Here is a great family advice column from the Washington Post on what to do about a smart child who is hopelessly unmotivated in school. The last piece of advice is about vision therapy:
Although an ophthalmologist will tell you how well your son can see, it usually takes a developmental or behavioral optometrist to tell you how well his eyes are working when he reads or when he looks back and forth from the blackboard to the printed page. Some children get headaches because they can’t focus well or their vision is blurry, but they don’t complain because they think that heads are supposed to hurt or that the world is a blur for everyone.
If your son has these or other vision problems, don’t despair. Vision therapy is to the eyes what physical therapy is to the body, and it’s effective 90 percent of the time. He’ll just have to wear special glasses for a little while every day, do some eye exercises every day and maybe play a couple of video games. To learn more, go towww.covd.org, the Web site for the College of Optometrists in Vision Development.The article also gives excellent advice on parents who suspect that their child may have ADD. The symptoms of ADD are often the same as treatable eye movement problems It is smart to see a developmental optometrist for a vision evaluation before getting tested for ADD:
If your son is still quite distractible and fidgety, and if he still has a short attention span and makes careless errors, he might have attention deficit disorder. But not always. One study says that parents should always have their child’s eyes checked before he gets tested for ADD, because these disorders often have the same symptomsImage courtesy of Ambro / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
