School Struggles?
Does your child struggle with school? Reading? Math? These activities require the use of our eyes. Not only must we see things clearly, have good eye movements, but the words or numbers must be single. Along with those tasks, the student must be able to do them all day long. If you are the parent of a child who is having trouble learning or misbehaving in school, you quickly find yourself confronted with a series of difficult choices. Not only do you have to be an advocate for your child in the school system, you have to help your child succeed.
There are different ways to treat reading problems, learning problems, spelling problems, attention problems, hyperactivity, and coordination problems. My story explains one way that works for many people with no drugs involved!
Here is my story:
My youngest son struggled in school from the time he was in 1st grade. He wouldn’t sit still, or interact with the readings. He was a fun loving kid and could often be found talking to the other children instead of doing his work. Many times, though, I would go into the classroom to find the other students doing school work and my son would be in the back playing with blocks, or building something. I couldn’t understand why he couldn’t do what the other students were doing.
As he progressed through school, this became a problem. When a teacher couldn’t get him to sit still, or focus on his work they would send him to sit in another classroom, “to get his work done”. This didn’t fix the problem because there were just as many distractions for him in this other room. One teacher even called him “stupid”. By 7th grade we still hadn’t found any reason for his inattentive behavior, and even went so far as to give him the ADHD exam.
What could I do?
Every year I took my boys for vision exams, each year hoping that vision might be the reason they struggled in school.
Unfortunately every year we would learn that their vision was 20/20 and they could see fine.
In 2009, though, it was different. The eye doctor asked how my son was doing in school and explained that he couldn’t track a ball. Since he couldn’t track, this would make reading and school work very difficult. He referred us to a new doctor in town who did vision therapy.
This new doctor, Scott Lewis, did an exam on my son, and explained to me that my son had a text book case of Convergence Insufficiency. This meant he was unable to converge his eyes. The doctor showed this to me by having my son look at a stick, with a small ball attached to it. The doctor had my son look at it and tell him when he saw 2 balls. Dr. Lewis then moved it closer to his nose. When the stick was about 10″ away from my sons nose one eye quit looking at it turned out, creating 2 sticks. I was literally sick when I saw this and felt like such a bad mom. How in the world did I not know that my sons couldn’t use his eyes together at close distance?
Vision Therapy!!
The next step was to do vision therapy. Vision therapy is the act of building visual motor skills and increase endurance of visual activities. This is done through specialized visual activities enabling and teaching the patient how to use their visual system in order to find success in everyday tasks. These newly acquired visual skills are reinforced and made automatic through repetition and by integration with motor and cognitive skills.
After just a few months of therapy, my son could track a ball on a stick and see his world in 3D. His reading improved, his homework got done faster, he noticed things around him and life was just better! Homework before vision therapy would take hours! Then my son wouldn’t turn it in because he forgot about it. Ugh, this was so frustrating. After therapy, he would get his homework done in less than an hour, and then remember to turn it in!
Do you have a story about your child struggling in school, or sports, of just life in general? Please feel free to share your experience through the comments below.
Did you child go through vision therapy?