The lost art of handwriting

Summary

Podcast Summary: "The Lost Art of Handwriting"

Today, Explained (Vox) — June 14, 2026
Host: Jonquillen Hill

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Overview

This episode explores the evolution, decline, and recent resurgence of handwriting in an increasingly digital world. Host Jonquillen Hill, joined by education experts, scholars, and listeners, investigates how handwriting’s changing role impacts learning, memory, personal connection, and even our sense of touch. From educational policy shifts to the tactile allure of pen and paper, the episode asks: What do we lose—and what do we gain—when we swap handwriting for screens?

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Handwriting’s Place in Our Lives

• Listener Stories (01:17–02:39)

  • Listeners describe personal attachments to handwriting, its sentimental value, and the friction between analog and digital habits.
  • "I love writing by notes. I keep a shopping list that my partner likes to make fun of and consistently tries to make digital." — Listener (02:24)

• Host’s Family Anecdote

  • Jonquillen Hill shares how handwritten letters and mixtapes between her parents are treasured artifacts that are less common in modern life. (01:42–02:16)
  • Reflects on the tactile, visual, and emotional experience of physical writing.

2. How (and When) Schools Teach Handwriting

• Educational Standards Shift (03:23–05:11)

  • Sean Datchik, special education professor, explains national standards: "The vast majority of states... focus in on teaching handwriting during kindergarten, and it extends a little past the first grade. ...on average, teachers report spending as little as 10 minutes a week on teaching handwriting explicitly in kindergarten classrooms." (03:23)
  • Around 2010, with the rise of Common Core, there was a push to move toward keyboarding after first or second grade, leading to cursive’s removal from most curricula. (04:06–04:59)
    • "In those standards, it goes from print to keyboarding, and it completely dropped out cursive handwriting.” — Sean Datchik (05:01)

• Resurgence of Cursive (05:43–06:13)

  • 26 states have reinstated cursive requirements, citing reading development links, the decline in reading scores post-COVID, and even patriotic reasons like the ability to read founding documents.

3. Handwriting, Reading, and Memory

• Cognitive Benefits (07:07–08:47)

  • Handwriting, both print and cursive, is closely tied to reading development—especially for young children.
    • "When students learn how to handwrite, they're basically committing to memory not only the shape of what a letter looks like, but also its name." — Sean Datchik (07:20)
  • For older students, handwriting may support deeper synthesis and less distraction than screens.

• Handwriting vs. Screens

  • The debate isn’t about “which is better,” but about how much time kids spend with each mode of communication. (08:47–09:10)
  • AI and digital tools raise new authorship questions and make handwritten “blue book” exams popular again to curb cheating. (09:23–09:53)

4. Emotional and Social Value of Handwriting

• Personal Significance (10:09–11:34)
  • Handwriting is "deeply personal" and resonates emotionally. It’s a way to slow down, think carefully, and connect memory with meaning.
    • "When you engage in writing with a pen or pencil, you tend to synthesize or think more deeply about that information than when you're just typing." — Sean Datchik (11:02)

5. Broader Impacts: Technology, Memory, and Embodied Cognition

• Christine Rosen on Handwriting & Memory (14:38–15:44)

  • Learning to write by hand fuels short-term and long-term memory, text analysis, and embodied cognition.
    • “If you haven't learned how to write well by hand, you approach words differently, you understand and remember them differently.” — Christine Rosen (14:38)
  • Handwriting also forces us to slow down, affecting how we process and express thoughts.

• Listener Voices: Handwriting as Deliberate Practice (15:53–16:12)

  • Listeners maintain pen pals, write love letters, and cherish the ritual of handwriting.

• The Value of Friction and Analog Tactile Experience (17:23–19:03)

  • Younger generations revive analog hobbies (notebooks, records, crafts) as a reaction to digital fatigue.
    • “We need friction to learn. We need frustration to understand our own approach to things. And in some small way, handwriting reintroduces that for some people. And I think that's all for the good.” — Christine Rosen (18:45)

• Handwriting Socialization and Self-Expression (19:03–20:20)

  • Early standardization in handwriting (parents, teachers insisting on neatness) lays the groundwork for later personal expression. Basic skills are necessary for expressive writing.

