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moomin, it's good to hear your dd's update - it sounds like she's had a good summer!


I can't give you specific insight into your dd's issues and how her vision may have impacted them, but I can tell you a bit about our dd's experience. She had severe double vision that went unnoticed until she was 7 years old and struggling in school - we never knew it was a vision issue because she didn't realize that the rest of us weren't also seeing two of everything. Even now, at 11 years old, after vision therapy etc, it is still second nature to her to expect to see double and she doesn't tell us when she is unless we ask her - and she then will tell us she "sees two" without blinking - as if it's totally normal (because for her, it is). The other thing that I'd heard can happen with young children and has apparently happened with our dd is that eyesight can change rapidly when kids are young - so a child who has good vision one day may, within a month, have eyesight that is much worse. (I'm talking about actual eyesight here, not visual processing challenges). My ds had had a few difficulties with just a tad bit of farsightedness when he was younger, and his teacher had told us that she had had many students who had issues when first getting glasses because their eyesight would change so rapidly. So - my first thought when I read your question about how can your dd read road signs and still have such poor vision was that quite possibly her vision hasn't always been so poor, but the issue has just recently developed.

Back to our experience with our dd - re vestibular challenges - vestibular refers to balance if I remember correctly - our dd was a kid who routinely bumped into things etc - and that improved tremendously when she first went through vision therapy for double vision (which included significant improvements in her peripheral field of vision) - and now we also see a difference in her balance and overall "clumsiness" when she isn't wearing her glasses and when she is. We also see obvious differences in her proprioceptive awareness with and without glasses, as well as differences before and after vision therapy.

So, yes, I would expect you may see a difference - quite possibly a large, obvious difference.

Last thing I'll add - quite a few of our friends and relative's children have gotten prescriptions for glasses when they were in elementary school. It's been our experience that it's pretty obvious that our dd needed glasses because how she reacted to putting them on and wearing them was very different than the kids who didn't have significant vision issues (but relatively minor needs in terms of prescriptions) - the kids with the minor issues didn't wear their glasses full time, showed more inclination not to wear them either because they were minor annoyances or they didn't want to be the kid wearing glasses etc. Our dd put her glasses on the first time and her world changed - I've never seen a happier kid and never felt so guilty in my whole life for not realizing she'd needed glasses sooner. For the first few months she had them she never took them off except to go to bed. She's morphed back into a kid who now occasionally will appear without them on - but she still happily uses them. I suspect if your dd has 20/200 vision, you'll see that her vision really was challenged once she's had a chance to look through glasses for the first time

Best wishes,

polarbear