Senin, 29 Juni 2009

The Power of Glasses For Children With Learning Disabilities

by Darin Browne


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

As a working Behavioral Optometrist for over 25 years, I recognize that vision is the main sense in the classroom, with larger than 80% of all information coming in by way of the visual system. So it makes perfect sense that any interruption in vision can affect a child's learning ability. However, having a straightforward eye examination is very often far short of supplying the answers despairing parents are looking for.

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

Reduced concentration,

Aching eyes or excessive eye rubbing,

Headaches or exhaustion 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 lots of of these difficulties, and they can often be considerably decreased by a expert eye assessment and the appropriate reading glasses. But is it as much as necessary? Does only putting glasses on a child and helping their fundamental visual difficulties mean that the child is cured?

Clearly this is often not the case! How can a pair of glasses assist a child to spell better? How can glasses stop a child writing things in reverse, or assist them to code or sequence more proficiently? Yes, I am the first to concur that reading glasses can assist mitigate lots of problems in children with learning disabilities, but throughout the years I have come to recognize that more is required.

The thing is that, even wearing the right glasses if they are necessary, these children lack the visual skills required to achieve the task of reading, writing or spelling. These skills are not inborn, neither are they magically given with any piece of equipment, such as a lens, a colored lens, an ADHD tablet or anything else. They have to be learned, and they have to be learned properly if the child is to advance in their learning to become an effective student.

This makes total 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 teach the appropriate skills. If we want them to play piano, we don't only sit them in front of the piano forcing them play over and over again, do we? We have piano lessons, and they learn the skills that are considered necessary to play the piano.

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

So if you recognize children with learning disabilities, having an eye assessment is a wonderful place to start, but it is very often not a excellent place to finish. Why leave the task half done, with all of their visual skills under developed? Why sentence them to keep struggling when, with the appropriate training system, you could see impressive and fast results.

The subject that remains is, where do you find such a program> Despite the fact that there are lots of therapy programs available through Behavioral Optometrists, there has been very little available until now on the internet.

Children with learning disabilities should be given every possibility to progress, and only giving a pill or a pair of eyeglasses may not be the full treatment they require. If you want to see if your child could be helped in their learning difficulties by training the correct visual skills, then go to see our site for free symptoms lists and more, and see for yourself how powerful vision therapy can be for helping children with learning disabilities.

About the Author

To discover positive, holistic and effective solutions for learning disabilities you can start using right now, visit learning disabilities.

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