OnTrack Reading

I teach reading, primarily phonics. I’m not a doctor, nor am I dyslexic, nor do I have any children who are dyslexic. Your child’s teachers have probably already told you that dyslexia is a medical diagnosis, and I guess they’re probably right even though this position helps the education community avoid responsibility for addressing the needs of a child who can’t seem to learn to read. Unfortunately, as I said on the previous page, the medical community generally has no answers, only diagnoses.

In spite of this, I think I can help you determine whether your child is dyslexic. Essentially, I think dyslexia is a developmental issue. My experience has taught me that certain vision skills must be in place before a child can handle the task of learning to read. And, vision skills of the sort I’m talking about are developmental in nature. A baby doesn’t have them. They develop on a schedule of sorts in response to his needs to get along in the world. But some kids don’t develop the proper vision skills. We end up thinking of them as dyslexic, not because we know they have poor visual skills, but because we see the symptoms. These children struggle to learn to read.

The Importance of Well-Developed Visual Skills

Visual skills are not the same as visual acuity. Almost all of my young clients have had vision exams and their parents have been assured that the child can see print clearly (although some do require prescription glasses to achieve that.) That is, the children I see have acceptable visual acuity. Unfortunately, they almost always have poor visual skills. That is, both eyes don’t work together well to form a clear, single image of the print they are viewing. An exceptionally good website to visit to better understand these issues is childrensvision.com, especially the page titled Vision and Reading.

Find a Good Developmental Optometrist

If, after reading the vision information here and at childrensvision.com, you decide that your struggling reader should be further evaluated, the profession that diagnoses and treats visual skills problems is called Developmental Optometry. A developmental optometrist is a fully-trained optometrist who has decided to further specialize in treating vision skills deficits. As a reading instructor, I have found that developmental optometrists offer a huge piece of the long-term solution to the problem we call dyslexia, though professionally they are just diagnosing vision skills problems and then treating those problems, usually with vision therapy. (Another necessary piece is effective phonics instruction.)

You can find the nearest developmental optometrist by visiting their organization’s website at covd.org. Once there, put your zip code into the “Locate a Doctor” search box on their home page. Note to those in other countries: Use the “Advanced Search.” With some browsers you might have to click through twice after selecting your country to get to a listing of developmental optometrists. If the first click yields no results, try clicking “Search” again.

So, how did I come to feel so strongly that all children (and adults too, for that matter) who struggle with reading are suffering from undiagnosed, untreated, vision problems?

The Genetic Component

The tendency toward poor visual skill development most likely has a genetic cause. To put it bluntly, it is very likely that the reason your child is struggling is because either you or your spouse also struggled to learn to read, or else one of you has a parent, or brothers, or sisters, or uncles or aunts who struggled. It’s a 50/50 gene and is carried by either father or mother. If you carry the gene (whatever gene or combination of genes it turns out to be) and you have ten kids, about half of the ten kids will learn to read easily just like their classmates and about half of them will struggle, just like you or your spouse did (or a bunch of other close relatives.)

How do I know this with such certainty? A few years ago I began to recognize a pattern in my client base. Parents kept mentioning that one child learned to read easily while another struggled. And if there were several children in the family, it seemed like another child besides the one I had as a client was also having trouble. Furthermore, I noticed how many times a mother would mention that her husband didn’t like to read either, or that she herself only began to feel comfortable reading when she became an adult. Now, I probably never would have taken it beyond that, except that for the past couple years I’ve had the opportunity to give reading level assessments to children being brought to a vision therapy department for vision evaluations.

An Informal Survey

Most parents bringing their child to a developmental optometrist for a full developmental vision exam are doing so because they are already at their wit’s end trying to figure out why their child is having so much trouble learning to read. Or, if the child can read reasonably well, he either tends to avoid reading or complains of headaches or fatigue when he reads. I would estimate that well over 90% of the children brought to vision therapy departments have reading issues of some sort, and that most are found to have vision skills deficits that require vision therapy to correct.

So, for the past two years I’ve asked the parents a simple question after doing their child’s reading assessment. I ask them if either of them remember first grade being a tough time in school. If a child can’t learn to read along with his peers in first grade, that child is going through his personal version of hell, and he tends to remember the experience. (Just a reminder: I use the masculine pronoun, but there’s just as many girls with vision problems as there are boys.)

I ask the question in that particular way because people will admit to first grade being tough, whereas they won’t easily admit that they didn’t learn to read on schedule, especially if they still don’t read very well. I’ve asked the parents of over 100 children that question. Now, I’m not doing this as a rigorous research project by any means, so I’ve missed a few along the way, and I’ve never even gone back over my notes in an attempt to total up all the answers.