6. Evolving Attitudes: Balancing Analog and Digital

• Adapting Without Losing the Human Touch (20:49–21:58)

  • Rosen emphasizes a conscious effort to preserve analog experiences for civility and connection.
    • “We have to actively carve out those analog moments. We have to make the effort and we have to relearn lessons about what we should value in daily life.” — Christine Rosen (20:50)

• Advice for Digital-Native Listeners (22:06)

  • “You’re missing the process of embodied cognition, your mind and your body working together.” — Christine Rosen (22:06)
  • Encourages listeners to regularly write by hand to reconnect mind and body.

7. Touch, Screens, and Human Development

• Screens vs. Touch: What We Lose (25:28–28:07)

  • Sarah Hershander discusses falling tactile engagement in daily life and its impacts, especially for children whose fine motor skills and physical learning may be affected by early screen use.
    • “Education Week... found that the majority of preschool teachers say that their kids can't hold crayons like they used to. They can't zip up their jackets. And that makes a lot of sense, right, because touch is such a huge part of how kids... learn about their world.” — Sarah Hershander (27:00)

• For Adults, Emotional & Social Effects Dominate (28:07–28:58)

  • Adults' fine motor skills are resilient, but digital immersion mainly impacts emotional and social well-being.

• Pendulum Swing: Digital Backlash and Return to Analog (29:06–31:55)

  • Evidence of analog resurgence in response to "touchscreen mania" (vinyl, physical hobbies, buttons in cars).
    • “We are tactile learners.” — Sarah Hershander (29:43)
  • Schools are again restricting screen time and encouraging tactile learning.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “A handwritten note is super important and yet I feel like that's something being lost.” — Listener (01:17)
• “There is such a close connection between reading and writing. When students learn how to handwrite, they are basically committing to memory not only the shape of what a letter looks like, but also its name.” — Sean Datchik (07:20)
• “Handwriting is so deeply personal to all of us. And I think that's one of the reasons why a handwritten note resonates so emotionally with us as humans.” — Sean Datchik (10:09)
• “Learning to write by hand... doesn't just teach you how to put words on paper. It implicates all kinds of things about short term and long term memory. It affects our ability to analyze text.” — Christine Rosen (14:38)
• “We need friction to learn. We need frustration to understand our own approach to things. And in some small way, handwriting reintroduces that for some people.” — Christine Rosen (18:45)
• “We have to actively carve out those analog moments. We have to make the effort and we have to relearn lessons about what we should value in daily life.” — Christine Rosen (20:50)
• “We are tactile learners.” — Sarah Hershander (29:43)

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Timestamps for Major Segments

• 01:17–02:39 – Listener reflections; handwriting’s personal significance
• 03:23–06:13 – How schools teach handwriting; Common Core and the cursive comeback
• 07:07–11:34 – Educational/cognitive value of handwriting; handwriting as personal and emotional
• 14:38–19:03 – Christine Rosen on memory, learning, and the value of slowing down
• 25:28–28:07 – Sarah Hershander on reduced tactile experiences for kids
• 29:06–31:55 – Digital backlash and the analog resurgence

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Conclusion: What Are We Losing?

The episode closes with a reflection on what’s lost when pen and paper give way to screens: the embodied experience of cognition, the emotional resonance of a handwritten note, and tangible connections to our own thoughts and memories. Experts encourage listeners to “touch grass” and paper again—if only to rediscover the power, frustration, and deep humanness found in handwriting.

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This summary covers the key topics, speaker insights, and thematic through-lines, providing a useful and engaging overview for anyone who missed the episode.

Transcript

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[Listener or Guest]

a handwritten note is super important and yet I feel like that's something being lost.

