Children & Vision
Children and vision development differences can cause delays in reading and writing. Attention is hard to sustain when the eyes are not directing unconsciously to the desired location. A full vision examination for a child considering the eyesight, eye health and eye coordination results and adds additional visual processing tests to best understand the vision. This is required before vision therapy can be recommended.
I recommend individual one-to-one vision therapy programmes alongside glasses, or where no glasses are required but visual processing is significantly below developmental age levels. I also recommend eye control and eye coordination programmes that may interconnect with developmental visual skills, however, this is not always required.
As members of the Australian College of Behavioural Optometrists we are trained in providing individual programs in office and supplementary home activities.
As the optometrist I enjoy working through these more difficult and thought provoking problems. My vision therapist and I guide children through individual programs to address these.
Visual fatigue with screen use are occurring in the child population. There are good solutions in glasses and these must be teamed with people specifically attending to changing habits or choices with screen use.
Children and vision development differences can cause delays in reading and writing. Attention is hard to sustain when the eyes are not directing unconsciously to the desired location.
Eye control starts in earnest from the time we are born. Some difficulties directing the eyes and generating complex binocular control may result in amblyopia, strabismus (turned eye), binocular dysfunction from vergence insufficiency and accommodation insufficiency.
Some problems resolve with sight correction in glasses and contact lenses. But some are variable problems recurring based on the amount of reading, or concentrated viewing with computer screens. These can occur within high precision sports such as target shooting and with fatigue in multisporting.
Attention, focus and directing the view are hard to sustain when the eyes are not correctly directed automatically to the desired location.
Binocular vision therapy works on these types of difficulties and generates a new understanding that we control the eyes globally before attending to the detail. This may be a short process to gain improvement for some but it will be a lifetime of visual awareness for others. It is not a surprise that eye control can be less accurate when we are tired. It is important that attention be sorted with an optometrist when the view blurs or even doubles up.