I'm considering what to tell the other
parents from Charlotte's nursery class about her vision.
I can see pros and cons to both
sides. One parent sent a note to
all the class parents explaining her son's vision and was so pleased she did.
At this point, I am leaning towards
informal disclosure, and not to its fullest extent: "She wears the
glasses because they help her see better."
"She has quite poor/very bad vision."
Because it is nursery, the time will go
by very quickly and more than half the children will leave by the time they start school. By the time they move into
the proper school, she will have been established for a long time and I feel there will be no need for a big
announcement.
My main motivation for not telling is that I don't want other
parents to worry that they could not take proper care of her. Not so much this year, but soon they will go
for drop-off birthday parties, playdates and sleepovers and I would not want
Charlotte to be excluded from these. It
seems that the less fuss I make about it, the less concerned other parents
would be about it.
Charlotte's life will be full of
decisions about how much to disclose and when so this is just one of the many
steps in that road.
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Hi Kathy- our 2.5 year old daughter is visually impaired, and we think she may have achromatopsia or some other rod/cone disorder (we are in the process of getting testing done). We are upfront about our daughter's vision, but I give an abbreviated version of it when it comes up. My daughter wears glasses, but people are used to glasses fixing any vision problem. So I do add on "she is visually impaired" when necessary. When people watch her, they know she can see and that she gets around quite well - thankfully she has excellent functional vision, even though her acuity is pretty bad. In the US, there is a big focus on teaching kids to advocate for themselves - to speak up and say things like "I can't see that; I need to get closer." etc. but in the meantime, I am happy to advocate for her. I usually don't use the word "blind" - people hear this and assume that she can't see anything. I also will say specific things like "she is light sensitive so can't see very well outside and needs a lot of help." or whatever. I dread going into regular school and having all the kids want to know what is wrong. I plan on adapting my approach depending on the situation. I know that kids don't like to feel different, and I agree about not making a big fuss about it. If your daughter is like mine, she is able to do almost anything and find lots of things especially if she is inside rather than outside on the playground. Outside is harder.
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