My daughter Rylie loves to get lost in otherworlds.
In print, she soars the skies with “Phoebe and Her Unicorn.” On screen, she wades through the swaying hand-drawn grass of “Kiki’s Delivery Service.” And, together, we kick it into hyperspace to cruise the galaxy in “Star Wars.”
There are no limits to where she’s excited to explore. It wasn’t always like this, though. Rylie turned 8 this June. Just 14 months ago, she couldn’t read.
Plus, as we found out later, she had been missing key elements of the worlds that wowed her in books and movies.
That all changed with a conversation that had my wife and me wondering how we missed the signs of her struggles for so long.
Rylie’s reading struggle surprised us
Rylie is an intelligent child. She retains song lyrics and grasps complex game rules. She can quickly end a fight between my wife and me by replaying word-for-word the conversation we had the day before.
Yet, at age 6, she could not read. Rylie’s teacher raved about her work ethic and overall educational acumen.
Rylie clearly had the drive and the tools, yet her reading marks were low. My wife and I could not understand why she struggled.
We doubled down with more teaching and hired a private tutor for $60 an hour, once a week. Rylie’s language skills improved, but she didn’t make a breakthrough with her reading.
That changed with one question.
Rylie’s issue came into focus
The first “aha” moment came one spring day when my wife volunteered in Rylie’s first-grade class. After school, I joined them. That’s when my wife asked Rylie, “What is the word of the day written on the chalkboard?”
Rylie nonchalantly tossed back, “What word?”
“What do you mean, ‘What word?'” my wife and I asked.
“I can’t see the words,” Rylie said without emotion.
Everything came into focus on our end.
“Oh! You need glasses!” we said gleefully in unison.
Rylie’s eye-opening revelation
We took Rylie to an optometrist who confirmed what we’d suspected: Rylie struggled to read because she struggled to see. The doctor diagnosed her with moderate myopia, aka nearsightedness.
After she got glasses, Rylie’s reading marks went up from below average to reading at the level of her classmates. Her math and writing marks have also gone up.
I wish I’d taken a picture of Rylie putting on her glasses for the first time. She had a permagrin as the world around her shifted into focus.
That weekend, we rewatched one of her favorite movies, “Star Wars: A New Hope.” During the attack on the Death Star near the end, she hollered out, “Wow, there’s so much going on in the background!”
My wife and I locked eyes as we realized Rylie’s vision kept her from seeing beyond the central characters in movies. It was another aha moment for me.
I write about family films for Rotten Tomatoes, SlashFilm, and Not Another Kid Movie. While Rylie has seen many more films than the average child, she’s missed a lot of the details.
Because of this, we’re rewatching a lot of films. Her eyes move from corner to corner in amazement. I watch her dazzled eyes with equal dazzled amazement.
What parents should look for
Looking back, there’s one more clue I didn’t notice that other parents should keep an eye out for. Rylie used to get sick on car rides. Sometimes, a mere 20 minutes would make her stomach lurch.
The discomfort was caused by a sensory mismatch. Her brain sensed motion, but her eyes struggled to focus on anything outside the car. The more she looked inside than out, the dizzier she got.
Now, with her glasses keeping her eyes focused and not blurry, she rarely gets sick, even on Oregon’s winding coastal roads.
If I could go back, I’d ask my pediatrician for more specialized testing to earn Rylie back several years missed exploring the world around her, both in reality and in her stories.
She’s making up for it, though. Rylie reads before and after school—graphic novels and chapter books. She asks for movies with powerful cinematography and expansive effects like twisted alien landscapes and bustling animated metropolises, details she couldn’t see before.
I happily oblige, sharing the fictional worlds I roamed as a kid and getting a tour of the new worlds she’s discovered thanks to her new glasses.
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