give six year olds access to a keyboard or a tablet, then they will be able to express themselves in written form earlier, simply because it’s so hard for a six year old to learn to produce those letters on paper. So if you give them a keyboard, then it’s only simple movements involved and they can express themselves in written form earlier and that increases their motivation to start learning to read and write. Okay. So that’s the argument and there has been the past 10 years, a lot of emphasis on making our kids digitally competent, but now there’s this movement going on driven mainly by parents and, but also some teachers are involved saying that, “Do we really need to teach our kids digital competency or do they have this knowledge already?” I mean, they can swipe, they can double click, they can open an Excel file, they can even use Word files, but is that really digital competency doing these kind of things or does digital competency, is it about other things like coding and more difficult things to learn or should we teach our kids other things like the possibility to focus over longer periods of time to go into depth of class material and those kind of things because it’s our kids, they pick up these digital skills in no time.

(00:48:35):

It’s much easier for them. They are born into this digital world, but it’s the other things, concentrating over longer periods of time, focusing on and going into depth and coding maybe that are much more pressing skills that they need to learn.

Dr. Sarah Bren (00:48:57):

Yeah. It makes sense. I mean, I think it’s very easy to say speed is seductive, right? If we can get something faster, if we can be more efficient, if we can get them reading or writing quicker, okay, I think that’s a very seductive argument. I understand why it’s used a lot, particularly by people who have maybe a economic stake in selling you a digital product at scale to entire school systems, but realistically, the depth and the ability to stay with and to filter out unnecessary input and focus for longer periods of time to dive deeper into concepts, to be curious, to just tolerate distress of things going slower or having a problem arise and having to kind of work it through, go back, go back, go back, iterate. These are the skills that are going to be so, so valuable and they’re being the ones that are getting bypassed by speed and efficiency and I think it’s really risky.

Dr. Audrey van der Meer (00:50:12):

Yeah. And nowadays, people, even when they’re waiting for the bus, they just pull out their phone and start scrolling or reading other people’s profiles and other people’s interesting lives, about other people’s interesting lives. Whereas for the brain, it’s sometimes so important to not bombard it with sensations and stimuli, but because the creative thoughts and the deeper ideas, they come when the brain is in a state of boredom almost. Sometimes we have to stop bombarding ourselves with all this unimportant information and that the tech companies, they know exactly how to keep the attention of ourselves, but also our teenagers. And in Norway, the average age of teenagers spent online, 16 year olds spent online is seven hours a day. That’s almost a full working day and they don’t do it during daylight hours. They take their telephone to the bedroom and they start watching YouTube videos or TikTok videos and they are being pulled into these rabbit holes, which because the tech companies are really very cynical companies that know exactly how to catch the attention and keep the attention of our teenagers. So it’s going at the cost of sleep, essential sleep of our young people, the next generation, which is so sad.

Dr. Sarah Bren (00:52:00):

Right. And the cruel irony is that sleep is a huge, huge player in brain development, brain health, brain functioning. So it’s like, it’s just this vicious self-eating snake that’s like spiraling down because…

Dr. Audrey van der Meer (00:52:14):

Exactly. Yes.

Dr. Sarah Bren (00:52:16):

Yes.

Dr. Audrey van der Meer (00:52:17):

And it really worries me, I have to say. I really worry about the next generation. So I’m happy to do my bit with showing in hard signs that handwriting is good brain stimulation. It’s this evolutionary ancient link between the brain, the hand and the eye that we have to keep up to date. We have to keep practicing it. And I’m happy to say that in Norway at least, but I also think in the rest of Europe, and maybe also in the States, skills like knitting, coloring or drawing even, they are much more popular now than they were even three years ago. People are really enjoying creating something with their hands and doing it slowly. It doesn’t have to be instantly, the product, it doesn’t need to be finished instantly. You need to, you work with your hands and your brain is also involved in all these intricate, fine motor patterns and you use your senses and it’s so satisfying to see something emerging from your hands, basically.

Dr. Sarah Bren (00:53:36):

Yeah. And I feel the same sense of sort of like despondency about how things are. And I can sometimes feel very helpless and hopeless about the direction things are going with tech, especially in schools where you have some control of what happens in your home, but you don’t have as much control when you send your kid to school because you’re participating in a larger system that you don’t control, right? But I also think, and I think it’s important to both name that sense of angst, we all feel, but also in the same sentence that you said, I feel really worried, you also felt hopeful about these like really small things and it’s not … They’re small in name only. Knitting is, yes, it’s small, but like it has a big impact and it doesn’t need to … I think it’s important to say like little things peppered into our day or our child’s day can offset a lot, right?

(00:54:42):

You don’t need to say no screens ever and only tactile, sensory rich movement at all times. It’s like working out, right? We don’t say, in order to be healthy, you have to work out all day every day and give up anything that interferes with working out. It’s to be healthy, you got to work out like 30 minutes a day. It’s like, so write for 30 minutes a day or like, give your kids opportunities to do tactile activities, sensory rich activities a little bit every day. It doesn’t, I would imagine that a little goes a long way in the use it or lose it mentality. And so I think it’s also important just to put things into perspective and context of like, you don’t need to go take down big ed tech for you to be able to support your child’s brain development and you don’t need to be paranoid or anxious or hopeless either. Teach them to crochet or garden with them or…

Dr. Audrey van der Meer (00:55:47):

Cook together.