It's useless. Cursive is outdated. My wife not so much in agreement on that. I take a lot of pride in my handwriting. Actually. I joke that I was a calligrapher in a past life.

[Jonquillen Hill (Host)]

My parents started dating back in the 80s and for a while they were long distance. This was way before the smartphone so they sent each other a ton of mail. They wrote letters back and forth and my dad would make my mom mixtapes to send her. I love it because it's a peek into my parents lives before me. I can feel the paper, I can see my mom's beautiful penmanship. But it also makes me realize we really don't physically write all that much anymore. But some of you are trying to bring it back.

[Listener or Guest]

Handwriting is a big part of my life. I've been bullet journaling since 8th grade

[Jonquillen Hill (Host)]

and now I just graduated college.

[Listener or Guest]

I I love writing by notes. I keep a shopping list that my partner likes to make fun of and consistently tries to make digital. My husband loves to joke that I write enough letters to keep the post office in business.

[Jonquillen Hill (Host)]

I'm Jonquillen Hill and this week on Explain It To Me from Vox, the Handwritten Word how our relationship with writing has changed and how that's changed us. First up, learning how to write. I called up Sean Datchik.

[Sean Datchik (Education Expert)]

I'm A professor of special education at the University of Iowa. I'm also a former K12 teacher, administrator, and former director of the Iowa Reading Research Center.

[Jonquillen Hill (Host)]

Okay, Sean, it may be a surprise to no one, but it has been a while since I was in elementary school, and things have changed a lot since then. When do students start to learn handwriting in schools and how is it being taught now?

[Sean Datchik (Education Expert)]

The vast majority of states, approximately 48, have adopted a national set of academic standards that specifically focus in on teaching handwriting during kindergarten, and it extends a little bit past the first grade. Now, importantly, the standards only focus on print handwriting. So text that's unconnected. There's a huge range of time spent on handwriting, but on average, teachers report spent spending as little as 10 minutes a week on teaching handwriting explicitly in kindergarten classrooms.

[Jonquillen Hill (Host)]

10 minutes does not seem like a lot of time. Looking back, it felt like so much more. When did handwriting become less of a priority?

[Sean Datchik (Education Expert)]

Yeah. So changes really started to happen around 2010, and that was when the passage of the national academic standards, that's typically called the Common Core Academic Standards, or were adopted across the United States.

[Sponsor Announcer]

It is one of the most confusing,

[Sean Datchik (Education Expert)]

controversial issues in the entire nation. And it's percolating at the grassroots level, making its way onto the national stage. It's the Common Core.

[Jonquillen Hill (Host)]

The Common Core raises the bar for students performance. We have to challenge our students in ways that have them interact more actively in learning.

[Sean Datchik (Education Expert)]

And in those standards, there was a push for students to quickly move past handwriting and and to start to adopt keyboarding or typing. So the standards explicitly talk about that students should make this transition to keyboarding right after the first and second grade.

[Jonquillen Hill (Host)]

Wow, that's so early, right?

[Sean Datchik (Education Expert)]

Yeah. And then in those standards, it goes from print to keyboarding, and it completely dropped out. Cursive handwriting.

[Jonquillen Hill (Host)]

Wow. You know, okay. I think of my own education, it was printed cursive. And then eventually you get to your Mavis Beacon typing lessons.

[Sponsor Announcer or Narrator]

Welcome to typing class. I'm your teacher, Mavis Beacon. Click the computer in the center of your screen to start your lesson.

[Jonquillen Hill (Host)]

And I remember. I remember being so excited for third grade in particular, because where I went to school, that was when they started teaching cursive. And it was like, oh, my gosh, cursive. But is it. Is it just not being taught at all anymore in K through 12 schools?

[Sean Datchik (Education Expert)]

So over the past several years, there's been a swing back towards cursive. So the latest count is approximately 26 states across the United States have passed some sort of legislation reinserting cursive into their statewide curriculum. Florida students will soon be learning cursive again.

