It started with my son Arlo.
He’s never been what you’d call an avid reader. In fact, he often avoids it altogether. And while some kids just aren’t into books, I started to wonder if there was more to it. He’d squirm, lose focus quickly, and say that reading made him tired. But when you’ve never seen the world any other way, how would you even know something's different?
Then I heard about something called Irlen Syndrome—almost by accident. A friend casually mentioned it, saying coloured lenses had helped her child with reading. I was intrigued. Coloured lenses? It sounded too simple, almost too strange. But curiosity got the better of me, and down the rabbit hole I went.
Irlen Syndrome, I discovered, is a perceptual processing issue. It’s not a problem with eyesight itself—kids can have perfect 20/20 vision and still struggle. It’s about how the brain interprets visual information. For some people, black text on white paper can appear distorted, blurry, moving, or doubled. Words can seem to jump around or fade. And here’s the thing: if that’s the way words have always looked, how would you even know that’s not normal?
Reading about Irlen Syndrome was like finding a missing puzzle piece. Could this be why Arlo finds reading so frustrating? What if it’s not that he doesn’t want to read—but that he literally sees the page differently?
What really struck me is how something so subtle could have such a big impact. I watched videos of kids trying on coloured lenses for the first time, and their reactions were nothing short of emotional. “The words stopped moving,” one said. Another smiled and simply whispered, “I can read.” All because the lens colour filtered the light in a way that calmed their visual processing.
It’s still early days for us, but I’m so grateful to have found this information. Not because it’s a guaranteed answer—but because it opens up a new possibility. And when you’re a parent, sometimes that’s everything: one more path to explore, one more way to support your child.
So if your child avoids reading, complains of sore eyes, gets tired easily while doing homework—or just doesn’t seem to enjoy books the way others do—it might be worth asking, could it be how they see the words?
There are Irlen screeners and specialists who can assess this properly, and if it turns out to be the case, something as simple as a coloured overlay or lens might make all the difference.
Who knew that something so small could change the way a child sees the world—and their place in it?