vision therapy

I was told my child needed it.She was given glasses that magnified the words. My child does not like to wear the glasses and doesn’t.We had improved her skills with the glasses as she read for 20 minutes every day for a while.I decided not to do vision therapy as it was one more thing I had to get her to someplace to do it.My other reason not to was I read this book”Helping Children Overcome Learning Difficulties” by Jerome Rosner. He said improving a child’s eye movement skills and expecting to obtain improvement in reading simply does not pay off.Improving a child’s reading ability through effective instruction will improve his eye movements.There also are two tests in his book for auditory prossessing and visual my child scored low on these but he also has a systematic way to build these strengths.I am doing it now so can not say if it is worth it but I can see my child’s difficulties.A lot less than vision therapy also.My child is doing “Explode the Code” series it also helps me to see where her difficulties are.She is also being tutored in the Spalding Method.Good Luck-

some people swear by it, we found it to be of little value and very expensive. It’s credibilty is controversial, our schools do not recognize it nor do opthamologists, who are MD’s; Behavioral Optometrists are not medical doctors. I would not recommend it given our experience.

forgot to add that it requires daily home exercises. Our’s were 45 minutes per day plus two weekly visits to the B.O.

We have done six months of vision therapy. It def. helped but did not totally resolve his vision problems. Before vision therapy, my son could not find his way around a work sheet, line things up, ect. No problem now. But he still has trouble tracking with cognitive demands–and given his auditory processing problems—that is reading. So when the text gets difficult, he still skips words.

We’re still trying to resolve his vision problems. He has sensory integration problems and it appears that his remaining difficulties are connected to this fact. He is currently doing exercises to integrate the vestibular and visual systems with a different therapist. Can’t tell you the outcome yet.

My experience is that the computer and paper sort of exercises that our OD used are not adequate for a child with my son’s sensory integration issues. My advice would be to find someone who uses movement as well, unless you have no inkling of such problems.

Now eye therapy cannot teach a child to read. It can only make the process easier. A child with other learning problems still will need to be taught with a systematic sequential method.

Beth

How do you know if your child might benefit from vision therapy? Would an OT be able to look at visual motor issues?

Yes, an OT can diagnose a visual-motor integration issue. The OT my son saw told me that kids often made much faster progress with vision therapy when doing OT at the same time. If your child has visual-motor integration problems, it is more complicated than simple tracking problems. My son’s VMI improved into the normal range from doing vision therapy but there still are some issues.

Beth

I agree with everything everyone else has shared with you. My dyslexic son has had 6 months of vision therapy, and it did help with tracking; however, decoding is his #1 issue. It does require daily exercises (which the school won’t do). We also stopped the OT Therapy 2 times pw\er week.
We are now focusing in on the decoding and getting him tutoring 2 times a week.
He will attend an LD School for 1/2 days in the summer then full-time in the fall.
Despite the hope we have for our son at the LD School I’ve found that parents still take their kids to private reading remediation lessons 2 times a week.
My advice is to focus what limited time you have on the therapy which will have the greatest return and address the highest priority issue.
We were worn out, we have a daughter and we want them both to be kids and us maintain our sanity!