So cried my son for about 5 minutes after being disciplined this afternoon for refusing to cooperate with his exercises. I understand. It's not fun. It's just a bunch of boring exercises with his eyes that he has to do for 15 minutes a day in order to improve his eye muscle coordination and eventually enable him to do things like read a real book. (Right now he has major tracking problems - in addition to other visual weaknesses - to the point where his doctor said that when he looks at a page of words they probably just scramble all over the place to him.)

I have repeated to him that if he does his exercises every day, then he'll be able to finish vision therapy much more quickly. But for him it's another way to challenge mom's authority. He cooperated brilliantly with the eye doctor in a 45-minute appointment on Monday. He has since been extremely resistant to cooperating at home with me. I expected it - he has a way of resisting any change to his normal schedule anyway - but I had hoped for better.

Obviously logic is not going to win this battle; it's going to require persistence on my part. I'm tired from constantly battling my children for control, but I'm not about to give in. Because I know that if they win these fights, in the end they lose.