In this paper, we propose the parallel, self-organizing, hierarchical neural netowrks as a handwritten digit recognition system. This system can absorb the various shape variations of handwritten digits by using the different methods of extracting the features in each stage neural network (SNN) of the PSHNN, and can reduce training time by using the single layer neural network as the SNN, and can obtain high rate of correct recognition by using the certainty area in all the output nodes individually. experiments have been performed with NIST database. In which we use 21, 315 digits (10, 625 digits for training and 10,663 digits for testing). The results show that the correct rate is 97.48% the error rate is 1.72% and the reject rate is 0.78%.