[Sarah Hershander (Vox Fellow)]

Learning cursive handwriting will now be mandatory in California schools.

[Jonquillen Hill (Host)]

Pennsylvania students haven't been required to learn cursive since around 2010.

[Sponsor Announcer]

But today, the writing is on the wall, and it is the law.

[Sean Datchik (Education Expert)]

So there some compelling evidence that handwriting, whether it's print or cursive, is closely related to reading development. So following the COVID 19 pandemic, across the nation, we saw dips in reading scores. So there is some thought by educational stakeholders and legislatures that perhaps if we focus in on handwriting, or in this case, cursive, maybe that will improve student reading scores. And I also hear consistently from parents, guardians, teachers. They're very interested in minimizing screen time. And then there's also there's a camp of people out there who may have a strong patriotic inclination, and they say that, well, the Declaration of Independence is written in cursive, so we should teach kids cursive because it looks so different than print. So that way they can study the founding documents.

[Jonquillen Hill (Host)]

You've worked in education for a very long time, and I'm curious what you make of the changing trends in handwriting. Is pen and paper actually better compared to screens?

[Sean Datchik (Education Expert)]

That's a complicated question. But for younger kids who are learning how to read, there does seem to be some benefit on specifically using pencil and paper. There is such a close connection between reading and writing. When students learn how to handwrite, they are basically committing to memory not only the shape of what a letter looks like, but also its name. So let's say you're teaching a student this is a letter M, and then they learn and commit to memory. Oh, these are the different strokes or loops of M. And that also makes the M sound. So they're committing that to memory, and so that allows them to draw on that for when they're reading. Now, for older high school students, there also seems to be some logic in how distracting screens can be. So, I mean, I've taught high school before. I also currently teach undergraduate students. And there's a lot of different things that pop up on screens, whether it's online shopping or checking messages or checking emails, that can definitely distract from learning important content. Now, let me kind of flip over the other side. Screens are definitely here to stay. And I think pencils and paper are also here to stay. Artificial intelligence is here to stay. That also adds in a whole other layer of complexity to this.

[Jonquillen Hill (Host)]

Yeah.

[Sean Datchik (Education Expert)]

So for instructors and parents and guardians, perhaps the better question to ask is not so much, which is Better. But it's how much time do my kids need with each one of these ways to communicate, whether it's with a paper and pencil or whether it's with a. With a computer or tablet or smartphone?

[Jonquillen Hill (Host)]

You know, we talked a little bit about this evolution of technology. You have pen and paper, you have computers, you have smartphones. Now we have AI. Is AI another reason to keep hand writing alive?

[Sean Datchik (Education Expert)]

You know, unfortunately, I think so. So computer based writing, and with the rise of artificial intelligence, I think it brings up difficult to determine questions on authorship. I definitely see kind of a shift back almost to the blue books.

[Sarah Hershander (Vox Fellow)]

After being a fixture on campuses for

[Sponsor Announcer or Narrator]

generations, the blue book is making a

[Sarah Hershander (Vox Fellow)]

comeback to combat cheating in the AI era. Get this. They're making students pull out their pens and pencils once again and just write on paper by hand.

[Sean Datchik (Education Expert)]

I know that the Iowa bookstore here has started stocking blue books on their shelves for the first time since I've been here, and I've been here over a decade. So it is surprising.

[Jonquillen Hill (Host)]

What do you think students lose if they stop writing by hand regularly?

[Sean Datchik (Education Expert)]

I do think that one of the strongest reasons that I can think of to engage in handwriting is actually probably what we consider a moral reason or lesson, is that handwriting is so deeply personal to all of us. And I think that's one of the reasons why a handwritten note resonates so emotionally with us as humans. You know, so, like for instance, when my mom had her recent birthday, I sent her a handwritten card on Mother's Day. My sons and I wrote little notes and my. My four year old drew a picture for my wife. And then I've been by mid-40s, so probably one of the rites of passage and being kind of a middle aged person now is we were. My wife and I went through the process of getting a living will put together.

