If you search for information regarding children learning disabilities you will notice that a lot of of them describe conditions like reading difficulties, learning difficulties and dyslexia as impairment in the brain’s capability to decipher images received from the eyes or ears into languages that are understandable. These same articles assert 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 think that this is the moment in time to set the record straight. The literature is so confusing merely because the classification of “normal” vision is so elaborate and hotly debated, and it depends on WHO has performed the eye assessment, and their total viewpoint on vision.
What Is Vision?
On one side of the debate we have the conventional medical model, which says that, if a child with learning disabilities can see sufficiently to normal levels, that is 20/20, and if they do not have a essential quantity of longsight, shortsight or astigmatism, then their vision is fine and the learning disability must be some sort of brain dysfunction.
This model, totally ignores the fact that these very same children with learning disabilities have brains linked to their eyes, and that even as the sight and eyeballs may be all right, the signals to the brain are by some means not making sense. In this model, if an operation or a thick set of spectacles are not indicated, all is well.
On the opposing side are practitioners like myself, who think that vision is not merely 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 results. Children with learning disabilities came through my door, all had normal sight, and very few had excessive prescriptions. I could do very little to facilitate them, because as far as I could figure out, their eyes were normal.
Perhaps your child has had an eye test merely to be told that their eyes are normal. Yet you watch them every day, losing attentiveness, rubbing their eyes, getting markedly tired, misreadingwords, struggling to learn their spelling and writing things in reverse.
But then I discovered a key.
I discovered that children with learning disabilities need more than merely the capability to see: they need to learn basic skills in order to triumph over 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 location to help.
Vision therapy is not crazy magic, it is merely teaching and training these basic visual skills in children so that they can pick up their learning, and given that vision is the prevailing sense in the classroom, vision therapy is successful to a greater or lesser degree on nearly every child with learning disabilities that I have seen.
That’s thousands of children, all considered to have learning disabilities, helped to overcome their learning difficulties in a matter of months, because I transformed my viewpoint and began to see children with learning disabilities as entire individuals, not merely a set of eyeballs.
So I began training these basic visual skills, and over the last few years I have developed these to what I think to be one of the most effective therapies for children with learning disabilities in the world. I have thousands of testimonies of children who, having failed 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 accessible for all children with learning disabilities all across the world. It’s a home based, really low-priced option available to parents who are struggling with children who have learning disabilities, and it may be precisely what your child with learning difficulties really requires. Please, don’t keep struggling and getting more and more discouraged! Even if your child has had an eye test that came back normal, I urge you to go beyond and check out this special training designed particularly to facilitate children with learning disabilities.
