I’ve been approached for a wide variety of Kickstarter projects recently, and most of them are kind of fun, but not all that relevant. However, I was intrigued by the idea of new ergonomic cutlery, and happy to take a look at Doddl.
We’ve actually been sent one of the prototype sets, so that we can try it out in situ, and I have to say that I’m impressed. We’ve had a whole range of ergonomic cutlery over the years, and most of it has been shaped in such a way to force the child to use the cutlery right handed. Which is great, *if* your child is right handed, and *if* they pick it up the right way around. The number of times I’ve watched children pour food all over their trays because those two things haven’t happened!
Doddl is designed to be usable in either hand, heading off the whole hand confusion thing from the start, which seemed to me to be a strong selling point. As Smallest is actually left handed, and like her big brother, she has a lower level of strength in her hands it was interesting to see how she reacted to it. Turns out that this cutlery fits her pretty well, and encouraged her to have much more of a go than she usually would.
The cutlery is more aimed at younger children though, and Tigerboy is right in the age range. He took to the cutlery straight away, and it was great to see him managing to cut roast potatoes by himself. I’m not looking forward to having to send the prototype back in fact, so I definitely think I’m going to be ordering a set.
I also think this could be good for children with a variety of special needs, or hand weaknesses like Small and Smallest have displayed in the past, and price wise it’s a lot more manageable than most special needs sets I’ve seen.
What do you reckon? When it comes to cutlery, do you go ergonomic, or just scale down? Would you go for something like Doddl? Let me know, and do take a look at the kickstarter, or find more information on the Doddl company website.
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