Dr. Sarah Bren (00:55:47):

Cook. Make cookies. Find a few things that your kids are interested in that are tactile, nurture those interests, provide lots of opportunity for them to expand and deepen and construct depth in those interests and protect time for that.

Dr. Audrey van der Meer (00:56:05):

Yeah. I always say that it’s not difficult to teach a two year old either to swim or to read, but you need to provide the child with either water or letters, right? And then it can be done. So you don’t have to worry, but as a grownup or as a parent or as a kindergarten assistant, you have to look at the child, judge at the stage it is at, and then provide it with experiences so that it can move on to the next stage. And that’s a very, that’s a skill that needs to be taught, but really looking at a child and judge where it is at, and then stimulate it or provide it with experiences so that it can stretch just a little further. That is a pedagogue task, but that most parents intuitively do this very well, but some think they’re very impressed by these digital skills that even babies have, but they shouldn’t be impressed because like I already said, swiping and double clicking is much easier motorically and it’s much easier for the brain than to actually color something or make a drawing.

Dr. Sarah Bren (00:57:41):

Right. I think a good filtration device for all of us as parents is to say like, how many lights is this going to turn on in my kid’s brain? How many rooms are going to get lit up by this activity? The more the better, the fewer, let’s limit it. It’s okay to give your kid a screen. It’s fine. We’re parents too in the digital age and we sometimes leverage screens to help us cook dinner or whatever. I don’t want people to feel any shame around this because I certainly use screens in my home too, but it’s like we just need to zoom out, I think, and kind of make sure we’re thinking about it intentionally and saying, “If I’m doing this now, how can I offset it with something else later?” I think that’s a hopeful way to end because I don’t want people to think we’re all screwed.

Dr. Audrey van der Meer (00:58:37):

No.

Dr. Sarah Bren (00:58:37):

There’s little stuff to do and it actually can probably make a pretty big difference.

Dr. Audrey van der Meer (00:58:41):

No, and that’s what we are also saying about our handwriting research. We’re not saying that everything should be handwritten because when you’re writing an essay or even a book, it’s actually very practical to use a computer with a spell checker and you have everything in the same device and so on. But we know that when you are taking notes during a lecture, when you take them by hand, the material sits much better and you remember much better.

Dr. Sarah Bren (00:59:13):

Interesting. So what I’m hearing is when we need to, and this is true even when you were saying like, if we give kids a way to express themselves through technology faster, that is where efficiency helps light up more lights, right? Because they’re able to hit fewer roadblocks and be thwarted less because their ability to think of thought and express that thought by hand is harder at that moment in their development. And so there’s more roadblocks and more interruptions to the flow of the thought, right? And so if it’s expressive, outgoing, sometimes that speed and efficiency of typing really helps. But if we’re thinking about incoming and … Information. If we want to be prioritizing what are we learning, internalizing, synthesizing, retaining, linking to other ideas, that’s where using handwriting lights up more lights and it actually helps. So it’s like which direction are we working in too probably matters.

Dr. Audrey van der Meer (01:00:21):

So for every task, the teacher or the parent has to, and the pupils, they have to decide together what is the best way of doing things.

Dr. Sarah Bren (01:00:35):

Yeah. And it’s not one size fits all.

Dr. Audrey van der Meer (01:00:37):

No, exactly.

Dr. Sarah Bren (01:00:38):

I love that. Well, for me, that’s my biggest takeaway from this is trying to just be a little more intentional on like, well, what’s the bigger goal and how do we really light up the most parts of the brain? And sometimes it’s going to be by removing barriers and removing roadblocks and speeding things up. And sometimes it’s by slowing things down and making it actually more challenging almost. More elements at play. And that actually is going to help with the internalizing it, slowing it, more things, more lights on there. I think I’ll take that away with me. Thank you so much for coming on. This is so interesting.

Dr. Audrey van der Meer (01:01:25):

You’re so welcome.

Dr. Sarah Bren (01:01:25):

If people want to follow your research. If they want to read more of your work, where can we direct them to? We’ll link some of the stuff in the show notes and where can we send people?

Dr. Audrey van der Meer (01:01:39):

Well, we have a lab page that I could send or you could link to that. Yeah.

Dr. Sarah Bren (01:01:47):

Yes. Perfect.

Dr. Audrey van der Meer (01:01:48):

Or they can Google my name and lots of stuff will come up, both on the baby front and on the handwriting front.

Dr. Sarah Bren (01:01:56):

Love it. Thank you so much. Keep doing this really important work, please.

Dr. Audrey van der Meer (01:02:00):

We will, I promise.

Dr. Sarah Bren (01:02:10):

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