How Can Parents Help Children With Learning Disabilities?

The subject of children with learning disabilities is one to which millions of dollars are invested by distressed parents every year in both the western and the developing worlds. They realize that their children face massive difficulties in life if they cannot excel at school, and they are geared up to spend time and cash into programs, tuition and added facilitate for their struggling children.

Although there is no simple and complete answer to this query, there are hundreds of organizations and individuals who think that they can help, so for the distressed and often confused parent, where should they turn? It all seems too difficult, too high-priced and the results are often too ethereal to determine, with everybody claiming they have the “top secret component” that will cause the invention the child needs.

So, as a practitioner working in the area of learning disabilities for two decades now, I would like to proposal a standpoint that may provide some clearness for those distressed parents of children with learning disabilities.

As a Behavioral Optometrist I know that the most ignored area of learning is vision.

I am not simply talking about whether a child can see or not, because clearly most children with learning disabilities see equally as competently as those who read competently. Vision is more than simply seeing: it is seeing, understanding and interpreting their world. It involves all that comes to a child through the eye door. It is over 80% of all a child takes in while learning.

So, I reasoned, if we teach the visual skills a child has to facilitate them improve their interaction with the world, will we see an escalation in their school accomplishment? The answer is a loud “YES!”

This makes complete sense, doesn’t it? If we require our child to be a fantastic footballer, we send them to football practice to teach them the skills of the game.

If we require them to be good at tennis, we send them to tennis coaching so they learn and teach the correct skills. If we require them to play piano, we don’t simply sit them in front of the piano making them play over and over again, do we? We have piano lessons, and they learn the skills that are necessary to play the piano.

Yet, when it comes to reading, we simply force children with learning disabilities to read repeatedly. Doing the same thing incessantly, expecting a different result is the definition of insanity, isn’t it? Remedial reading, making them read more and more despite the fact that we are expecting them to phenomenally get better, is the linchpin of learning, yet it hardly ever works, and takes a long time to cause even a small improvement.

Please don’t misread me, I am not criticizing remedial teachers. They have far more endurance than I, that’s for sure! Nevertheless, in a lot of cases, the chief subject with children with learning disabilities is that they are lacking the skills desired for the job: they are deficient in visual skills!

Behavioral Optometrists have long acknowledged that, if we teach the necessary visual skills, then children with learning disabilities get better rapidly in their reading and spelling abilities. There’s no magic, there’s no crazy un-scientific theories, there is the straightforward assertion which is the same as that which parents consent to when they put their children in football, tennis or piano training: if you teach the basic skills, you will facilitate the overall deficiencies in reading, writing and spelling.

I have personally overseen thousands of children with learning disabilities who have improved their learning enormously by training the basic visual skills, such as eye movements, focusing, eye coordination, visual memory, sequencing, left-right awareness, fine and gross motor and the like.

This expert training is usually hard to obtain and very expensive, but now there is a home based, tremendously cheap option obtainable to parents who are struggling with children with learning disabilities. It may not be the answer for every child, but it is more than probable that your child will be deficient in these areas. Please, don’t struggle with your children and their learning disabilities any more, take positive action today and increase their learning ability to light speed now!