The latest - Vision Therapy. How guilty do I feel?

Hi Karen,

Just thought I would mention that my son is farsighted too. My very good friend’s daughter is dyslexic, for lack of a better term, and very farsighted. I would be interested to know how many LD kids are farsighted. Rosner(Behavioral Opt), in his book, says he can walk into a classroom and tell which kids are having trouble just by the way they are using their eyes, ….he also says there is a correlation between farsightedness and LD.

I have often wondered about my son missing out on alot of toddler development b/c he was patching and using glasses that overcorrected to force the focus (ie making him more farsighted).

Just thought I’d mention that since I thought it interesting.

Margo

My oldest son is also farsighted and had focussing and tracking issues. We were given exercises by the opt to do with him at home to improve tracking and focusing and we did notice some improvement. The opt we saw was a “plain” old opt I just happened to mention the difficulty my son was having in school and he ran the additional tests to find his difficulties. It is interesting the pattern of simmilarities we see in our children.

My son is also farsighted. I was very frustrated in seeking help for my son. We went to 3 different eye doctors before the third one started pointing out all the weaknesses my son had and prescribed vision therapy. The first one was associated with a children’s hospital and only prescribed reading glasses! The second one added patching. Neither gave me any information and looked offended when I asked questions; and then, they only provided very short answers!! My son loved vision therapy. Before beginning he wouldn’t read a complete page without complaining, moaning, groaning, etc. And these were early readers with only a couple of lines per page. Now he reads several pages without complaining and is proud of it. Reading is still a struggle and we are going for other therapies but vision therapy did work for him. His writing improved both writing on lines and spacing now whereas before he would not or could not do either. Now if we can only finish up sensory issues with therapies and go for the intense reading remediation.:-)

This confirms it. They are long lost twins!

This is great news. My son got new glasses this week and I do think he reads better with them. I asked his teacher to confirm this for me because I don’t know if it is just wishful thinking on my part. He still doesn’t like to read but who knows how much of that is just related to such bad experiences for so long. His tracking as demonstrated by the ease of doing the exercises has improved dramatically in a very short time.(The not being able to move his head is tracking also called pursuits.) His near/far focusing is still really bad so we are concentrating heavily on that.

Another added bonus is that the exercises take concentration and focus and I do think he has learned to control his attention better by doing these.

Please don’t feel guilty. There is so much blah blah blah about vision therapy everywhere. So many treaty like voodoo that it is easy to get sucked in. I sure did. Then there is so much real voodoo out there that you just don’t know what or who to believe.

My friend’s son got those glasses and he was reading H. Potter within a week and out of sped the next week. He had already had his tracking issues dealt with so with the focusing dealt with he took a huge leap.

I wouldn’t feel guilty. I would feel relieved. Perhaps part of his difficulties can be remediated simply by putting on glasses. I think that is great.

My son moves his head instead of his eyes too. It is a lack of head-eye differentiation. He is better after therapy but you have to be careful with this tendency. I found that tracking work just made it worse—he couldn’t move his eyes fast enough. His Neuronet therapist was the one who figured it out (not the optometrist) and gave his exercises that worked on his visual-vestibular system.

If you don’t get body work from this therapist, you will never resolve the issue.

Beth

We do alot with balance and bilateral motor coordination. I do think this is very helpful. I do think that the thing that really worked on his ocular muscles was just having him follow a pen with each eye individually and then together. I also had him hold a position for a length of time all the way to the right, left or up etc.

He went from only being able to do this for a few seconds to doing it for 5 minutes on each eye. He can now move his eyes independent of his head very well.

In his case his eye muscles were just so weak. The balancing exercises may have contributed because he certainly has vestibular issues but for him just working those eye muscles every day really seemed to do it. He also does well with the marsden ball tracking.
He was the opposite. He could move his eyes fast. He couldn’t move them slow without his eye jumping around.

Now this is weird. My son could not look up and hold that position in the beginning. Neither can his father. Genetic?????

I remember when he did speech therapy he couldn’t differentiate his tongue from his jaw. Its all motor related for him. At least he’s consistent!

It is all motor for my son too!! It says something clearly about what will and will not work.

BTW, what kind of improvements have you seen with the Seeing Stars intensive?

Beth

Sounds genetic to me!!!

