Dyspraxia symptoms

This page provides a general list of common symptoms of dyspraxia (developmental coordination disorder or DCD).

Not everyone with dyspraxia will experience all of these difficulties; similarly, you can experience some of these difficulties without being dyspraxic. It’s about the big picture – and whether difficulties emerged at a young age.

Gross motor skills

The big movements. Dyspraxics can experience difficulties with:

  • General balance

  • Cycling

  • Jumping

  • Dancing

  • Aerobics

  • Throwing a ball (especially overarm)

  • Catching a ball

  • Kicking a ball

  • Hitting a ball

  • Playground apparatus such as monkey bars

Difficulties with gross motor skills can also manifest in a tendency to spill drinks, drop objects, and trip more than is normal.

Fine motor skills

The ‘fiddly’ movements. Symptoms include difficulties with:

  • Buttons

  • Shoelaces

  • Zips

  • Taking longer than others to dress

  • Taking longer than others to undress

  • Cutlery (including chopsticks!)

  • Ties

  • Lego

  • General construction toys

  • Tools: hammers and nails, screwdrivers, saws

  • DIY

  • Locks and keys

  • Grooming tasks: cutting nails, styling hair, plucking hairs

  • Handwriting (either messy and/or unusually slow)

  • Musical instruments

Visual-spatial processing

Dyspraxics find visual-spatial processing more challenging. This can lead to:

  • Avoidance of cycling on roads

  • Avoidance of driving cars

  • Finding the visual-spatial aspects of mathematics trickier than, say, algebra or statistics

  • Difficulties judging distance and speed

  • Difficulties with judging other players’ movements in team sports

  • Difficulties processing space and making use of it

  • Bumping into things

DCD can also lead to difficulties with:

  • Maps

  • Video games

  • Directions

  • Physical games such as Jenga

No dominant hand or foot (or foot dominance)

  • May use right side for some tasks and left side for others.

  • Can manifest in sports (e.g. playing tennis with the left hand and pool with the right)

Verbal

  • Can struggle to ‘find’ words

  • Can struggle more with verbal than written words

  • Can struggle more later in the day due to fatigue

Organisation and sequencing

Dyspraxics often struggle with:

  • Sequencing

  • Physically organising possessions

  • Laying out a room

  • Planning holidays

  • Planning a week’s meals

  • Cooking complex meals (dyspraxic may prefer cooking ‘one pot’ meals to, say, a roast dinner)

Anxiety, stress, avoidance

Think of those symptoms above as primary symptoms. Stress and anxiety are secondary symptoms caused by difficulties with some/many of the above.

Stress and anxiety can become more prominent in later childhood and adolescence when the social implications of dyspraxia-led difficulties become more prominent.

Avoidance can become a big issue during adolescence for fear of humiliation in front of peers. This may include PE, dance lessons, drama lessons, school trips, and other areas in which dyspraxics feel vulnerable.

Fatigue

Like anxiety, this is a second-order symptom.

Dyspraxics tend to get more fatigued than their neurotypical counterparts because it takes more cognitive effort to process the visual-spatial world. The brain is a hungry organ!

Further reading

If you recognise many of these symptoms in yourself or someone with whom you have a professional or personal relationship, check out the diagnostic criteria for dyspraxia here.

Parents and teachers may find these blogs useful: signs of dyspraxia at primary school and recognising dyspraxia in secondary school students.