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We had our meeting with the optometrist to discuss DS7's vision testing results.

It is quite clear he has a delay/issues -
Scored 0 on the figure/ground test!
The eye tracking while reading shows exactly what I observed having him read to me - he skips words, loses his place - yet somehow his comprehension is good. The graph showed that his eyes don't effectively track together and often diverge from each other. Comprehension is grade 4 level, but eye tracking of a 3 yr old! No wonder he's tired and frustrated after school!

She claims that he has mild primitive reflex issues - I don't know, it still sounds odd to me...

But the rest of what she said made sense. She did say that if we do nothing he'll eventually develop the skills and catch up, but that vision therapy can make his eye movements more efficient, faster...

However she's recommending we sign up for a program of 38 weeks of therapy, at ~$6,000 (Canadian)! She'll re-evaluate every 8-10 weeks.
It seems like a long time, and a lot of money that my insurance won't cover...

What are other people's experiences? How long did your kids do therapy for?

I am typing this sitting in the waiting room while DD is doing vision therapy...

We were told it would be 6-8 months if we come twice a week. Probably a year if we come once a week. The "vision gym" is 45 minutes from school/ 30 minutes from home so a HUGE time commitment. It is covered by our insurance, though. I am estimating about $1500-$2000 out of pocket by the time we are done. Plus of course another few hundred dollars in gasoline costs.

DD is now 10 and I first noticed visual perception issues at 18 months. She has not only not caught up but her visual perception scores were 40+ points below her verbal comprehension scores so it is well worth it to us to give it a try.

We started a course of vision therapy for DS13 last spring. The DO told us 20-40 weeks depending on how hard we worked at home. Well, we HIT it at home every day. I had to record all the exercises we did each day and we did 730 over the course of 22 weeks and finished close to the minimum time. The exercises are quick and varied so that's about 10-15 minutes of vision therapy each day and 22 therapist sessions.

I had to drive 45 minutes each way and pay out of pocket so I was very motivated to finish quickly like Pemberley. DS hated most of the exercises but he could tell his eyes were getting stronger, tracking better and simply had more stamina by week 10.

DS also had depth perception and convergence issues. He has always had problems with clumsy slip and falls, almost on a weekly basis, and vision therapy radically reduced this problem. Poor guy. I wish I had known sooner. Maybe he could have even learned to catch a ball.

Thanks Pemberley

How long has your DD been doing the therapy? Is it helping?

My gut says we should do it despite the time/cost. DS has frustration and self-esteem issues - after the appointment today I can see why.
It's good to have a reason - his teachers had me thinking he just gives up easily. Now I can see just how hard he must be working to compensate for his vision!

Thanks! It's good to know that it can work relatively quickly...

DS is also clumsy - we previously had an OT assessment done which suggested DCD. But now I'm wondering if it's not mostly visual.

DS has bruises all over his legs, and has since he started walking! I used to think it was normal, that it was a boy thing - but he still bumps into things regularly. If we can help with that I'm sure he'd be happier!

Our VT recommended 36-48 weeks of treatment. The contract was about $7K. Instead, we chose to get one unit of 12 weeks with an option to extend. If we did the whole course it would a bit more than prepaying all at once, but it looks like two units/24 weeks will probably be enough, and we were able to see some progress before paying for the second unit.

Yes, progress. Before, DD8 could only comfortably read a font with inch-high text on a dark background, on the iPad. Now she can read a normal book! Her pencil control is improving, too. She wiggles less; she used to be in constant motion. I wonder if that was her way of getting depth perception, with eyes that couldn't coordinate well?

My son ended up being in VT for 2+ years and more extreme due to him being born with some physical issues that directly impacted his left eye. We paid out of pocket too. I think we were paying about something like $125/every two weeks. Yes, it was a financial killer.

My son had tremendous progress with the VT. I am big fan of it. I was skeptical in the beginning, but then my son had such eye-hand coordination and visual perception issues, gross/fine motor delays, sensory and attentional issues. He also had years of pt/ot before he started VT. The VT, though, helped with the visual system being integrated more and made a huge difference.

The visual system accounts for about 80%. Helen Keller still have to use her visual system to assess where her hands, legs, and the rest of her body was in space. She had to use her visual system for her spatial memory and to track things. Visual system is much more than visual acuity or 20/20 vision. Our brains and bodies rely heavily on the visual system.

ljoy, may I PM you about this?

Of course.

So DH talked yesterday to the vision therapist - it sounds like they are willing to start with a 12-week plan, if that's what we want. She explained a few more details:

'Over a period of weeks, we work on monocular motor skills (fixations, pursuits and saccades), eye teaming (convergence and divergence), accommodation (spatial awareness on the z axis for identification), and visual perception (visual thinking). We customize the program to identify and target the adaption’s and coping strategies each person uses to facilitate efficient visual processing. '

Another question - did any of you talk to your child's teachers about their vision issues? We just recently added accommodations for DCD to his IEP, but it seems to me like the vision issues better explain some of his difficulties. However the school year is almost over and I don't want to confuse everyone with yet another 'thing'...

DD8's vision was clearly impacting her second grade work, since it kept her from reading normal-size text, made it hard to copy from the board, and gave her trouble keeping digits lined up in math, among other things. We are blessed with an IEP team that understood even better than we did and suggested accommodations, plus the teacher really tried to help. For instance:
Magnifier available for text (she hates it so didn't make use of it)
Standardized testing done with a specialist, either photocopy enlarged, with a huge font on a computer screen, or read aloud to her, depending on the test
Math work done on grid paper
For now, ignore reversed letters and digits; if math answers are wrong, consider whether switching digits was the error. If so, ok to mark wrong, but don't count it against mastery of the topic.
Reference lists of spelling words, etc provided as a paper handout rather than only posted on the wall
Put a slip of tracing paper over spelling lists. Half of her repetitions of writing the word can be traced instead of copied. This is helping her handwriting dramatically. The teacher introduced this when she saw DD take her paper to the window to use it as a light box for tracing the words.
DD came up with something the class adopted: laminate a 100 chart for each kid so it can be drawn on with a dry-erase marker to do math tasks that involve tracking along rows or columns.

To help with acceptance, the magnifiers, grid paper, and I think even tracing paper were offered to any kid who wanted them (but required for DD). They were popular for less than a week, then the extras went back to the assistive technology closet.

I wish the two private gifted schools my ds attended for part of pre-k and k had a clue about visual issues, but they didn't. They didn't understand how it affected his gross/fine motor skills, speech, attentional and sensory issues; why he struggled to play soccer, for instance, for gym and with writing. They also didn't understand how the tracking and visual discrimination impacted his reading and phonics ability. Oy. Ds was in vt then and wore the ambient glasses.

One of the schools claimed to be the 'visual spatial' school or for those kids, but this equaled with having a very visually stimulating classroom/school and doing a considerable amount of online work. All of this negatively impacted ds because he would get visually overstimulated at a drop of a hat; the school didn't grasp that concept. At all.

Ds didn't need to be visually 'awakened'. In fact, it was quite the opposite. He couldn't visually filter what was relevant and what wasn't in the schools and kept getting distracted and losing focus. He wanted to take everything in - visually.