Tips For Parents With Children Who Have Visual Disorders
Summary: Some children have special needs and they need educational help or other types of help outside of their family structure. Sometimes the state fails these children and parents need to learn how they can help themselves. This is especially the case when children do not have all five of their senses. However there are plenty of things that parents can do to ensure that they get the help that they need.

Children with visual impairment have special needs because children learn through mimicry and when children cannot see they cannot mimic. Charles Darwin discovered over a hundred years ago that blind children could make faces that other adults in the world recognised easily. That meant that showing emotions such as laughter and pain was innate. Children were born with that ability and they did not have to learn it.

However there are many things that children have to learn by sight and effective coping strategies are needed as soon as a child is diagnosed as being visually impaired. Sometimes a visual impairment may be a secondary problem, this does not mean that visual impairment is trivialised but it means that the child may have other more immediate life threatening problems. Tests have to be carried out to assess the level of visual impairment.

Parents are most vulnerable around the time of a diagnosis because it is hard to accept that child is not perfect, it is then that they have the most questions and need the most advice. Support groups in the community and within the family have not been established. There is the possibility that the child may be ineducable within mainstream education and a blind child may need a special school.

The need for a special schools rarely frighten parents, but there is always the possibility that there may not be a special needs school locally and the child will be separated from the family and have to go to boarding school. Once a child has been diagnosed as being visually impaired, there are a large number of unanswered questions, such as are there surgical options open, if not immediately later in the child’s life.  

Visual impairment has no respect for culture, race, creed or economics and often visual impairment creates extra money worries for a family hard pressed economically. As if the prospects were not bleak enough parents have often to face a low expectancy from professionals who ought to know better. Parents should try and inform themselves as to how to help visually impaired children before they are labelled as slower. Intensive programmes for early intervention can encourage parents to take a hand on approach to educating their children and this make the difference between the children keeping up with their peers or lagging behind.

Today we live in a world that education is power and the first rung in the power game is literacy. Parents of visually impaired children may have to face the fact their children will have to learn to write Braille. They can then store     the information and communicate it with others normally. Blind children must have the power to awaken their intelligence fully so that they direct their own studies and not be labelled slower than other children. Literacy for blind children means using computers as a means of storing information and retrieving it by means of printers and other computer technology.

One of the coping strategies that parents can put into place is the development of the other four senses of hearing touch taste, and smell. Children may not be able to see traffic but they can hear it and be made aware of it. Many blind children develop other senses more highly and blind children can be far more sensitive to the touch of Braille.  

One of the things that blind children find difficult to understand because they cannot visualise it is spatial awareness. Spatial awareness is normally developed by the age of sixteen and rarely develops later. This means that they find directions difficult. This problem is even worse for blind children or partially sighted children. They may go upstairs in their house but they have not made the connection between the two floors. They are not aware that one storey is on top of the other and parents can assist to foster this understanding. A useful tool is play with a dolls house even for boys because it assists blind children to make that connection.

The importance of role models is important especially those blind adults who have become high achievers such as Andrea Bocelli the blind opera singer and Ray Charles and Stevie Wonder. Blind children can love music and be made aware from a very early age that the musician is blind.  In the case of Andrea Bocelli he first trained as a lawyer. There are special challenges for both the parents and the blind child, but there is no reason at all that the blind child cannot be a happy and productive member of society.