OnTrack Reading

As I said earlier, when the parents of children who need vision therapy are asked, most of them indicate that others in the family have struggled with reading. However, in many cases where it was a parent who also struggled, that parent now reads and even reads willingly and easily. In other cases, they still tend to avoid reading. What’s going on here, anyway?

Some Vision Problems Resolve by Adulthood

From what I know of the sorts of vision problems that cause reading difficulty, those who eventually become willing, efficient readers get there in one of two ways, assuming they never undergo vision therapy. One way is for the particular vision problem to correct because the parent finally develops the affected visual skill. In other words, somewhere between first grade and present day the parent finally developed effective visual skills. Since such skills are developmental in nature, this is not implausible.

The second, and probably more likely, way is for the adult to eventually suppress the visual input of one eye to the point that reading is effectively being accomplished with only one eye. Both eyes are open, and seeing clearly, but the brain is only accepting print input from one eye.

I have a pair of polarized glasses in my office that can be used to tell if a person’s eye convergence skill is in place. I was trying to show a parent how they worked, but when the parent put the glasses on, one side of the visual field was black. This is what would happen if a person was completely suppressing visual input from one eye. Here was a parent who had been using one eye to read and had no idea that the adaptation had taken place.

Once a person, or rather the person’s brain, has accomplished the task of suppressing visual input from one eye, they can deal comfortably with print. Their near-point depth perception might suffer, but at least they aren’t getting two conflicting inputs because of an inability to focus both eyes simultaneously on the same spot. The brain removes the conflict by eventually selecting a primary eye and ignoring the other’s input.

So, in either case, would vision therapy be a good idea for an adult? In the first case, there’s nothing left to remedy because the vision problem resolved favorably, and in the second case there’s always the risk of reintroducing confusion without then resolving that confusion. In other words, vision therapy could make things worse. Plus, in both situations the adults are reading and able to do other close work.

But Some Adults Still Need Vision Therapy

But if you, as an adult, are still struggling with print, and particularly if you clearly don’t even want print pushed in front of you, then maybe you should have your vision examined by a developmental optometrist. If reading or other close work is always accompanied by headaches or other feelings of discomfort, vision therapy might be considered because then you aren’t really reading effortlessly. Again though, sometimes poor reading is a result of a lack of phonics knowledge and auditory skills, and the real solution is a phonics course.

In reality, except for the occasional college student who takes vision therapy to enable him to be able to handle the reading load in college, very few adults undergo either vision therapy or phonics training, even though some of them would obviously benefit from either.

Besides, in many cases it’s just too late. Recall all of the trauma associated with being unable to read well in school? Childhood trauma can have a lasting impact and many of the behavioral issues that are generated persist into adulthood. Studies by developmental optometrists indicate that large proportions of our jail populations suffer from visual skill deficits that have gone undiagnosed. Other studies show that large numbers of inmates have reading problems. This is no coincidence, as the two problems are related.

A Mix of Outcomes

So, either adults have improved or adapted to their visual systems over time and are able to live normal lives, or they have adapted their lifestyles to live with their vision deficits (many spend as much of their day outside as possible, far from books and other close work,) or they have done neither. In many such cases the frustration and trauma caused by their inability to adapt results in behavior that earns them jail time. Regardless of outcome it is probable that very few adults ever receive vision therapy and most never even get an accurate diagnosis of their deficient vision skills.

Next: Dyslexia Remains a Puzzle, or return to the OnTrack Reading Home Page