Many children diagnosed with ADD, ADHD, or dyslexia actually have functional vision problems. Reading struggles like losing your place or skipping lines often come from how visual, auditory, and language processing work together, not a missing brain region. Bright screens and busy environments can cause sensory overload with dizziness and headaches.
I really want people to hear this. The way optometrists go to glasses is similar to the way that doctors kind of just default to antibiotics.
You may be wondering, does my kid have ADD or ADHD or dyslexia? Losing their place with reading, skipping words, skipping lines, even just being resistant or reluctant to reading. These are all incomplete diagnoses until functional vision problems are ruled out first. And it's not like somebody's born missing a portion of their brain that allows them to read. It's faulty integration of the visual processing centers, the auditory processing centers, the language centers, and not creating the right pathways and connections there. Screens are hard to look at. It's hard to read. We get sensory overload in environments like the grocery store mall where there's all this input that we can't filter. Dizziness, nausea, headaches. I mean, there's so many symptoms there. But then even the simple, as we get older, we all think that cognitive capacity drops, vision problems occur. And although that's common, that's not normal.