[Jonquillen Hill (Host)]

Oh, yeah, yeah. Yep, yep, yep. Gotta have all your ducks in a row.

[Sean Datchik (Education Expert)]

And then last night I was making handwritten notes on the. On the living will because I knew that was something that I really needed to think through carefully and deliberately and at least for me. And what we kind of see with even lots of college age students is that when you engage in writing with a pen or pencil, you tend to synthesize or think more deeply about that information than when you're just typing.

[Jonquillen Hill (Host)]

So we take in information better when we write it down. What else does writing do for us? That's next. Support for the show comes from Quince. In the summer, everything changes. Longer days, summer Fridays and a serious wardrobe change. You still want pieces that look good but are also made from lighter fabrics that feel effortless. That's where Quince comes in. They focus on high quality essentials but without the luxury markup. Quint's has beautiful everyday pieces like 100% European linen pants, dresses and tops with styles starting at $32. Their denim is soft and easy to wear and their organic cotton sweaters are perfect for layering on cool summer nights. Our colleague Andrew Melnyzyk has gotten some quints.

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[Jonquillen Hill (Host)]

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[Jonquillen Hill (Host)]

I'm jq back with more Explain it to me. Christine Rosen is a senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute where she researches technology and human behavior. And one human behavior that she loves to dig into is writing some one

[Christine Rosen (Senior Fellow at AEI)]

of those things that I think we all take for granted. That's a skill we all have. And I had young children at the time and noticed that they weren't being taught handwriting in school the way I was. So I thought, well, am I an old timer who just sort of hearkening back nostalgically to the good old days, or is there something useful in handwriting? One of the most surprising things I discovered is that learning to write by hand, whether that's print printing, block letters or later cursive handwriting, doesn't just teach you how to put words on paper. It implicates all kinds of things about short term and long term memory. It affects our ability to analyze text. If you haven't learned how to write well by hand, you approach words differently, you understand and remember them differently. So there's all kinds of broader implications for how we remember the things we read that are based in some of that embodied cognition. So that was really fascinating to me. The other thing I found is that it just makes us slow down. If you're thinking and writing, your body doesn't allow you to write as quickly as you can type on a keyboard. So that also changes the process of how we put words to paper.

[Jonquillen Hill (Host)]

I will say we heard from a lot of listeners on this topic and we heard from a lot of listeners who still prefer to write things out.

[Listener or Guest]

I do you typically write a card, a letter, a few postcards? I write those at least two or three times a week. My friends and I, after we graduated from college, got into the habit of mailing each other monthly letters.

My wife likes love letters and so I write her one once a week.

[Jonquillen Hill (Host)]

But it is true typing is faster and more convenient. Why is slowing down a good thing? Why do we need to slow down?

[Christine Rosen (Senior Fellow at AEI)]

Well, I think we all sort of complain sometimes about how the world seems to just be speeding up year after year. And our technologies encourage that sense of with infinite scroll and all the things that we can do with them to make time not be located in place and not be slower. But what it robs us of is downtime, time where we can daydream, let our minds wander. And sitting and thinking and writing your thoughts forces you to really shape those thoughts in a way that you do differently on the screen. It's actually a necessary and healthy practice in daily life that more and more of us should, should try to integrate into our lives.

[Jonquillen Hill (Host)]

In some states, teaching cursive is now being required in public schools again. And there's been a boom in the notebook and pen market.

[Sarah Hershander (Vox Fellow)]

Several years ago, I discovered fountain pens and fountain pen ink, and it's just

[Jonquillen Hill (Host)]

a Beautiful tactile visual experience.

[Listener or Guest]

I love pens, I love stationery. I get compliments on my handwriting all the time.

I have found truly nothing is better than pen to paper.

[Jonquillen Hill (Host)]

We're also seeing a resurgence of physical media coming from younger generations like Gen Z. You know, vinyl, cassettes, CDs. Are people just being sentimental about some of this archaic technology or is there something real here?

