Vision therapy: Opinions?

We have had a very positive response to VT. They just retested him for his non motor visual perception skills.

All his visual perception sub scores put him at the level of a 16 year old (he is 9) except for visual spatial where he scored as a 14 year old.

Before VT he scored as a 5 year old for visual spatial. We have been doing VT for 7 months.

I would make sure you go to a doctor that addresses visual spatial skills, visual motor integration as well as visual efficiency skills. Some only address visual efficiency skills like tracking and focusing.

Don’t do it unless you and your child can commit to working hard on the exercises. This isn’t something you can just go to once or twice a week and see dramatic results.
My son is doing well in a regular class. Math is his favorite subject.

Oddly, the one area we are working on now that he was shown to be deficient in during the latest round of tests is auditory memory. I always thought this was his strength.

VT was a huge help to my daughter. She had trouble with convergence, couldn’t hold her focus, resulting in tracking problems. She was teh child who cried about having to read, rubbed her eyes, whined about having a headache, -a frustrated and angry child.
The VT did not fix her language processing issues. I cannot speak to the motor issues-the equipment was there but we didn’t use it.
The best money I ever spent was on VT and intensive reading tutoring. I was fortunate to find knowledge people in both areas.
The initial visit only was covered by insurance. the doctor put together a home plan and we stuck to it religiously. We used a stop watch everyday. It was summer and we were able to do double daily sessions, she made great gains in a month. After two months we went to just weekly sessions. we still do maintenance exercises once in a while.

I would urge you to shop around for a developmental or behavioral optometrist. Get someone who specializes in this area.

Wish you all the best

We are seeing results from VT in the areas of improved eye contact, better visual spatial skills during athletic activities, and no more motion sickness!! The biggest boost has been seen since switching to a doctor that incorporates body work (like OT) as a part of the VT. Definitely agree that you should shop around.

I can’t comment on how it will effect him academically. We are doing so much work there as well, its hard to know where one therapy begins and another remediation ends. But I also see improvements in tracking and he doesn’t complain when he reads anymore.

Interesting about the auditory memory. When DS was reevaluated for VT with our new doctor, he found visual memory to be well below age level (no suprise there!) and auditory to be average. And yet 2 years ago when we had ds fully evaluated by a neuropych his auditory memory was 99%tile.

So I’m thinking - first, each test is just a snapshot. And maybe as we remediate deficits the whole child is kind of smoothed out.

I have seen several children make significant gains with vision therapy. Since your son has motor issues, shopping around for a developmental optometrist who incorporates bodywork is a great idea. If you can’t find one, then you may want to work with an occupational therapist while you are doing VT.

VT provides a good foundation, but I am a strong believer in following it up with cognitive skills training (Audiblox or PACE) to realize its full benefits.

Also, you may want to look into Interactive Metronome after VT. IM is often very helpful to motor skills.

Nancy

Karen,

I agree with that statement. There is so much interplay between skills. In order to remember verbal instructions there is a certain amount of visualization that goes on.

My son also tested very good for auditory memory on the PACE testing I took him to. Our vision therapist tested him as 2 years younger than his age.

I agree that you, just work on all the things that seem difficult and you get a more efficient learner out of the deal. You can get really lost in the sub scores trying to pin down exact deficits. These kids have many deficits otherwise they would not be LD at all. They would just compensate.

I really agree with the multiple deficits. Our Neuronet provider told me that she seldom sees a kid who doesn’t have significant deficits in three of the five areas she assesses. She says, like Linda, that less than that they just compenstate.

My son, after years of therapy, isn’t really bad at anything. For him, now, it is the combination of small deficits in lots of areas with no strong strengths that still makes his life more difficult than it ought to be.

We also got great improvements doing Interactive Metronome.

These areas are all interconnected, especially for a kid with motor issues. I took my son back to a developmental optometrist who evaluated him two years ago. We have done no vision therapy since, having decided to work on integration, as it seems to be our son’s core issue. What was interesting was how much his vision scores improved in that time, without any vision therapy.

I am not saying don’t do vision therapy but that there is carry over from one area to another.

Beth

There is also the issue of deveopmental maturity; perhaps kids with various LD’s mature more slowly and we are expecting too much too soon because we as parents want “everything fixed ” by middle school…I found that for my son with LD now in 7th grade that things came slowly and gradually for him over time. Maybe it’s OK just to plug along and provide academic support.

I wonder if many of you all who have kids in the 3-5th grade time period are pushing hard to remediate because middle school is looming; what I see in middle school is a huge aacademic/dev. skills range(bigger than elementary) because the kids are at different stages of physical development, and social development…which take priority over academic gains(in the kids’ eyes at least). To my 7th grade son it is more important to sit at the right table at lunch and to quickly get to/from his locker between classes and not look like a dope in front of girls, than to be an academic superstar.

Totally agree SAR. I do think as a mom of a 4th grader that we want to build up his basic skills as much as possible before adolescence really hits! I also hold out hope that he will have a boost of brain development around that time. His social skills are improving as we remove the anxiety of the other issues though, so I don’t think he can be successful socially without the academic interventions we are trying now. Its all so connected.

I see my and my son’s efforts having an affect on all areas of life. Sports, social, academics. It is all tied up together.

My son really presents as “normal” now. Whatever that is?

He still has some writing issues as far as I am concerned but his teacher thinks he is pretty typical for a fourth grade boy.
His is in the lowest spelling group in a regular class which is just fine by his teacher. I just know that spelling has self esteem implications so once we are done with VT I will probably do sequential spelling as Beth has.

