Detecting Childhood Vision Problems

”If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.” Right? Sometimes, it’s not so simple. As my children’s teacher, I get to see them work through their challenges and frustrations daily. Most of the time, things that are hard one day give way to new competence (and less whining), and even the kids can see the progress they’re making little by little. But occasionally, the tears just keep coming and things don’t get any easier. If you’re homeschooling, you can catch the problems that won’t slip past one-on-one attention.

When he was five, my son taught himself to read and devoured hundred-page books faster than I could get them out of the library. His handwriting, however, was awful. It wasn’t just that it looked bad, but that he couldn’t write even half a line in our penmanship program without breaking down into tears. Some letters were larger than others, some veered off the line, other letters, like “b” and “d,” he kept mixing up. Math was torture, too, because he kept messing up writing the numbers. For months, there was no improvement.

So, we started vision therapy. What vision therapy does is teach children, using a variety of games and exercises, what they should be seeing under certain conditions. Knowing this, they can make their eyes work to produce that result. One of the exercises, for example, was a plastic w-shaped contraption with a picture of a fishbowl on one side and a fish on the other. If you pull your focus closer toward you, you should be able to see the fish go into the fishbowl. If the fish disappears, you’re in trouble -- it means your brain is ignoring input from one of your eyes.

Vision therapy entailed 12 weeks of driving to Worcester and doing exercises three times a day for 10 minutes each. Between that, practicing music, karate and managing to do any schoolwork, we had an awful lot on our plate. But it helped immeasurably. Afterwards, my son could write an entire story with hardly any complaint, and the writing was actually legible and at grade level.

Lucky me, now we’re back there with my daughter, who’s now 5. She would rub her eyes whenever I tried to work with her on her math workbook, and tilt her head to the side. Unlike my son, she won’t complain -- she’ll just refuse to do anything that’s “hard” or pretend she has no interest in reading and writing. When I try to “buddy read” with her following along as I point to the words, she can barely make it a few minutes without rubbing her eyes and saying she’s tired. I’m really, really hoping my third child doesn’t have vision problems, because I’m tired of spending one afternoon a week driving back and forth from Worcester.

Aside from that minor complaint, I’m very grateful I caught these problems before my children got older. The vision therapy office is usually full of middle-school kids who’ve likely been told for years “you just have to work harder” or “you’re not paying attention.” Many of them have been falling behind for years and have finally been crushed by the sheer weight of their middle-school homework. Vision therapy can help the vision, but it can’t help the years of feeling stupid or the hours lost struggling with homework.

In the home school, excess whining or running from the room in tears is generally a good indicator there might be a problem. In a class with 20 or 30 other kids, vision issues can often be missed, or misinterpreted as poor behavior or a learning disability. Some things to look for are: holding a book very close, squinting or covering one eye, holding the head at an angle while reading, constant poor posture during close work, poor attention span and fatigue. Correcting a vision problem can make a huge change in a child’s life. I can sure see the difference.

Published in the Groton Landmark on February 17