When Do Kids Learn Left and Right? How to Teach It

In 1994 the researcher Robert Rigal published a study of 406 children that looked at when they start using the words “right” and “left” correctly. Children named right and left correctly on their own bodies from about age 7. Next came a person standing with their back to the child, and naming right and left on a person facing them came at about 8 to 9. Even at 11, about half the children still could not apply right and left correctly to other people.

On the other hand, telling whether two things face the same way or different ways was mastered much earlier than naming right and left.

So it is normal for young children to mix up left and right. In this post I go through the order in which it develops and some ways to teach it at home.

Telling apart and naming are different things

An important point in Rigal’s study is that telling left from right and attaching the words “right” and “left” develop separately.

Children notice early that gloves and shoes come in left and right shapes. But ask “Which one is your right shoe?” and they hesitate. They can see the difference. What is still missing is the link between that difference and the name “right.”

So when a child mixes up left and right, it can be seen not as failing to see, but as being partway through linking the word to the idea.

Mirror writing

Writing letters backwards, like b for d, is also a left-right mistake. As I wrote in Why Kids Write Letters Backwards, one idea is that the human brain tends to treat mirror images as the same thing, and that learning to read and write means learning to switch this off for letters only.

Learning the words right and left and writing fewer mirror letters often happen around the same time, but fixing one does not necessarily fix the other. Both can be seen as stages on the way to giving the left-right difference a name and a meaning.

Facing each other flips it

A common thing adults do when teaching left and right is to stand facing the child and say “This is my right hand.” From the child’s side, the adult’s raised right hand is on the child’s left. In Rigal’s study, too, the left and right of a person facing you was the last thing children learned.

When teaching, it helps not to face each other. Stand beside or behind the child and raise the same hand in the same direction. Standing together in front of a mirror works well too.

Ways to teach it at home

Put a marker on the body

Put a marker on the right wrist, such as a hair tie or a sticker. If you agree that “the side with the marker is right,” the child can check by themselves when unsure.

Some people teach “your right hand is the one you eat with,” but that doesn’t work for left-handed children. A marker that doesn’t depend on the dominant hand works for every child.

Once a child knows the letter L, there is also the trick of holding both hands up in front, palms facing away, index fingers up and thumbs out to the side: the left hand’s thumb and index finger make an L.

Use the words every day

The more often a child uses right and left, the more firmly the words stick.

• Putting on shoes: “Right shoe first.”
• Washing hands: “Let’s wash the right hand first.”
• Out walking: “We turn right at the next corner.”

Rather than setting aside time to teach, repeating the same words in daily life puts less of a load on the child.

Play with the body

Call out “Raise your right hand” or “Stand on your left foot” and have the child move. When they are used to it, try something like “Touch your left ear with your right hand,” which crosses the middle of the body and is a bit harder. It is best to play at a pace where mistakes just make you both laugh and you keep going.

No need to hurry

As the study shows, naming left and right on one’s own body starts at about 7, so it is not unusual to still hesitate after starting school. Even some adults can’t come up with right and left in a hurry.

It does not need to be perfect before school. With a marker, everyday words and play, children learn it at their own pace.

What BrainDojo Kids offers

BrainDojo Kids is a learning app for iPhone and iPad for children aged 3 to 6.

Its training games include ones that use position words. Front · Back, for 4-year-olds, asks the child to listen to an instruction like “the third from the front” and tap the right animal in a row. Up·Down · Left·Right, for 5-year-olds, combines left and right with up and down, as in “third from the right, second from the top.” Left and right on the screen are left and right as the child sees them, so they match the child’s own body. Both games are available when the app is set to English or Japanese.

The three daily games in Today’s Training and the four Recommended games are free each day, and every other game can be tried once. In the parent settings there is a daily time limit, on by default at 10 minutes. There are no ads and no account to create. The app is free to start, and a Premium subscription (monthly or yearly) opens all courses and games.

Getting Started with BrainDojo Kids covers the first session.