We’ve done the tracking exercises and while they helped with reading worksheets and the like. I didn’t see a lot of transfer to reading. We’ve also done vestibular exercises, and again nothing has been the key.

I don’t know if it is attention or eyes at this point. I had him reading phrases from the Great Leaps program. It was easy but half way through he started miscalling all the words. The second day he got them all right. Now he was using a pencil to track—so maybe that is why. But sometimes, even the pencil doesn’t do it.

I am going to try to train his attention this way. If it doesn’t do it, I will try something else.

Beth

…

We saw observable, measurable improvements in his decoding and fluency. Specifically, he is now able to decode just about any multisyllabic word you put in front of him - albeit slowly. Seeing Stars seems to have just cemented the rules of the code he already know, and filled in the blanks. He also seems to be able to navigate worksheets better. Hard to explain, but he seems to be organized in his approach. I also think some of his spelling is better, but that is such a weakness its harder to quantify.

Try this:

Ask him to put his tongue up and look up, tongue left eyes left etc. You may have to point to get him to do this. My son could not do this at all at first. They explained it had something to do with visual motor integration but I don’t know if I understood.

I have a new exercise for bilateral motor coordination that I think is awesome.

Walk with your feet and hands turned in (think severe pigeon toes). Then feet turned in but hands out. Then feet out (like a duck walk) and hands out. Then feet out and hands in. Do this back and forth.
Arms are straight down by your side.

They told me my son had a problem with this one which I would have known because he definitely has always had bilateral motor issues. They explained bilateral motor issues really well. Apparantly, most people have the right brain control the left side of their body and left brain the control the right side of the body. People with a problem with bilateral motor get those signals crossed and don’t always have the correct side of the brain control the correct side of the body. I thought this was interesting in light of the handedness discussions we have had on this board.

DS has very poor control of his tongue, and not much of a tongue tip (if I remember the technical description). That was how we ended up in speech therapy - the OT noticed his poor oral motor control. Poor kid, he also had a very short lingua frenum (sp?) which is the ligament like thing under the tongue. (This he got from his Dad who has no speech issues) . We actually had it lasered when he was 5 to give him a little more mobility with his tongue. Anyway, I’m going to try, but I bet he can’t do it for a variety of reasons!

I come from a family of farsighted people. We are all born farsighted.

This is extremely rare — the vast majority of children are nearsighted.

Unfortunately, a lot of professionals who should really know better and who should really act more professionally responsible fall for what I call the 80-90% fallacy — if something is true for 80 or 90% of the population, then it’s a hard and fast rule for everybody and we won;t look for the exceptions or admit that they exist.

When my brother was young, in 1948 in northwestern Canada, he was premature and spent several months in an incubator. It is amazing that he is not blind. My caring mother noticed when he started to crawl that he would keep stopping and crying. She took him to a good pediatrician who realized that he was so farsighted that he couldn’t see anything within his reach, so he would crawl towards something distant and then stop when it went out of focus. He got his first glasses at the age of nine *months*.

Unfortunately when it came to my turn, we were in a different area with all sorts of up-to-date doctors which at that time meant Freudians. When I walked into walls, couldn’t catch a ball, had constant headaches and fatigue, it was all brushed off that I wanted glasses because I wanted to imitate my big brother. I was also brushed off in the annual eye text because I read the eye chart perfectly. Of course I can read every line on an eye chart twenty feet away — I am *far* sighted.

Anyway, I went through seventeen years of my life with untreated farsightedness and severe astigmatism, walking into walls, unable to play team sports, and having constant headaches and disorientation. Finally we moved yet again and found a really good ophthalmologist; he took one look at my eyes and said “Why in h.. don’t you have glasses?” I said “You tell me, doc.”

Because of this I have severe amblyopia; my left eye works physically, but the brain has trained itself to refuse the messages from the left because they were too confusing. Glasses do help, but I am practically blind on the left side and have zero depth perception.

Nonetheless I cope and I ski downhill and I have a perfect driving record — I turn my neck to the left a lot.

This all happened *despite* having good caring parents, regular private checkups, annual school checkups, and so on.

