I have three kids. My eldest kid was the kid I was most nervous with, but I think that is normal as many parents experience first time nerves with their first child. My second child was quite easy, she was rather quiet and well-behaved. By the time it came down to my third child, I thought I would be an expert. Boy was I wrong. My third child was the most complex of them all. He was loud, fidgety and cheeky. He was, and still is, heaps of fun, but he was such a handful. When he started school, the teacher reported that my son seemed to struggle with a few things. He really struggled with placing things according to size. There was a task with various sized squares and he just could not line the boxes up in order from smallest to largest. He would then get increasingly frustrated with himself. I decided to book a behaviour optometrist appointment and it was extremely helpful. The optometrist assessed my son’s level of right and left awareness, letter reversal recognition, awareness of shapes, visual memory and discrimination, and overall visual analysis skills. We came to learn that my son struggled with visual perception and had a very slight struggle when it came to eye movement control.
The benefit of these tests and looking into these problems at an early age meant that we could start looking into therapy to treat these issues. Over the years I noticed my son’s visual awareness skills started to improve, and he seemed to be getting a lot less frustrated with himself when completing certain tasks. Every now and then I would take him for a review at the eye doctor. Brighton has a really lovely beach so I’ve worked the beach visit into the routine. This helps him feel a lot less self-conscious about his appointments as he gets to have a pleasant day off from school, rather than the day focusing on his struggles.