The Light Barrier: A Color Solution to Your Child's Light-based Reading Difficulties

by Rhonda Stone

Overview

The Light Barrier: One family's journey to understand a barrier to reading that may affect millions of children and adults worldwide.

Countless children with Irlen syndrome, involving sensitivity to aspects of light, have been misunderstood as lazy, slow, inattentive, dyslexic, ADHD, or just plain "troubled," when, in fact, what they suffer from is a correctable problem.

Rhonda Stone's daughter Katie was struggling at school, despite hours of help each night with homework. She also complained of physical discomfort and constant difficulties with seeing and reading, even though she passed repeated vision exams. By chance, while looking for a solution to help her child, this mother encountered a controversial but scientifically proven solution that has already helped thousands. Her personal story shares with readers the latest information gathered from three continents and shows what can be done about this highly prevalent, commonly overlooked, but readily addressed problem.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781466871106
Publisher:	St. Martin's Publishing Group
Publication date:	05/13/2014
Sold by:	Macmillan
Format:	eBook
Pages:	240
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Rhonda Stone is a journalist, education and health writer, public information specialist, and most importantly, a mother whose children were diagnosed with a little-known form of light sensitivity. Respected for her ability to assimilate, organize, and communicate complex information in easy-to-understand terms, Stone has studied the condition extensively. She lives in the Pacific Northwest.

Rhonda Stone is a journalist, education and health writer, public information specialist, and most importantly, a mother whose children were diagnosed with a little-known form of light sensitivity. Respected for her ability to assimilate, organize, and communicate complex information in easy-to-understand terms, Stone has studied the condition extensively, and wrote The Light Barrier. She lives in the Pacific Northwest.

Read an Excerpt

The Light Barrier

---

By Rhonda Stone

St. Martin's Press

Copyright © 2003 Rhonda Stone
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4668-7110-6

---

CHAPTER 1

THE RISE AND FALL OF A CHILD

Katie is fair and lovely. At age thirteen, she is tall and slender with the kind of cheekbones I always wanted when I was a girl. At that age I remember sucking the insides of my cheeks together and puckering like a fish in an attempt to produce the high, full cheekbones she produces with just a demure smile.

Katie is a normal American youth through and through — normal in every way but one. Just before her eleventh birthday, Katie was spiraling downward into a pattern of frustration, irritability, and school failure. She struggled to read, rarely smiled, and found it hard to keep friends at school.

It is hard to watch a child struggle. And puzzling to see a normally developing boy or girl hit a wall in the second or third grade. That is what happened to Katie. She hit a wall that no one could explain — until a chance encounter introduced our family to an invisible barrier to learning.

TENDER BEGINNINGS

Katie came into the world on a crisp November morning. She was beautiful, her eyes almond-shaped and her brown hair distinguished by a single shock of gold toward the back. From infancy, Katie was fascinated with the world. On a shopping trip at a week old, she nestled in my arms in a sun-yellow pram and studied the bright lights and black-and-white images around her. The pupils of her eyes were like mysterious little pools of oil that had not yet committed to brown or blue or green.

As a toddler, Katie loved bold colors. Her favorite book at age two was Moo Moo, Peek-a-Boo, a brightly colored picture book that had us oinking, neighing, and hooting through its pages. Books were not strangers in our home. Katie's room, from the day we brought her home from the hospital, was full of books.

In some settings, Katie was a little shy. Her first preschool class was at a local gymnastics center, where the windowless gym was filled with murky fluorescent light. Initially, Katie preferred my knee to the noisy bustle of her classes. After a few weeks, though, she acclimated and joined in enthusiastically.

Katie's second year of preschool was spent at a Catholic school. The lighting in the old house where preschool classes were held was more like home — incandescent bulbs and plenty of large, unobstructed windows. She was very comfortable in that setting and adapted quickly. She no longer clung to my knee. There, Katie's teachers were loving and down-to-business. One afternoon, as the children played on the school's outdoor gym equipment, Katie's teacher predicted she would have an interest in science when she grew up. I asked her why. She pointed to Katie sprawled on the sidewalk, studying a column of marching ants. Katie, she said, loved to study and observe.