[Christine Rosen (Senior Fellow at AEI)]

I think the first instinct we all have is to say, oh, nostalgia trip, isn't that cute? It's just a small group of people who, you know, the guy who always wants to only listen things on vinyl. But I think this is somewhat different. I think the search for this, particularly among younger generations, speaks to a desire for tangible things, things they can hold in their hand. Because if you think about their memories, for example, most of them are in a digital cloud. It might, those might disappear. They're not organized in the way that we used to organize our old fashioned memories of, whether they put in a scrapbook or a photo album, something you could pick up and touch. So I think that it speaks to a deeper impulse for those tangible objects. I think it's also a desire to reintroduce into their lives something that technology took away. And that's some friction because in some sense technology has made certain things so easy that we miss that pushback, that response we get from the world when we rub up against something the wrong way and have to figure it out ourselves. So I see it all as a pretty hopeful expression of not wanting to totally, totally deskill ourselves as human beings. And we need friction to learn. We need frustration to understand our own approach to things. And in some small way, handwriting reintroduces that for some people. And I think that's all for the good.

[Jonquillen Hill (Host)]

Is our handwriting socialized? I don't know. I remember my parents being like, you need to write neater. We're practicing making me write sentences saying like, you need to have neat handwriting. But is it just something sort of like, sorry, that's the way I write.

[Christine Rosen (Senior Fellow at AEI)]

So it's interesting. I think when we're all younger, we're sort of. It feels very conformist and oppressive to be told everyone's letters should look the same, but that is actually the building block for later being able to be expressive with your writing. Just like anyone who's an accomplished painter will tell you, they have to first learn to do the basic forms and the shadowing. And so we should think about that with our handwriting and it's why we should practice. And I think it's great that many Schools are bringing back teachers teaching handwriting, but I think it is. Your parents were exactly right because they understood that your handwriting is a reflection of who you are in the world and you'll be judged by it. And so that's one of the things where a lot of kids these days when they. The most interesting anecdote I have come across in my research were bakeries, like at supermarkets having problems hiring people to be bakers because none of the people they hired knew how to write a happy birthday message in cursive to make it look nice on a cake.

[Sponsor Announcer]

Wow.

[Christine Rosen (Senior Fellow at AEI)]

So they had to teach them cursive so they could decorate the cake. So. So, yeah, it's great. I think we need the basics though, in order to then later have a more expressive form of handwriting.

[Jonquillen Hill (Host)]

Change is normal. Socrates said writing things down would make people lazy and make us stop relying on our memories. People thought the Sony Walkman was gonna make us antisocial and isolated. Do we romanticize the past? Do we need to accept that people have moved on? Or. Yeah, I wonder how you think balancing that, like moving forward with the times, but also kind of cherishing these old ways.

[Christine Rosen (Senior Fellow at AEI)]

This is a great question.

[Sarah Hershander (Vox Fellow)]

And it's.

[Christine Rosen (Senior Fellow at AEI)]

Each age has to ask it again for itself. So I think, look, I don't want to go back to. You can pry my washing machine out of my cold dead hands. Like that thing's not. Technology is here to stay. And I, you know, look, I use digital streaming music. We use our computers every day for work. I wouldn't want to go back. But I think the challenge now is that we have to actively carve out those analog moments. We have to make the effort and we have to relearn lessons about what we should value in daily life. So I think we should value more face to face interaction, more civility in public life, like acknowledging the stranger when they walk into the elevator. And these seem like small niceties, but they really matter in terms of our day to day lives and the ability to be civil to each other. So I think we have to choose it now. It is an option never to do it that way. And that is brand new. So in some ways I think we do adapt and we have adapted, but we can overcorrect towards technology and start to become a little too machine, like in our own way of behaving and thinking. And I think sometimes we need to step back and say, what are the human things that we've lost in doing that?

[Jonquillen Hill (Host)]

You know, if someone's listening to this interview and is thinking, I haven't written anything by hand in weeks. What would you tell them they're missing?

