We take for granted the roll of sight in development of social, physical, emotional development. When vision is impaired, socialization and understanding what is required of may not make "sense" to a kid. They may in fact be labeled weird, or even inaccurately diagnosed, when the remedy was an issue of sight and not a cognitive or social issue after all.
Our child’s maturity has increased over the course of her 1 year Vision Therapy sessions with Dr. Susan Kim and her amazing staff. When she first started here, she would hide under the desks, and regress to toddler like behaviors. When she would decide to leave the cover of the desk, she would interact perhaps awkwardly, in a stand back way watching the response of the technicians and other children in the therapy space before she engaged further.
Once she engaged further, she may not have been sure of the right behavior or words, and often one can see the "immaturity" but the fact that she was given permission to observe and evaluate the appropriateness of her response was encouraging and told us as parents that this was the right center for her Binocular Vision Therapy. The staff accepted her and each session she had with them we saw improvement.
The “play” with the toys in the treatment room has also matured. Her imagination (Theta) was overpoweringly dominant at the onset, however, by the end of her treatment program, her verbal and physical play matured drastically to age appropriate levels.
Prior to Vision Therapy, she would push back emotionally and refuse to do work or check out daydreaming. What they were asking her to do was very difficult for her considering her Binocular Dysfunction, inability to focus, double vision, blur vision, depth perception issues which caused dizziness, nausea, and low confidence. It was never that she could not understand content, it was that her ability to keep track of that content as it changed was nearly impossible. She would go on overload and her understanding of what was being required was not a linear processing as is required in the classroom setting.
These may seem like small changes, however they are happening because the neuronal pathways are changing and new neuronal growth I suspect has happened. These seemingly small changes translated into enormous gains:
- Her language skills have improved. Better flow and level of descriptive words.
- Her ability to keep up academically in a school setting where things are moving faster have also improved beyond measure.
- Her confidence has skyrocketed.
- Her social life has been transformed. She is now “popular” and sought after for play dates, when once she was labeled weird and teased.
- Her coordination has increased 10 fold.
- Her depth perception issues have disappeared.
- Her reading level went from 2nd grade to 9th grade. She has just started 7thgrade.
- Her mathematic strengths are finally showing up in her “grades” and it is spilling over into her skills in science.
- Her emotional resilience has improved and she rarely breaks down in crying fits.
- Improvement in AD/HD related issues.
- She can drown out distractions and focus on tasks better than ever.
- Improved attention & flexibility.
- Her anxiety has reduced.
Anxiety is prevalent when stress enters the picture. Stress becomes more intense when children in learning situations have difficulty due to their need to find their own method after observing that the 'required" method is less effective for them. The longer you wait, the more crippling the anxiety becomes in your child. I wish we would have discovered this sooner.
With attention you want flexibility so that one can choose and implement a range of attention types or styles. When our child first began her sessions here, she did not have access yet to the flexibility required to understand and choose a type of attention shifting that was being asked of her. It happens, it takes time, and Visualeyes has the tools to make it possible for your child if you stick with it. Be religious in having your child execute the online classes and once weekly in office sessions.
- SW