My 10 year old son has a new pair of developmental lenses. These are a weak prescription that magnify text (his vision is normal). He told the developmental OD that they made it easier to read and sure enough he is skipping a lot less with them on. What is interesting to me is that we used large print books all summer on the advice of our Neuronet therapist and that didn’t seem to have much affect on his reading at all, much to my disapointment. He preferred it but he didn’t read more accurately with it.
I am not sure I understand why the lenses would help more than large print books but there is a difference.
My son has had some vision therapy and the most the developmental OD (a different one) told me he didn’t need more vision therapy because his problems are primarily integration. He told me that the lenses should help integrate him.
Anyway, I thought I’d share this for other parents struggling with tracking type issues. I know it is isn’t always easy to figure out what to do and developmental lenses weren’t even on my radar screen until very recently.
Beth
Re: Developmental lenses are helping
Gosh Beth that’s great!!!
I’m curious what the prescription was? I bought my son a pair of glasses that were prescribed by the VT, but he has such an aversion to the whole idea of wearing glasses that he insists they don’t make any difference and refuses to wear them.
Re: Developmental lenses are helping
I really am not up on exactly what process is going on. I do know that my son was more than 2 std. deviations below the mean on K screening on visual discrimination. He was diagnosed with motor integration deficit in K. His visual discrimination seems pretty normal now and he actually is beginning to draw, which is amazing had you seen what he could do a couple years ago. There just seems to be some places where he is behind and that is the theory behind these lenses, as I understand it.
Kids normally progress from very large print to smaller print but my son’s development just isn’t in line with the demands of print. His issue at this point is integration—I have been told his auditory and visual skills are adequate at this point. I would guess that the larger print makes it easier for my son to integrate the visual with the auditory. I am hoping if he can get good at this then he will eventually be able to do the same process with smaller print.
He reads faster and more accurately with the glasses. I would think that would make up for any social sigma associated with having them.
The prescription is very mild—I don’t really know what it is. The OD was surprised that such a mild prescription actually impacted his reading.
Beth
Re: Developmental lenses are helping
Several years ago, my son was also prescribed mild reading glasses. These are a lower strength that what you can buy at the drug store. The glasses made a huge difference in his ability to read. He described it as making it easier to focus. Even big letters were blurry without the glasses. Anyway, being easier to focus on the words made it so he didn’t get headaches from reading. He’s still dyslexic and dysgraphic, but he can cope better.
Now that my eyes are aging, I can finally relate to what he was talking about. I don’t need a strong prescription, in fact his weak prescription works great for me. What it does is made all the letters clearer, whether they are small are large print.
Kay
Re: Developmental lenses are helping
Kay,
Thanks!! You explain why just enlarging the print didn’t seem to make much difference. Does he still wear them? We were told that it was something he’d probably need for a year. Anyway, that is how I sold it to my son!!
Beth
Re: Developmental lenses are helping
He only wears them now when he’s tired and has to do homework. (He’s in high school now, and he’s often working until 10 at night.) His ability to focus seems to get worse when he’s tired. He wore them all the time at school for 5th through 7th grade, and not so much in 8th grade. There was never a problem with being picked on because he had glasses, but now that he’s in high school, he’s more conscious of his image (and most of the kids with distance vision glasses have switched to contacts.)
Good luck!
Kay
Re: Developmental lenses are helping
Was he able to wear them to do board work? It strikes me that these are really reading glasses….I honestly am not worried about the being picked on issue but rather him losing them!!!!
Beth
Re: Developmental lenses are helping
No, he took them off when looking at the board. I actually got him a glasses case with a keychain like hook on it that he could attach to his belt loop. Over 3 years, he only managed to loose the glasses once. Docking his allowance by 50% for a time to cover half of the cost of the new pair made him very responsible.
Magnifying glasses, aka the reading glasses that most of the over 50yo-me too-wear, enlarge the image as it goes thru the lens to the back of the eyeball-they do not affect visual processing at the optic nerve, the thalmus or other areas of the brain. If they work, that’s great; hopefully they were not expensive, and your child is not teased for wearing glasses. You might want to look at the www.interdys.org/servlet/idafundedresearch web site of the IDA to see some interesting reasearch into brain/visual processing; look at Investigating the Nature of Visual Defects in dyslexic readers.