[Christine Rosen (Senior Fellow at AEI)]

They're missing the experience, first of frustration. If you haven't been writing in a while, you'll be shocked that you might not be able to read your own handwriting. A lot of people have that experience. But you're missing the process of embodied cognition, your mind and your body working together. So I encourage people to just a couple times a day, try to do something by hand, write by hand, use your body and your mind together in this way, because those experiences are things we have to seek out now.

[Jonquillen Hill (Host)]

Handwriting is just one of the many experiences we can seek out for that connection. Coming up, what we lose when we swap pens and pencils for phones and tablets.

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[Jonquillen Hill (Host)]

Support for the show comes from Whatnot. Consistency pays off. It's what turns a business side hustle into something that lasts. And you can make it happen with Whatnot. Whatnot is the largest dedicated live shopping center platform. Whether it's beauty, collectibles, electronics, luxury, fashion, even cookies, sellers are building real, thriving businesses. Anyone can sell, whether your business is big, small, or yet to exist. According to their data across Whatnot, the number of sellers making over $1 million a year has doubled. And people selling on whatnot sell 10 times more than on other major marketplaces. That's because you're not just listing products, you're building real connections with buyers. Claire White is our colleague here at Vox, and she's tried Whatnot as their buyer.

[Christine Rosen (Senior Fellow at AEI)]

Whatnot has been such a fun experience. They've got great shows, great auctions, and just such a wide variety of pieces and different categories to shop from, search,

[Jonquillen Hill (Host)]

whatnot, W h a t n o t in the app store. Download and you can start to selling right away. Sarah Hershander is a fellow for Vox's Future Perfect team. She's been looking into how all the time we spend swiping and tapping on screens is impacting our sense of touch.

[Sarah Hershander (Vox Fellow)]

I mean, we talk a lot about screen fatigue, but I think we talk a lot less about the fact that we simply use our hands a lot less than we used to. At least most people. I don't want to overgeneralize here. Some people still have very physical jobs. I personally always find myself kind of like using my computer for almost everything I navigate with my phone. I use my phone's calculator instead of like, actually like touching buttons. I talk to my friends all the time, like via text. So I've just been talking to a lot of folks about, like, what does that mean for us? Like, how does that change how we feel about the world around us when we're not touching it as much? And what I've been finding so far, it's, is that it does kind of lead to this loss.

[Jonquillen Hill (Host)]

I want to get into the effects that removing these kind of tactile experiences have had on us. And I want to start with children who are growing up in a world dominated by screens. What's it looking like for them?

[Sarah Hershander (Vox Fellow)]

Yeah, I mean, it seems really significant. I think anybody who has a child in their life has seen sort of a toddler navigate an iPad with such deaf that it's like, almost remarkable. And that's great. There's nothing wrong with that. But it does seem like a lot of kids, at least kids who are growing up in households that use screens a lot are sort of developing their motor skills in that way versus, you know, the way that kids used to develop their motor skills, which is like playing with blocks or like drawing and coloring. And Education Week did a survey of preschool teachers to kind of figure out if this was just something everyone had an inkling about or if it was something that was really, really happening. And they found that the majority of preschool teachers say that their kids can't hold crayons like they used to. They can't zip up their jackets. And that makes a lot of sense. Right, because touch is such a huge part of how kids and to some extent adults learn about their world. The thing with kids is that they're still sort of developing those physical connections. Doesn't mean that they're never going to be able to hold A crayon. But they might never have as nice handwriting as. As their parents did. And then I think for older kids, too, there does seem to be sort of a linkage, too, between kind of the dawn of the smartphone and falling test scores. It's hard to say whether that's specifically about touch versus attention, but I do think because there's been so much evidence that, you know, incorporating touch in learning is such a great way to help kids retain skills, it does seem possible that the fact that so much of what we do is now online is affecting how kids. How kids learn.

[Jonquillen Hill (Host)]

What about adults who didn't grow up with screens? How's this transition from going analog to going digital going for us?

