I’ve been practicing the ABCs and 123s with my son and notice that certain letters (J N P S Z) and numbers (4 6) he always writes backwards/mirror imaged. I’ve seen other kids, and even my own writings as a child, have the same quirk. Is this pretty much universal?
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Same reason they don’t know left from right for a while.
Left-right is largely an arbitrary notation for something that’s almost impossible to describe. What is “left”? Define “left” in terms that don’t have to refer to something else or become self-referential (like clockwise, or 90 degree “left” of forward).
The axis is perfectly understood, the directionality isn’t.
On Earth, up-down is quite easily… you can define in relation to the centre of the earth (a fixed point, relatively speaking). Left/right? What’s the “leftmost” point of the world? How much further right can I travel – by any means – from where I’m standing?
There is no fixed reference point for left/right, just an arbitrary assignment. Even East/West has some kind of reference points, including not least the Sun at a given time, but not Left/Right.
So children struggle with left-right, as do adults, and humans in general. The whole “why does the image in the mirror look flipped left-right but not up-down” is exactly the same problem with our adult, human perception – not with the physics of the situation. (For reference, in our heads “we” are flipping the person in the mirror to be facing the other way… and thus automatically thinking that “their left” is “our right”, when it’s not – that person isn’t facing us at all).
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