Katie's progress continued to be consistent with that of the other four- and five-year-olds in her preschool class. In fact, quite to our surprise, our non-Catholic daughter recited her Hail Marys so well that she was chosen to recite at the spring all-school program at the end of the year.

Our daughter did not lack for opportunities to learn and grow. Beginning at three and four, she took swimming and ballet lessons. In swimming, she started out a little fearful of the water, but quickly got over it. In ballet, she seemed a bit uncomfortable with the brightly lit classroom where she danced once a week. In the windowless room, Katie often stood timidly, knees pressed together, elbows bent and held tightly to her body. It was as though she were trying to make herself smaller. I thought it rather unusual, but never troubled her about it.

Just before the start of kindergarten, Katie knew her letters, shapes, and numbers and could pick out a few words in her picture books. In fact. the first word she could spell from memory was book.

Her kindergarten teacher inspired in her a love of preparing healthy foods. At age six, Katie appeared at our bedroom door for the first time, a black lacquer tray carefully balanced in her hands. She was treating us to the first of many breakfasts in bed. In a bowl, white liquid sloshed gently over the sides. Her creative masterpiece consisted of a bowl with seven small-sized shredded wheat biscuits in a mixture of half milk and half water. The concoction was sweetened with a sprinkling of sugar. I ate every bite with visible delight and lavished praise on Katie for the delicious meal.

Other than mild shyness and her unusual behavior in dance class, I cannot think of a single thing that might have suggested possible delays in Katie's academic development. Through first grade, she appeared to do fine in school. As long as the print was large and there were only a few words per page, her reading appeared to keep up with her classmates'.

One classroom reading activity, however, caught my attention. In this activity, the teacher worked with first graders all week to familiarize them with photocopied poems and short stories. On Friday, the text-rich pages came home in binders to be "read" by children to parents over the weekend. Nearly every Friday, Katie and I would snuggle together, usually on the sofa, and read. I would follow the words with my finger while Katie chanted the words. At first it appeared she was reading. Soon, however, it became apparent that Katie was using her memory skills to recite the verses. Her chanted phrases and the small print had little, if any, connection to one another. Even simple words she knew — is, it, the — were lost to her in the paragraphs of text. When I inquired about it, her teacher assured me this was normal and part of the program. The goal was not necessarily to develop reading skills per se, but to develop an understanding of the relationship between printed stories and spoken words. I accepted her explanation and thought little more about it.

Katie's classmates began to write letters, numbers, and short words in kindergarten. Inventive spelling was encouraged in the first grade. Katie was a master of inventive spelling and her teacher always seemed to be able to read and understand it. I was not as skilled. Katie's early print was erratic and difficult for me to read.

"MOMMY, I CAN'T SEE"

Shortly after the start of second grade, Katie complained she couldn't see to read. As soon as she shared this, I took her to a vision professional to have her vision checked.

Testing was typical of most vision exams. An assistant led Katie from the waiting room to a room in which she was seated in front of a boxlike device called a stereoscope. She was instructed to look through the dark box at illuminated images in order to measure her depth and color perception, as well as the ability of her eyes to work together. Katie passed all tests with flying colors. Then, in a dimly lit room, she was asked to identify large letters from a softly illuminated Snellen eye chart. She passed all her tests and her vision was pronounced to be fine — with a slight indication she might one day have trouble with distance vision. The optometrist recommended against glasses and asked to see her again in a year.

Soon after Katie's eye test, her teacher advised us that she was falling behind her peers in reading. Of greater concern to her teacher, however, was that Katie regularly engaged in daydreaming. Rather than pay attention during reading and instruction time, Katie would be off in her own world, looking out the window, at the ceiling, at the floor. When we asked our eight-year-old about it, she answered in her usual direct fashion: "Mom, Dad, school is boring." We gave her a gentle pep talk, put the issue on our ongoing radar screens, and marched her back to school.

