Why Should Your Youngster See a Behavioural Optometrist?
There is long been a close relationship between behavioural optometry and learning difficulties. In a world where learning difficulties seem to be more common, behavioural optometry exercises a unique role in helping these children.
Clearly there is a relationship between learning, Reading and the ability to see. But behavioural optometry and learning difficulties goes far beyond just a child’s ability to see. Any eye test that produces the diagnosis of 6/6 or 20/20 vision has completely missed the impact that vision difficulties can have on learning.
Behavioural Optometry Does it Work?
Many people have discovered behavioural optometry Australia wide, and have explored this is an option when the child is struggling at school. While there are many outrageous claims of treatments that help children, behavioural optometry exercises and lenses are based in solid science.
Learning difficulties, especially reading difficulties, involve many deep and complex visual skills. But there is far more to testing the child’s eyes than finding out if they are long and short sighted. Most eye tests only examine if a child is long or short sighted, and there eye health. Behavioural optometry exercises a unique ability to go far beyond other forms of eye testing.
Behavioural Optometry and Learning Difficulties
Behavioural optometry has a long tradition of working with learning difficulties allsorts, including dyslexia. Instead of offering a mere diagnosis, which most dyslexia testing office, you can actually offer a solution.
So what gives behavioural optometry and learning difficulties this unique relationship? The fact that a behavioural optometrist can go further than just “long or short sighted”testing is the key. A behavioural optometrist looks at eye movements, focusing, eye teaming and visual processing.
What this means is that instead of doing a test at a distance of 6 m, we can test children’s focus and eye teaming at the actual distance that they read at. By relaxing the stress that they are under when doing close work, behavioural optometrists achieve great results.
The Behavioural Optometrist and Dyslexia
Dyslexia is another condition that behavioural optometry as had a lot of success in treating. Behavioural optometry and autism have also been successfully linked from many years. In essence, any learning difficulty would benefit from the unique testing provided by a behavioural optometrist.
The Link between Behavioural Optometry and Learning Difficulties- It Goes Beyond Reading Glasses
The relationship between learning difficulties and behavioural problems has long been recognised. The source of the behavioural problems is often related to stress for frustration experienced when a child tries to learn. Some of this stress and frustration may be due to the task the child is asked to do. But some of this is frequently due to the length of time the child is asked to converge and focus on page.
By reducing the tension on the eyes when reading, learning disabilities and behavioural issues can be significantly helped by the appropriate reading glasses. However, glasses are not the full story in many cases.
In addition, a behavioural optometrist can also suggest vision therapy to train the actual visual skills that children use when they are reading. In my practice, I have developed my own brand of vision therapy which is cheap, easy to do at home and highly effective in helping children with learning difficulties.
In this vision therapy, I am able to train skills like visual memory, focus, eye teaming, directional skills, eye hand skills and much more. These are trained in a game environment, meaning the children are excited and enjoy their vision therapy rather than enduring it!
After 30 years of practice I can clearly see the link between behavioural optometry learning difficulties. I know the positive effect that the right type of reading lends can have on a child’s learning. But if I were to tell you that putting glasses on a child will improve their spelling, or their hand eye coordination, or stop them reversing letters, then I would certainly be lying!
These sorts of issues a developmental issues, and they require the right vision therapy to develop the skills that are lacking. I believe I have discovered vision therapy that works in achieving this exact result. It’s not glasses, it’s a home-based therapy program that allows children to develop the skills they need to read effectively.
So if you have a child who is struggling at school, make sure you get an eye test. When it comes to that eye test, you need to also recognise that behavioural optometry and learning difficulties frequently go together. You should also understand that our behavioural optometrist offers different tests and different treatments to a regular optometrist. If you are serious about overcoming your child’s learning problems, you need to see a behavioural optometrist today!
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