S has been asking me a question this week. I need some help answering it.
The question is this:
‘How do you close your eyes?’.
I realised a few years ago that S couldn’t voluntarily close his eyes – not to blink, wink, or close them – like for when we are playing hide and seek etc. He can close them for sleep, he can blink normally. It’s just the voluntary closing he can’t do. It just seems to be a quirky little aspect of his injured brain. A missing connection…
It hasn’t really been an issue. After all, he can close his eyes when he goes to sleep and blink regularly. His eyes aren’t sore and he can see just fine. If he wants to close his eyes to play a game, he just uses his hand to cover them.
But I think an activity at school early in the week where the children were blinking and winking has got him thinking. Hence, he’s raised the question for the first time.
He told me he had thought that maybe if he closed his mouth, then his eyes would close, but it wasn’t working. And he’s asked me several times now how he could close his eyes.
So how do I answer a question like that?
My answer has been that he’s just got to practice. Not particularly helpful, I know. But it’s the best I can come up with so far.
A while back a behavioural optometrist came to S’s kinder to check all the kids and declared that S would benefit from some sessions with her. We didn’t take her up, mostly because we had too much on. But I’ve been thinking it could be worth a visit to help him with his eye tracking and concentration. Wondering now if she might also have some advice about this tricky issue.
Has anyone been to see a behavioural optometrist? Does anyone or their child have this issue? Any ideas about how I can help my son learn to close his eyes would be most appreciated. Thanks 
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I haven’t got any advice, but will be interested to hear about behavioural optometrists. Emma has ‘very poor’ tracking ability apparently so am curious to hear what they do.
Ah yes, I know the feeling of, ‘what, more doctors/therapy/gagdets?’. My 6 yr-old stepson has spastic diplegia and, we discovered last year, serious vision issues in terms of tracking, focus, etc. He was already wearing glasses, but he was also having huge problems learning to read, write etc. He was tested for all sorts of things, and someone recommended vision therapy. His Mom and Dad and I were a bit skeptical, but though we needed to give it a try. We started it at the end of last school year, worked throughout the summer with in-office sessions and home practice. We also had tutoring all summer long to try to help with the academic tasks he was behind on. Basically his eyes would (and still sorta do) loose their focus and he can’t ‘see’ anything but a blur of lines, and couldn’t follow a line of text etc. While he still needs to look away, or give his eyes a break during school tasks, say every 6-7 minutes or so, he has made HUGE strides. His reading skills are slowly coming along and he now loves math. Before he got very frustrated when we tried to read and write numbers. Go figure. He had to repeat Kindergarten (combination of being too young – in hindsight – and the vision issues) and this year he is in a Special Ed classroom. He has a ways to go, but it looks like he is on track to meet his goals this year and hopefully transition into a mainstream first grade class next year. Send me an email if you want more info.
Mac can’t close his eyes voluntarily. I presume it is a whole muscle control thing. mac’s structure around his eyes isn’t right yet, still waiting for a true bridge on his nose to appear, broadening around that occipital area, cheek bones to extract themselves all courtesy of the ‘structural collapse’ we ABRs get taught about. it would be really interesting to see what the behav. optom. could do for S thought.
Gina
Di, I am keen too to hear what the beh op might say. It might be the learning to control yet another movement by doing it a zillion times? I had both the kids sitting on the couch blinking and scrunching their eyes up after this post xo
It’s interesting how there are so many things we just don’t think about! When Sebastian is in the tub, I tell him to close his eyes before pouring water on his head. He has now learned to anticipate it and closes his eyes just before the water hits them, sometimes before the water hits his head from my verbal cue and sometimes after it hits his head. Its become quite a fun game that we play as he loves having the water go over his face. But he still drinks in the water, so I think for us the closing the mouth bit will be trickiest.