Should I Consider Vision Therapy
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Vision progresses through various developmental levels just like other skills, such as speech, motor, and sensory systems.
If these stages do not proceed orderly or if development stalls, then your child could have visual problems.
Your child may even demonstrate behavioral problems as a result of this unreliable visual information. Kids with vision difficulties are often diagnosed with ADHD!
Just like your child may need speech therapy, or occupational therapy , or auditory therapy , your child may also need vision therapy.
Now, do not confuse eyesight and vision!!
Eyesight (acuity) is the ability to actually see and to respond to incoming light.
Vision is the ability to process the information from eyesight and to make meaningful interpretations from this information.
So, your child may have vision problems even if they have 20/20 eyesight!
I did!!
I was always a slow reader in school and always the last student done with tests. I had to reread questions and text continuously to make sure that I understood correctly. Yet, I always made straight A’s!
Then, when I entered medical school and had to read voluminously, I noticed that my eyes were constantly fatigued and then blurred, and my headaches became intolerable. I was evaluated in the College of Optometry and was diagnosed with convergence insufficiency which is a type of vision problem!!
Naturally, I started vision therapy with particular eye exercises for convergence insufficiency, and my symptoms gradually improved. However, I still require extra time on medical board tests due to this disability.
I relate my own experiences of slow reading and rereading to illustrate that even small difficulties may be a sign of vision problems. How I wish that I had vision training when I was much younger!
I have listed some other symptoms that you may notice in you or your child that may actually be a sign of vision problems.
- Physical: headaches, nausea, light sensitivity, dizziness, motion sickness, falling, tripping, bumping into objects
- Emotional: irritability, anger, frustration, anxiety, depression
- Behavioral: hyperactivity, hypo-activity, spinning, staring, blinking, squinting, tilting head, covering one eye
- Reading: reading avoidance, fatigue or headaches with reading, skipping lines or words, mixing up letters, misinterpreting p’s and q’s and d’s and b’s, knowing words on one page but not on the next page, substituting words, inserting words or letters from the line above or below, omitting punctuation.
I highly recommend that you use the free Eye-Q Reading Inventory to further assess yourself and your own child for vision problems. This free and simple 10 minute evaluation will help you screen for various reading difficulties that may actually be due to a vision disorder.
You can also have your child evaluated by a behavioral or developmental optometrist with specialized training and experience in this field of vision training.
This optometrist may discover any variety of problems in various ocular skills.
- Eye movement or tracking
- Binocularity or eye teaming
- Accommodation or eye focusing
- Convergence or eye aiming
- Visual perception – figure ground, laterality and directionality
- Contrast sensitivity – light and dark
- Eye-hand coordination
- Visual-motor integration
The optometrist may recommend various developmental lenses, such as therapeutic lenses, prisms, filters, and patches. They may also recommend several daily eye exercises in order to correct the visual deficiencies.
In addition, your child may be helped by the Irlen Method which uses color to reduce sensitivity to colors, patterns, lights, glare, and contrast.
Adults as well as children can participate in vision therapy!
Gradually, your vision should improve and the associated symptoms should diminish or resolve with the continued use of the specialized lenses and eye exercises.
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