Walt Decherd Wellbeing

The Power of a Lens For Children With Learning Disabilities

Walt Decherd Information About Visual System By Darin Browne

Children with learning disabilities may be helped by the use of reading glasses, but is this the full story?

As a practicing Behavioral Optometrist for over 25 years, I recognize that vision is the dominant sense in the classroom, with over 80% of all information coming in through the visual system. So it makes sense that any disturbance in vision can affect a child’s learning ability. However, having a simple eye test is very often far short of providing the answers desperate parents are looking for.

The symptoms of children with learning disabilities who have visual problems include

Reduced concentration,
Sore eyes or excessive eye rubbing,
Headaches or tiredness after reading
Frustration when reading or writing
Misreading or skipping words or lines
Avoiding, crying or screaming when forced to do homework

Children with learning disabilities experience many of these difficulties, and these can often be significantly reduced by a competent eye examination and the correct reading glasses. But is it enough? Does simply putting glasses on a child and solving their basic visual difficulties mean that the child is cured?

Obviously this is frequently not the case! How can a pair of glasses help a child to spell better? How can glasses stop a child writing things backwards, or help them to code or sequence more effectively? Yes, I am the first to agree that reading glasses can help relieve many problems in children with learning disabilities, but throughout the years I have come to understand that more is needed.

The thing is that, even wearing the right glasses if they are required, these children lack the visual skills necessary to perform the job of reading, writing or spelling. these skills are not innate, neither are they magically endowed with any appliance, such as a lens, a colored lens, an ADHD pill or anything else. They have to be learned, and they have to be learned correctly if the child is to progress in their learning to become an effective student.

This makes perfect sense, doesn’t it? If we want our child to be a great footballer, we send them to football practice to teach them the skills of the game. If we want them to be good at tennis, we send them to tennis coaching so they learn and train the appropriate skills. If we want them to play piano, we don’t just sit them in front of the piano making them play over and over again, do we? We have piano lessons, and they learn the skills that are required to play the piano.

Yet, when it comes to reading, we just make children with learning disabilities struggle on, and yes, the right reading glasses may help, but how much greater will their progress be if we couple this with training the appropriate visual skills?

So if you know children with learning disabilities, having an eye test is a great place to start, but it is very often not a great place to finish. Why leave the job half done, with all of their visual skills under developed? Why condemn them to keep struggling when, with the appropriate training program, you could see spectacular and rapid results.

The question that remains is, where do you find such a program. While there are many therapy programs available through Behavioral Optometrists, there has been nothing available until now on the internet.

Tags: Walt Decherd Visual Systems