I just can see that all these therapeutic interventions have made him a better learner in all areas of life. We need to learn well for social success, sports success and academic sucess. He didn’t just grow out of his deficits.

He was so thrilled the other day that he was the only kid in his class that mastered the various jump roping skills taught in gym and that all of a sudden despite many previous attempts and failures he could hoola hoop.

That is how I measure success.

I’m chiming in because, unlike the other posters, for our son, vision therapy was unsuccessful.

Our son is GT/LD, and in the 4th grade, was behind in reading and avoided anything having to do with a ball. This all pointed to problems with visual tracking. He seemed like a perfect candidate for VT.

Our son, now 13, did vision therapy for six months when he was 9 and in the 4th grade. He went twice a week for therapy and faithfully did exercises for 30 minutes another three days a week. He showed very little improvement in any area when he was retested by the vision therapist.

During the initial consultation, the optometrist told us that we had waited too long to enter our son into therapy and that there was only a 50% chance that our son would benefit from the therapy. So we decided to try VT for six months and decide after that whether or not to continue. After six months, our son showed a 15% improvement on his tests. To us, this wasn’t a big enough improvement to continue therapy. At this rate, he could be in vision therapy for years before we saw any real improvement.

The optometrist pressured us to continue therapy and members of his staff called us a couple of times to set up appointments. In the end, I felt like the therapist just wanted our money. He himself had told us that our son had only a 50% chance of vision therapy helping him.

Some factors to consider before beginning vision therapy are:

Cost — does your health insurance cover vision therapy? The cost of therapy four years ago for us (we live in a large metropolitan area) was $80/hour with half of it covered by insurance. Over time, this adds up.

Time — Do you and your son have at least 5 hours (plus commuting time to sessions) each week to devote to therapy?

Child’s Attitude — The novelty of doing the exercises wore off after a few weeks. After that, our son did not want to do the therapy and it was a struggle to get him to do it. (Yes, we used charts & rewards). This was very stressful for all of us.

Chance of success. Our son was apparently too old for VT to work.

In the end, we decided that our money and time was better spent on other things that could help our son. Things that worked better for our son were FastForward, PhonoGraphix, speech tutoring, and reading tutoring. Also, we enrolled our son in swimming classes and in an Aikido class (a defensive martial art similar to Judo). These have really helped his physical coordination and self esteem. Also, for middle we have put our son into private school. The small class size has helped him to focus better in class. Also he gets more individual attention. Today, he is strongly on grade level or above in all areas and is doing very well in general.

In retrospect, despite the lack of success, I’m glad we tried vision therapy. Otherwise, I’d wonder, “What if…” And I’m even more glad that we stopped doing it after six months, when it wasn’t working.

It’s quite possible that vision therapy will help your child. Other kids that I know have had a lot of success with it. I just wanted to make sure you knew that success isn’t a sure thing, even if therapy is faithfully done five times a week. If VT doesn’t work, there are other things that you can try. Don’t give up seaching for ways to help your child.

LJ

LJ< I appreciate your thoughtful post. It sounds alot like our experience with Interactive Metronome - everyone thought we’d get a big bang and we didn’t. However, I’m not sure that it didn’t clear out some neural pathways that have made subsequent therapies more effective. More likely with IM than VT, since VT has corresponding tests for tracking etc.

I’m just curious if your son’s VT included body work as well. We saw some improvement doing VT that did not, but since changing providers to one that does are seeing much more signifigant gains.

Also curious if your son’s middle school is a regular private school or an LD school.

thanks for sharing!

Yes, I have the same question on body work. It is difficult for me to tell what aspects of VT has helped my son. We do body work to address balance and timing as well as the more conventional VT exercises.
I would be curious to know if those who have not had success did not do that aspect of VT.

Our son’s vision therapy did NOT include body work.

We did notice that once he started doing Aikido, his balance and overall athletic ability improved. Also, he improved a lot academically, but we’re not sure if Aikido played a role or if it was the maturation process. He has not had any tutoring or therapy in 1 1/2 years, so we can’t look to that as making a difference.

Also, his private school is a non-secular private school. There are 14 kids in his class. The school does not specialize in helping kids with LDs, however, it is willing to work with kids who have mild to moderate LDs. The teachers e-mail me if he is missing any assignments, which helps a lot.

BTW, in kindergarten and first grade, he went to a parochial school. The kindergarten was fine because, there again, the class size was small. However, in the first grade, there were over 30 kids and he was totally lost.

LJ

I think for some kids the body work is a key piece of remediation. I know several people whose kids had big academic maturation that coincided with karate.

We had a rather mediocore experience with vision therapy but it did not include body work. My son did learn to read work sheets which was no small accomplishment. Even today, after lots of body work though, he still skips words and lines.

I have taken him to a second developmental optometrist and he did not recommend more vision therapy. Like the Neuronet therapist we are working with, told me it is primarily integrative. Interestingly enough, the integrative body work we have done seems to have made a big difference in his vision functioning. I could see the difference on the testing compared to two years ago. Unfort. it hasn’t translated very well into real life reading. My son seems to now have lots of small deficits that still seem to add up to difficulties in functioning. He has auditory processing difficulties, which while much remediated, still cause some difficulties for him. I think that if he had one or the other (auditory or visual) at this point, he would be fine.

I think it can be very difficult to resolve some of these issues. I am hoping that maturity on top of a lot of remediation may do it. My son took karate a couple years a ago but found it very difficult. Maybe we should try again. His coordination is much improved post Interactive Metronome.

Beth