A Consistent Response

Nevertheless, almost every time I’ve asked the question, the parent I’m talking with opens up and reveals that one of the two parents or a significant cohort of near relatives (aunts/uncles/grandparents) of the child struggled with reading.

Answers range from “That would be me, I just skim articles,” to “My husband still doesn’t like to read,” to “My oldest daughter has always gotten headaches even though she likes to read,” to “I really hated school until I hit third grade and then everything started to make sense.” Almost none of the parents I’ve asked respond with “No, I can’t think of anyone. Both my husband and I have always liked to read and so do our other kids,” or some similar answer.

Bear in mind that most of these parents don’t really know much at all about the sort of vision issues that cause reading problems. You might not either, for that matter, since I haven’t said much about them in here yet. So they can’t tell me whether they had vision problems. What they can tell me is that, yes, a pattern of reading problems runs in the family.

Update: Since writing the above, the number has grown to 200 children and I’ve been more persistent in asking the question. Over 90% of parents confirm that a reading problem runs in their family. In nearly all cases, their child who is struggling with reading has been found to have vision skills issues that can be addressed with vision therapy.

So What’s Going On?

Here’s what I think we’ll eventually find. There is no reading gene responsible for poor reading. But there is a gene that affects child development unfavorably and one way it does so is to cause a delay, either temporary or permanent, in the development of normal visual skills. When this gene is active, your child’s vision skills will not develop normally and that is what will cause his reading problem. If he has a great phonics education and doesn’t get beat up too much by the system during his struggles he just might learn to read, but he’ll tend to avoid it because the act of reading makes him uncomfortable visually.

I’ve known class valedictorians with vision problems that make them uncomfortable but who managed to excel because they got proper reading instruction at the outset and were encouraged to work twice as hard as everyone else for thirteen years of schooling. That’s doing it the hard way, but it can be done and it no doubt built a great work ethic.

Is It Dyslexia?

Here’s how I think you decide if your child is dyslexic. Let’s assume that your child was (or is now) an otherwise normal six-year-old who seemed to struggle to learn to read compared with his or her classmates. If you had an older child already go through school without a problem, the difference will have been obvious. If you had a younger child who passed the older one by with little effort, this too will have been obvious. If you or your spouse had the same thing happen to you, or to a couple of your brothers and sisters, your child is probably dyslexic.

But what does that menacing word, dyslexia, mean to you now? Here’s what it should mean, based on my personal experience with a couple hundred children. Your child inherited a genetic condition that ultimately manifests itself as vision problem that can cause trouble when your child attempts to learn to read. About ten to fifteen percent of your child’s classmates are in the same boat, by the way. What should be your response to this situation? My suggestion would be to start looking for a developmental optometrist, as you’ve no doubt figured out by now.

Still a Long Road Ahead

I can’t close this section without cautioning you that a lot of time, effort and expense still lies ahead of you and that the ultimate outcome still might not be satisfactory. I’ll go over some of the difficulties in later pages and I’ll give you an idea of the expense and the time involved if your child needs vision therapy. I’ll also go over the cases I’ve had where vision therapy wasn’t enough and where even a combination of vision therapy and phonics still wasn’t enough. And remember, despite everything I’ve said here, I could be wrong. In fact, a lot of people will tell you that I’m almost certainly wrong.

But you’re the parent. You know your child and you know when people have been wrong about your child in the past. They’ve said things about him or her that you know in your gut are just plain not true. They’ve said he’s not working hard enough. They’ve said he just needs more time to mature. They’ve said he doesn’t pay attention, and even suggested that he needs medicating. They’ve implied that you’re doing something wrong in parenting. You’ve heard it all if your child is in third or fourth grade already.

And by now you also have a pretty good idea whether or not I’ve accurately described your child’s situation. If I have, you’re also wondering whether I might be right to suggest that your child probably has an undiagnosed vision problem. As the parent, it’s up to you do decide how best to help your child, so whether all the others believe me or not, it’s what you believe that really matters.

The next few pages of The Dyslexia Puzzle describe my perceptions of what dyslexic children have to endure during their school careers if their vision problems go undiagnosed and untreated. If, instead, you want to get right to a discussion on diagnosing and treating the vision problems, you can jump ahead to The Vision Piece (of the dyslexia puzzle). Other sections you might want to check are The Diet Piece (of the dyslexia puzzle), The Exercise Piece, The Auditory Piece, The Phonics Piece and The Policy Piece.

Note: If you’re new to this site, the list on the sidebar is the Table of Contents for this Guide to Overcoming Your Child’s Reading Problems. A quick scan now will help you navigate the site easily because the sidebar appears on each page you are reading. (Scroll up the page to see it.)

Next: Can Dyslexia Just Disappear?, or return to the OnTrack Home Page