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Left-Handed or Right-Handed?

From Mike in Hamilton, NJ:

I have a son who will be 3 in May. He seems to enjoy sports and is pretty athletic for his age. When he throws a ball, he varies between throwing righty and lefty. I recently bought him a baseball glove for his left hand. I noticed at first he would sometimes put it on his right hand and throw lefty. Then he would sometimes catch with the glove on left hand, take the glove off, take the ball out and throw it lefty. Finally he would leave on his left hand hand and throw it righty.

Is there an age when you can tell if a child is right-handed or left-handed? By the way, he writes right-handed and eats right-handed.

Answer: I certainly am not an expert in this regard, by any means, but I can tell you what my own life's experience is. I have three grown sons and my recollection of their very early years is that the three of them started out by throwing things (toys, food, balls, etc.) with either hand but ultimately, before they were about four or five years old, they became right-handed in all respects. I suspect that this is true of most children. To learn more, I did a bit of research on the question for you and found a number of internet sites that deal with "handedness." One of the most interesting of these sites is Lorin's Lefthanded Site at http://duke.usask.ca/~elias/left/ and I posed your question to Lorin Elias. Lorin's response follows:

There is SOME research on this question, but surprisingly little. Although there is considerable individual variation (as with anything developmental), handedness becomes more firmly established between ages 3 and 5 (as you suspected). However, handedness continues to "stabilize" until the early teens. The same effect can be seen in other lateralized functions, such as language perception. Although both young children and adults demonstrate left hemisphere superiority for language perception, this left hemisphere advantage gets stronger with age through the early teens.

I hope this helps to answer your question Mike. If you have an opportunity you should visit Lorin's Lefthanded Site. It is very, very interesting and informative on the subject.