My son and daughter have a very whacky vision disability – exophoria/esophoria with convergence insufficiency. Some people have told me ADHD, some people have told me Dyslexia…for me I don’t care what you call it, my children simply struggle intellectually, emotionally, behaviorally. Through my journeys, I have met quite a few people who might be holding perceptions and teachings that were flat out wrong about my children’s challenges. As a parent, before the meeting with the school, please educate yourself as to what the top 10 misconceptions are about your child’s disability. As a teacher, seek to understand and learn and keep an open mind when the parent is educating you about their child’s struggles/disability.
Here’s my top 10 list of misconceptions about Convergence Insufficiency:
- Vision Therapy is this new age thing – it just is another ploy that preys on parent’s hearts and does not work. Well tell that to my son – he’s living proof it does work and works very well on multiple fronts.
- Computer Work can cause more eyestrain to the visually impaired – well it could, but with adaptive software that reads to your child the pages, writes for your child when they speak, allows the screen fonts to be larger and allows for the child to control the brightness – computer technology actually assists the visually impaired. They actually have a chat messaging software that allows a blind man to chat with his children at college.
- There is no such thing as Convergence Insufficiency – it’s ADHD. Convergence Insufficiency and ADHD do exist and they share overlapping symptoms which makes it very hard to diagnose Convergence Insufficiency. A good behavioral optometrist can help rule out Convergence Insufficiency.
- Sitting too close to the television and reading for prolonged periods in dim light can be harmful to the eyes. The eye functions much like a camera in focusing light and, because of this, the dimness of the light or closeness of the object will not harm it any more than taking a photograph in dim light will harm a camera. Adequate illumination, however, can make reading easier . As for sitting too close to the television harming eyes – the question needs to be raised why is the person doing this – is there a hidden vision impairment that the person is struggling with?
- Eye Muscle Surgery will fix Convergence Insufficiency – Not always – so forms of this disability are congenital and cannot be fixed with surgery and with Convergence Insufficiency – surgery is not recommended.
- If a child is transposing letters and numbers, they should be examined for Dyslexia. This is not always true – my son did not have Dyslexia and was tested by the national center of dyslexia and he ended up being gifted with Convergence Insufficiency (diagnosis made by behavioral optometrist)
- Large-print and/or magnifiers help tremendously. Sometimes, but are not always the answer. Usually regular print, as long as it is crisp, sharp, and with good contrast and no glare, is best. In fact, the worst thing you can do is give a low vision kid fuzzy, smeared, blurred, or faint copy–no matter how big it has been enlarged.
