Vital Visionaries: Andrea Tellier – Vision Therapy Helped My Kids to Overcome Learning Challenges

Introduction and family background 0:00

Hi, my name is Andrea Tellier. I'm from Grand Rapids, Michigan. Um, I am a mom of three children and an occupational therapist of 30 years. As an OT mom, I realized somewhat early on in my children's lives that they were learning to read a little bit differently than I expected that part of

Early reading and comprehension concerns 0:31

life would go. I noticed that instead of sounding words out in a traditional way, they would read a sentence and they might skip over some words. And they read the word beautiful instead sight words such as a, an, and the. And I began to be intrigued and concerned about that. And then I also noticed at times that we were having some difficulty with comprehension, especially to testing. So being an occupational therapist, I thought I'm going to need to employ some of my own skills here to figure out what's going on because I had a difficult time finding anyone that was an expert in the area of concerns.

Vision therapy and early breakthroughs 1:29

After beginning vision therapy, I realized very quickly that we were going to be on to some newfound successes. I was pretty surprised at how quickly, as Bryce speaks of the eye-brain connection, how that started to come together for my voice. I remember distinctly being in our local grocery store and walking through a section where my son looked over at some artwork that was on a couple of beer cases that we had absolutely no intention of purchasing. But the words were on the slant and it was very artistic and he looked up at me with big huge eyes and said, Mom, I can read that.

And I still remember the type of craft beer that it was, and we stood there in the aisle just embracing and hugging each other and being so surprised.

Sports improvements and family commitment 2:37

He had, at that time, participated in only three vision therapy sessions, And we'd done five sessions of home programming. We suggested to them that we thought it was really important that embark upon a journey of vision therapy. And it might take a long time. This was going to require some dedication on our part to work through our convergence insufficiency and our visual challenges. They didn't balk at it. They kind of realized themselves that these were going to be their people. And so we initially attended visits for the purpose of improving learning and making reading and academics easier.

It didn' t really take very long at all before the boys started noticing some increase in their automaticity for sport. Then I would say that was the absolute hook. We noticed that exit below and hitting went up. We notice automaticity in the infield when fielding ground balls and so vision therapy just very quickly became a way of life.

Overcoming skepticism and finding help 3:43

So I was just actually not even five minutes ago having this conversation with a cohort of mine here at Family Tree Therapies. If there was one thing that I could do, I would totally go back to about age four or five or six and access the services that we did at age 10 and 15. Unfortunately, I listened to a very dear cohort of mine who I respected, and when I thought that vision therapy might be something we needed to look into, the advice that I received was, oh, that's just quackery. And I still will never forget that word until this day because I hung on to it.

It stuck in my mind and for three years we didn't. But after three year I realized that there was only one service that was going to provide some significant assistance to us and it actually was vision therapy.

Seeing the brain-vision connection differently 4:49

So in this case, I feel that being a vital visionary means that one not ought be concerned about looking at life through a little bit of a different lens. I think that what we see in our work with vision therapy is that we are able to address the brain vision connection in a number of very creative ways.