subject: Vision Therapy At Home Must Be Enjoyable! [print this page] Vision therapy at home could be probably the most effective ways of helping children with learning disabilities. Without scheduled journeys to the Optometrist, you can do the activities any time you need, morning, afternoon or night. It requires no appointments, no travel and could be carried out in the comfort of your own home.
But doing vision therapy at home with a child can sometimes be a nightmare! Traditional eye exercises are long, boring and repetitive, causing lots of children to react badly and take it out on the well meaning parents.
What is the missing element once you attempt vision therapy at home? I imagine it is merely having fun
Some Vision Therapy at Home Is Not Fun!
As a behavioural optometrist I have recognized the effectiveness of vision therapy at home for years, but have always had trouble getting children and parents to do the exercises. Doing them myself with my daughter at home underlined how boring, uninteresting, uncomfortable and monotonous the techniques truly had been! She hated them, I hated them, she hated me as well, and the complete process broke down!
Sound familiar? The missing component is having fun, pure and simple.
So again to the start I went and I started to design a therapy program that had fun and pleasure added to it. If you need a child to do a specific exercise, making it fun means that they'll do it with enthusiasm and a smile rather than an enormous screaming performance.
My Vision Therapy at Home is Enjoyable!
Let me take one of many therapies I have frequently used, which involved circling a bunch of numbers three times each, but only in the proper order. Sounds simple, if not a bit uninteresting, but here's the twist The numbers are replaced by numbered flies, and the task entails circling every fly 3 times to "swat it". Then we add a stopwatch, and the child just isn't only swatting flies but racing the clock to beat his greatest time as well.
Same process, but fun is added and the child is now eager to beat yesterday's time and kill as many flies as he can!
This is only one instance of many where adding fun makes things attention-grabbing, and actually causes us to have better outcomes and results as well. It helps if the optometrist is just a little loopy like myself, and if they basically are a child who never grew up (the proverbial Peter Pan Behavioural optometrist if you will). But my purpose was to get kids doing the vision therapy at home effectively, and adding fun makes the duties much more effective.
It is true that some vision therapy at home exercises are boring and can't be significantly made enjoyable, but I attempt to balance any uninteresting, strenuous therapies with some fun activities every week. If the child knows that a enjoyable exercise is coming they'll often see the boring one off as a way to get to the fun one, and so even the boring ones are being carried out effectively.
The Efeectiveness of Vision Therapy at Home
It is well established that vision therapy at home, if accomplished properly with the right guidance, could be an efficient tool to help children with learning disabilities. However, it may well just as easily turn into all-out conflict at home, and that is the principle reason for parents stopping what may very well be the very tool they are seeking to help their child!
Keeping things fun, gratifying and challenging for your child can often hold the key to doing the activities often enough to have a constructive impact on their learning ability. Making things fun means increasing compliance, enjoying the time together and seeing better outcomes, so if you'd like enjoyable and effective vision therapy at home let me know!
Adding the element of fun to your vision therapy at home could possibly be the answer to your baby's learning disabilities.
