Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Twice Exceptional Uncertainty of 2e

N, vision therapy is controversial, but you'll also probably find that it's more widely accepted and practiced than you might anticipate. As I mentioned, I was very skeptical when it was suggested for our dd. Like your ds, she had never mentioned *anything* to us in anyway that suggested she had issues with her vision. Prior to neuropsych testing, she'd complained that she had difficulty reading what her teacher wrote on the board, so we'd had her eyesight checked by our regular eye dr and it was 20/20, no concerns. I did, however, know another mom who's dd had been through vision therapy and it had made a tremendous difference for her re reading ability, so she reassured me it was worth going through the eval. I still wasn't convinced, so I asked our eye dr expecting to hear that it was bogus nonsense (which is what our ped thinks), and instead found out that our eye dr feels it can be really really helpful for people who have vision issues due to muscle weakness. She helped me understand the difference in her exam vs the developmental optometrist - the conventional eye dr is looking at acuity of eyesight, the developmental optometrist is looking at how the eyes function together. So she totally believed it was possible that our dd could have had a 100% a-ok exam with her and still have vision issues. I also found out, when talking about it with a teacher at school, that a staff member at our school was undergoing vision therapy - her eyesight had begun to bother her at 40, so she just assumed it was normal aging and she was headed for bifocals, but that wasn't what was up - she had convergence issues that developed later in life, and she went through vt and it resolved.

SO.... we decided that it was worth at least going for the eval, which I was allowed to sit in on. At one point they asked my dd to tell how many points she saw on top of a baton held up about 6 feet away from her. There was one baton, she saw two points. She said two as if it was as natural as night and day, and had absolutely no idea that none of the rest of us weren't seeing two of everything also (she was 7 years old at the time). I have no idea if she'd had double vision her entire life, but once the vision therapists told us what signs to look for, we realized she'd probably always had double vision. So that's the thing with young children and vision - they've never looked through anyone else's eyes so they don't know they don't see the world the same way other people do. And double vision was tricky too because the brain will shut down the vision in one eye if it gets too overloaded with trying to process visual information (hence the double-vision seems to go away). That doesn't mean there isn't an issue though - when you are only seeing through one eye, peripheral vision is extremely limited, depth perception is off, and you tire quickly when trying to read etc.

Sorry for the long reply!


FWIW with reading, we have a dd (different dd) who has an actual reading challenge (not vision-related) - she's been through extensive testing by a reading specialist (vision-challenged dd also went through a not-quite-so-intensive dyslexia eval prior to her vision testing). I've found the reading evals to be really helpful - you might want to consider more in-depth reading testing too if your ds hasn't already had a thorough eval. I'm not sure what type of eval your tutor is using- there are literally (or at least it seems like it!) tons of different skills to assess when looking at the skills that together go into reading.



FWIW, our dd who has a reading challenge has a wide range of conflicting opinions/diagnoses depending on who evaluated her. Her 2nd grade teacher was concerned that her reading, although at grade level, should have been higher based on her verbal communication skills - so she was tested at school, found to be at grade level, hence no concerns from school. We (parents) were concerned, dd hated to read, so we had her evaluated by an independent evaluator with sped experience (evaluation included full ability vs achievement testing plus dyslexia screen). The tester found that dd had an issue with associative memory that significantly impacted her ability to associate a letter with a specific sound, hence the challenge with reading (although *not* a dyslexia diagnosis and not technically an LD, per the tester). DD was evaluated again a year later when we needed more help trying to figure out a game plan for remediating reading - this time by a reading specialist who administered a wide range of reading-skill-specific tests, and once again found the same issue with learning and remembering sight-sound correlations. The reading specialist actually diagnosed dd with dyslexia, and dd's been working with a tutor through the reading specialist on a specific reading program which has made a huge difference - but it didn't give us what we needed to fully understand the impact of her associative memory challenge with respect to other academics, and it also didn't give us the documentation we needed for accommodations at school that had been recommended by both of dd's previous testers. SO... we were referred by dd's ped for a neuropsych exam. Keep in mind, we have an older ds who is 2e, and his neuropsych exams have been extremely valuable in understanding his challenges and in putting together a roadmap forward, so we expected that we would get at least some clarity from dd's neuropsych exam. But nooooo... the ability scores didn't match her previous ability scores, her achievement scores were off the charts (makes no sense, if you believed the ability scores), and the neuropsych pooh-poohed the extensive testing run by the reading specialist and insisted that dd's only issue with reading was that she was bored. I know enough about my dd to know that the neuropsych was totally out of touch with the eval... but just wanted to put that out there as an example of how complicated getting to the root of issues can be with gifted children.

Again, sorry for the long ramble! Hopefully some of it helped

Best wishes,

polarbear