How Can Children With Learning Disabilities Make The Grade In The Doctor's Vision Tests?
If you look for information about children learning disabilities you will become aware of that a lot of of them describe conditions like reading difficulties, learning difficulties and dyslexia as impairment in the brain’s capability to render images received from the eyes or ears into languages that are comprehensible. These same reports declare that in these children suffering with learning disabilities, vision, hearing and intelligence are all normal.
I have been working in Behavioral Optometry for over 20 years, and I believe that this is the moment in time to set the record straight. The literature is so bewildering only because the description of “standard” vision is so elaborate and hotly debated, and it depends on WHO has performed the eye check, and their total philosophy on vision.
What Is Vision?
On one side of the argument we have the conventional medical model, which states that, if a child with learning disabilities can see satisfactorily to normal levels, that is 20/20, and if they don't have a key quantity of longsight, shortsight or astigmatism, then their vision is acceptable and the learning disability must be some sort of brain dysfunction.
This model, entirely disregards the fact that these very same children with learning disabilities have brains linked to their eyes, and that despite the fact that the sight and eyeballs may be acceptable, the signals to the brain are by some means not making sense. In this model, if an operation or a thick set of glasses are not indicated, all is well.
On the opposing side are practitioners like myself, who believe that vision is not only sight, but it is the emergent of a combination of factors like sight, eye control, memory, spacial awareness and a whole host of skills that a child must learn in order to overcome learning disabilities.
You see, I tried that conventional model for a period of time with very poor outcomes. Children with learning disabilities came through my door, all had normal sight, and very few had excessive prescriptions. I could do nothing to help them, because as far as I could figure out, their eyes were normal.
Possibly your child has had an eye test only to be told that their eyes are normal. Yet you look at them every day, losing attentiveness, rubbing their eyes, getting markedly tired, misreading words, struggling to learn their spelling and writing things backwards.
But then I found a key.
I found that children with learning disabilities want more than only the capability to see: they want to learn basic skills in order to rise above their learning difficulties. Now, these visual skills embrace things like eye coordination, eye movements, focusing, eye coordination, visual memory for spelling, sequencing, left-right awareness for reversals, fine and gross motor and the like, and that as a visual practitioner I am in the perfect situation to help out.
Vision therapy is not crazy magic, it is only coaching and training these basic visual skills in children so that they can advance their learning, and given that vision is the prevailing sense in the classroom, vision therapy works to a greater or lesser degree on almost every child with learning disabilities that I have examined.
That's thousands of kids, all considered to have learning disabilities, helped to overcome their learning difficulties in a matter of months, because I changed my philosophy and started to see children with learning disabilities as entire individuals, not only a set of eyeballs.
So I started training these basic visual skills, and over the last couple years I have refined these to what I believe to be one of the most valuable therapies for children with learning disabilities on the planet. I have thousands of testimonies of children who, having been unsuccessful at other methods like tutoring and remedial work, have suddenly made colossal strides ahead in their learning by simply training these skills.
And now I have them offered for all children with learning disabilities all around the world. It's a home based, tremendously low-priced option obtainable to parents who are struggling with children who have learning disabilities, and it may be exactly what your child with learning difficulties really requires. Please, don't keep struggling and getting more and more frustrated! Even if your child has had an eye test that came back normal, I recommend you to go further and check out this special training designed especially to help children with learning disabilities.
