About three weeks ago, I took my son to the optometrist for his regular eye exam. He needed new contacts and the prescription had expired. I chose to take him to my vision therapist just in case there might be other issues, but I didn’t really suspect anything.

It turns out that my 16-year-old son has a pretty serious case of convergence insufficiency. It’s basically the opposite of what I have. His eyes give up on focusing together up close and then one eye turns out. (When eyes don’t focus together properly, the brain shuts off one image in order to avoid seeing double, and that’s when the eye turns in or out to move out of the way.)

As with my daughter, I had not noticed his eye turning out and he hadn’t complained about his vision. Andrew’s eyes have been red at times, but I attributed that to a lack of sleep. However, he has always had difficulty completing his schoolwork. It has been an all-or-nothing proposition: he either does it and gets an A, or doesn’t do it and gets an F. He tends to start out the school year OK and progressively go downhill. I think he just gets tired of fighting it. I know he’s extremely bright and all the learning tests have indicated he can do the work, but he hasn’t been doing it. Since he’s not motivated to do schoolwork, he convinced himself he’s lazy! I didn’t believe it before, and I certainly don’t believe it now!

The good news is that it’s really easy to teach the eyes how to converge properly and it should only take about four months of vision therapy. I’m wondering– how much frustration could we have avoided by having this diagnosis occur about 10 years ago, before he told himself he’s lazy? Isn’t it time we really tested VISION, not just 20/20 eyesight?