I brought my DS7 last night for the first part of a binocular vision assessment. Second part is tomorrow.
The optometrist examined him doing a lot of things that seemed to be different than a normal eye checkup. From her initial assessment she thinks he has convergence insufficiency - which I kind of suspected she might say. It was clear to me that he had trouble following a moving object, and also converging his eyes on an object brought close to him. He would be able to do it until fairly close the first time, then would get tired and so performance subsequent times was worse. She also did a bunch of things with lenses, which I didn't understand - making things fuzzy, then double, etc.
She also asked questions about whether or not he crawled and seemed to think it was a big deal that he mostly skipped that stage (he walked at 11 months). Also she thought it was a big deal that he can't really swim yet despite many lessons (which I had thought was mostly a sensory issue, maybe DCD). I don't know - I guess I don't see the connection between the crawling and swimming and binocular vision. (DD10 also went straight to walking at 10 mos. and has no vision issues that I know of.) She also started going on about retained primitive reflexes - which I've not heard of before.
I took him for assessment because he does seem to have issues that may be vision related - or they may be just DCD - or both? He bumps into things, gets tired quickly when reading or doing close work (fine motor), has trouble finding items on a crowded background. So if he has convergence issues, maybe vision therapy helps with these things?
Anybody with experience with this? How do you know when you get a good optometrist/VT? I just want to be sure we're not wasting time/money ...