Two messages: one, don’t listen to the “experts” who toe this year’s party line; research and look into the real facts.
two, don’t beat yourself around the head for being imperfect and not doing every single thing. Do your very best and when you find a problem, do your best to fix iot; nobody can ask more of you than that.

seeing stars- from LindamoodBell? my son did 5 weeks (we simply couldn’t afford more and are presenty gearing up to sue our school district for failure to provide a FAPE, etc, etc, etc- yucko- and to get them to pay) )anyway- as far as I’m concerned Lindamood Bell hung the stars and moon- my son made AMAZING PROGRESS!- our special ed director suggested that if our son read at a fourth grade level in grade ten that would be okay (since that’s the level newspapers are written at)-he’s in fourth grade now- comprehension at grade equivalent 5.3, word attack at 4.0. BEFORE lindamood bell word attack was 1.8. Sp Ed wa USELESS and after failing to learn , the poor thing was learning to fail. anyway- go to Lindammod Bell’s web site- lots of stats, tc
good luck!

Hi Victoria,

Interesting story. I have vision problems, too - but according to the eye charts have “perfect” vision. I have no depth perception, and am relatively well convinced that I suppress the vision in one eye.

I took my son to a pediatric opthamologist a year ago - who gave him glasses. They were bifocals, clear on the top, magnification on the bottom - to help im copy off the board. He hates them, and refuses to wear them. So we went to a different doctor last week. He said my son has convergence, teaming, tracking and focusing problems - and supresses the vision in one eye. He apparently wasn’t suppressing the vision in one eye last year, or the doctor didn’t catch it.

We’re starting vision therapy as soon as the CD comes in. I hope we can correct some of this for him, or at least keep it from getting worse. :-)

Lil

That’s great. We’ve done some Seeing Stars but, as you know, it is hard to keep all of this up. That’s the advantage of what you did. We got distracted by standardized testing here and started working on comprehension. Although he still has deficits, he has proved to be easier to remediate with comprehension than decoding.

Beth

Any *good* eye doctor will spot this. However, as I have discovered in many fields, there are a lot of lazy incompetents out there. The eye suppression issue and tracking issues are not found in the usual under five-minute eye chart screening; you have to have a proper exam taking at least half an hour. So if you have been told in a quick screening that you or a child have “perfect” vision or hearing, and yet you see problems, go find a real doctor who will do a real exam.

It was supposed to be a thorough screening by a specialist with children, and did take at least 1/2 hour. I’m wondering is supression is a learned response when things don’t get fixed in a timely fashion - and if it had simply gotten worse over the last year. I’ll never know. :-)

The opthamlmologist saw nothing wrong with my son’s eyes.

The developmental optometrist found alot. His problems became very clear to me when we took up vision therapy. I don’t know how someone could have missed them. His eyes are a MESS!

The original optometrist told me that my son DID have “slight” visual processing issues - but the glasses should fix it. It’s only after we’ve tried various (usually extremely succesful) remediations that I looked into the vision thing further.

Of course, my son has just taken one of those leaps in awareness that all children go through - so I’m hoping what ever we do now will be more effective because it is so much easier for him to “get it” - whatever “it” may be. :-)

There are a lot of people on this board who bad-mouth ophthalmologists and praise the optometrists who finally found their problems. But my own experience was the exact opposite. All the optometrists and their assistants for many years were obnoxious and insulting to me, implying that I was just trying to get attention; the person who finally gave me glasses and salvaged at least a little of my eyesight was an ophthalmologist; in fact, a professor of ophthalmology who trained almost every eye doctor in Canada for a generation. Pity they didn’t all listen. The ophthalmologist/professor was also the first one who mentioned tracking issues (and our weakness in this area) to me and my daughter. As in every field, it isn’t the name and title on the door, it’s the competence and dedication in the mind.

The american association of pediatric opthalmology has a position paper negating the effects of vision and learning.

It might be different in Canada.

My son is slightly far-sighted too!

Karen, I’m glad you’re exploring VT. I truly hope it helps make a huge difference for your son. I think whatever you do should help get him where he needs to be (or around there. Most people fall into a pretty wide range…and that’s a good thing!).

Best of luck and please let us know how it goes! :-)

Just got back from a week long vacation. DS is about to turn 9, and is still so clueless. Its really obvious when we spend so much time together.

Our optometrist (who is well known and well thought of here) had only nice things to say about the opthamologist who pronounced my son’s eyes perfect, and encouraged me ot get him a good tutor. But she also said that his expertise is the health of the eyeball, and hers is the whole visual system. Maybe like a neurologist and an OT. Just a thought.