[Sarah Hershander (Vox Fellow)]

Yeah, I think something that's come up a lot, and I didn't know when I first started reporting this, I was like, are we going to find that our own fingertips are less sensitive than they used to? And what keeps on coming up is that that's not true. Okay. For the most part, I know, thank goodness. But for the most part, adult motor skills and those sort of pathways are already baked in, and they're actually very resilient. That's something that's been emphasized to me a lot. There is some association between, like, smartphone addiction and, like, having worse balance. So there might be some sort of connection there, but it seems to be less important than sort of the emotional and social effects of spending so much time on screen.

[Jonquillen Hill (Host)]

Have we reached peak screen, or are we gonna be even more immersed in the digital world as time goes on?

[Sarah Hershander (Vox Fellow)]

I think it's too soon to tell. However, it does seem like the pendulum might be swinging, that people are starting to catch on, that they're not feeling as good as they might have in the past, and that screens might be playing a role in that. So I do think that there's sort of momentum moving in the opposite direction in a few different ways. One is, like, very everyday sort of items like we were talking about, like the calculator not being flat. You've seen car companies actually go back to putting buttons in their cars because people miss them. And they're also safer because we are tactile learners.

[Jonquillen Hill (Host)]

Some car lovers appear to be reversing

[Sponsor Announcer or Narrator]

course on touchscreen technology.

[Andrew Melnyzyk (Colleague)]

Why would I want to control my mirrors, my seats? You know, all this stuff on a

[Sponsor Announcer or Narrator]

stage screen, Everything from how you order to how you read to household appliances, and even cars have been touched by the trend.

[Sarah Hershander (Vox Fellow)]

And then we're also seeing a lot of young people who are kind of returning to analog hobbies, like collecting vinyl records or like joining a crochet club and using their hands in different ways. And I do think part of that is sort of a reaction to this loss of. And then we're also seeing schools kind of doing that, too, and instituting policies against screen time. I think that's more for those test scores, but that's also going to allow kids presumably to kind of interact with their world in a more tactile way.

[Jonquillen Hill (Host)]

Again, we heard from listeners who are actively trying to write by hand more. Do you think people are recognizing what's been lost and are reclaiming those tactile experiences? Like, what's, what's going on there?

[Sarah Hershander (Vox Fellow)]

I think so. I think that's exactly what that is. And I think it's part of that sort of broader movement towards you using your hands. Again, I think people genuinely feel like they don't touch grass anymore. And all of this is sort of trying to touch grass, touch, touch pencils and pens again, like they, like they haven't in a while. And I think there's also just more and more research coming out that, for example, writing by hand helps you learn things in a different way, helps keep you engaged in a different way than just sort of staring at your screen. Well, I mean, maybe one day we'll see screens that. And this is something that's come up in some of my conversations. They're trying to make screens a little bit more tactile, potentially in the future. So maybe less smooth. Exactly. More feel like you used to go to a mall and like buy a shirt and you can like feel the texture of the shirt. And like, of course, brands want to recreate that somehow. We're at this point where one person I spoke to described it as kind of like touchscreen mania. And maybe little by little we're sort of moving away from that.

[Jonquillen Hill (Host)]

That's it for this week. We want your help with an upcoming episode about my least favorite part of summer mosquitoes. Do they love you? Are you one of the lucky ones that they avoid? Either way, we want to know how you keep them away and how you deal with those annoying bites. Give us a call at 1-800-618-8545 or shoot an email to askvoxox.com becoming a Vox member will not keep mosquitoes from biting you, but it will let you listen to this and other Vox podcasts ad free. Head over to Vox.com members to learn more. This episode was produced by Dustin DeSoto. It was edited by Avishai Artsy Fact Checked by Melissa Hirsch and engineered by David Tadashore. Our executive producer is Miranda Kennedy and I'm your host, Jonquin Hill. Thank you so much for listening. I'll talk to you soon.

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