How Behavioral Optometry Can Unlock Your Child's Potential by Joel H. Warshowsky

Author:Joel H. Warshowsky
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Jessica Kingsley Publishers
Published: 2014-04-08T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 6

Vision Therapy and Learning Disabilities

A significant segment of our children are not being successfully educated by our current mainstream educational programs. This is true even though serious well-intentioned attempts have been made by boards of education to bolster educational systems with therapeutic services. Nevertheless, the success at individualized education remains unimpressive when your child is the one not able to learn. As stated throughout this book, the lack of success is due, in part, to a lack of exploration into the role that vision has on reading and learning.

Children experiencing learning difficulties have been given various labels: developmental alexia, developmental aphasia, minimal neurological dysfunction and maturational lag, minimal brain dysfunction, and, more recently, attention deficit disorder (ADD).

Developmental dyslexia, although represented by a small segment of the pediatric population, estimated to affect between 5.3 percent and 11.8 percent of school-aged children, may be additionally included and defined as a severe inability to learn or read through deciphering symbols. Despite adequate intelligence, and education, difficulties may include word decoding and recognition, spelling, and subsequent reading comprehension (Taub 2011). Directionality skills are often underdeveloped, resulting in severe reversal of letters and words. Recognize, though, that mild reversals are part of normal development, typically reducing through the third grade. Academically, the true diagnosis of developmental dyslexia suggests a diagnosis of exclusion. What this means is that, if there are any physical conditions that could create the symptoms presented, those physical conditions must be corrected before developmental dyslexia can be diagnosed.

On the other hand, forms of reading disability are prevalent in as much as 20 percent of school-age children. That’s one in every five schoolchildren. I’d say, without fear of contradiction, that that represents a problem seriously in need of a solution.

Reading disorders are a prominent and ever-present concern that is a subset of learning disabilities. And they may be accompanied by other academic disorders in varying degrees. Then there are the children who fail to learn to read or even fail to learn in general in spite of average or better than average intelligence, average or better than average motivation, and average or better than average educational opportunity. These children have experienced normal auditory and kinesthetic development, normal acculturation, have no evident brain damage, and experience no primary emotional disorder.

Nationally, the estimated prevalence of children with a learning disability ranges from 4 percent to 15 percent, with most teachers estimating that 4 out of a classroom of 25 children had, have, or will experience learning problems. If one considers a conservative estimate of the total school population in the US of 46 million children, then the number of children with some sort of learning disability ranges from 1.8 to 6.9 million.

Recognize that this is not a homogenous group, but rather one that crosses lines of color, religion, social class, and national origin. Clearly, one may assess that an epidemic of learning disabilities truly exists within the US.

Although children with learning and reading disabilities are often active, they are not always hyperactive. They are, however, often distractible.

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