My husband and I, for our parts, were sorely inexperienced in the area of child development as Katie progressed through school. I was the youngest of four children and my husband the second to the youngest of seven. Each of us had the academic achievements of older siblings to chase after as we progressed through school, and both of us found grade school remarkably easy. In retrospect, I realize now that neither of us had a clue as to what to expect our first child to accomplish in the early years of school. When she was a toddler and preschooler, we had a couple of paperback books to help track her progress — and she nailed every milestone. But the birth-to-age-six books ended just about the time Katie started school and, with her apparent normal development, it didn't seem necessary to track her milestones beyond what classroom teachers would tell us.

By the third grade, Katie appeared to have little interest in being an A or B student, although she did complain once again at the start of school that she had difficulty seeing in her classroom. This time, besides finding it hard to see the words in her textbooks, she specifically complained that she couldn't read the words on her classroom's white board. We took her to the optometrist again, where Katie's vision was checked once more. Her vision was again pronounced to be near 20/20, with the same caution that she might have a problem with distance vision in the future.

With her vision declared to be fine, we expected good school performance from her, and at first, she appeared to meet the challenge. But month after month, she slowly and steadily fell further behind. Occasional reports would come from her teacher that Katie struggled to keep her attention on the books and paperwork in front of her. She looked out the window too much or fidgeted in her seat — anything to avoid doing her work. The red flag we all ignored was Katie's handwriting. In the third grade, it continued to be the large, erratically spaced, and sloping print she began with in the first grade. She hated cursive with a passion and, whenever possible, avoided using it. Her loops and curls were just as erratic in size and configuration and the resulting words were difficult to read. When I asked her third grade teacher about Katie's difficulties in printing and handwriting, she shrugged it off: "We see this all the time. She'll catch up."

Another source of concern was Katie's spelling. After nearly three years of inventive spelling as the accepted standard, I began to wonder when she would understand that just any old set of letters scrawled on a page would not necessarily communicate meaning to the rest of the world. Adding to the confusion was the fact that Katie did fairly well on spelling tests, but couldn't spell even simple words when asked to write paragraphs. When I tried to encourage her to spell better, she became extremely defensive. "This is how we do it in class, Mom. This is how it is supposed to look."

Propped up with plenty of assistance at home, Katie passed from grade to grade with good to average marks. By now, her single lock of blond was long lost to a thick mane of shoulder-length chestnut hair. Occasionally teachers remarked that she needed to concentrate or focus more. These comments never came in the form of intervention, complete with cooperative problem solving. Her handwriting continued to be poor and her spelling inaccurate and inventive. I encouraged her to work a little harder at both. We began to have Katie do her homework at the dinner table after school so that her father and I could monitor her work. She resented our watchful eyes and our involvement. As she put it, such attention made her feel dumb.

It is difficult to look back on those days now. They are the types of memories parents prefer to throw in a boneyard of family moments best forgotten. Katie would open her social studies book and stare. Her eyes would lurch from word to word. She would get to the bottom of a page and remember nothing about the text she had just read. She would read end-of-chapter questions and stumble through the two or three pages where the information was located, unable to find a single key word. It was almost as if she were blind. More than a time or two, frustration ebbed to the top of my throat and I harshly delivered a shameful question. "Are you blind, Katie? Can't you see it? It's right there!"

"No, Mom!" Katie would fight back. "I can't see it!"

Katie became acutely aware that post-school-day life for her revolved around the dining room table and homework. It was a house rule that homework must be completed before the kids could engage in other activities. Because of the length of time it took Katie to do her homework, however, we modified the rule for her, allowing her about forty-five minutes of non-school-related activity before she cracked open the books. She worked for about an hour and a half before taking a break for dinner. After the hour-long dinner break, she returned to her homework until bedtime. During soccer season, when Katie participated on a team, she skipped the after-school break and we squeezed dinner into twenty or thirty minutes. This modification provided the necessary two to three hours for homework.

Katie's fourth grade teacher told us our daughter should not need to spend more than twenty or thirty minutes on each homework assignment. Ha! What is she thinking? I thought to myself. This should have been another signal that something was amiss. Clearly, what Katie ought to be able to do did not match what she was capable of doing. We couldn't seem to get this point across to any of the professionals we assumed would be able to spot an academic problem in the making. Our daughter clearly was falling into an alpine-size academic crevasse.

Homework was not the only struggle. I had known for some time that Katie had trouble sleeping at night. I attributed it to stress. Routinely she came home from school red-eyed and exhausted, the fatigue causing her to be irritable in class and on the playground. Her extreme moodiness at home by day's end explained to me why she might be struggling to keep friends. At some point during her third grade year, I spoke to Katie's pediatrician about how quickly her eyes would become red when she played outdoors. He assured me she was probably just more sensitive to light than most children and recommended sunglasses. It never occurred to me to press him about the red eyes and fatigue she experienced at the end of each school day — including bad weather days when children weren't allowed to go outside. I simply had not yet put together all the relevant pieces of our daughter's physical issues.

At the end of the summer just before the start of fourth grade, Katie complained again that she had difficulty seeing the words in her books. I asked her whether she would be willing to try glasses and she was enthusiastic. We returned to the optometrist, and after she had a thorough screening that yielded the same results as appointments past, I insisted she be fitted with a prescription for her slight nearsightedness. Katie's optometrist agreed, in light of the difficult time she was having in school. Katie chose a fashionable gold frame, and because she continued to come home every day with bright red eyes, I talked her into photo-gray lenses that would automatically darken in bright light. This, I figured, would address the problem with light sensitivity that Katie's pediatrician thought was caused by sunlight.

RISING TO THE CHALLENGE

Katie started fourth grade with her new glasses. Still, she read slower than other students and routinely stumbled over words. She qualified (sort of) for the school's challengers group for B students; I did a little begging to get her into the class. It was my position that she was bright and needed more hands-on activity, such as that offered through the challengers program.

Getting her into the class was worth the effort; no program inspired her more. She soared, scoring a perfect one hundred percent for the quarter, compared to a class average six or seven points below. Part of the program included an Invention Convention, where Katie's design for a self-cleaning pet cage, complete with indoor plumbing, took top honors in her category.

Katie loves animals the way chocoholics love chocolate. She came up with her mesh cage design as a method of improving sanitary conditions for animals in pet shelters. The cage's floor had two layers. Animals sat, stood, or laid on the top mesh layer, urine dropping through the mesh to a slanted tray three inches below. The tray operated like a drawer and could be slid out when pet attendants needed to sweep animal stools into the tray. The tray was also plumbed with a movable water hose and flexible drain for periodic flushing.

(Continues...)

---

Excerpted from The Light Barrier by Rhonda Stone. Copyright © 2003 Rhonda Stone. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---

Table of Contents

Contents

Title Page,
Copyright Notice,
Dedication,
Acknowledgments,
Foreword by Robert Dobrin, M.D., F.A.A.P.,
Before You Read,
PART I: A HIDDEN PROBLEM,
1. The Rise and Fall of a Child,
2. A Chance Encounter and a Child's Life,
3. Jacob's Dilemma,
4. Family Revelations,
5. Katie and Jacob Are Not Alone,
6. A Threat to School Success,
PART II: THE PROBLEM REVEALED — SENSITIVITY TO ASPECTS OF LIGHT,
7. Life-Changing Discoveries,
8. "Kids Like Us",
9. How Do We See?,
10. Bridging the Gap,
11. Signs, Symptoms, and Color Filtration,
12. Not Dyslexia and Not ADD/ADHD,
13. Solving the Mystery of Irlen Sydrome,
PART III: HELPING OUR KIDS,
14. The Right Way to Get Help,
15. For Parents,
16. For Professionals,
17. Our Children's Futures,
References,
Internet Resources,
Studies for, Against, and Neutral to the Use of Color,
Index,
Copyright,