Category Archives for Children’s Vision & Visual Development

Children’s Vision – Chat to Your Teacher

The importance of talking with teachers to identify vision issues

A child’s ability to learn is intimately related to their vision. At school, 80% percent of what your child will learn is obtained visually. Think about it, most of their learning happens in front of a whiteboard, computer or book. How the brain and eyes work together has a tremendous impact on the learning process.

Why is vision so essential to learning?

In school, your child will be using a wide range of visual skills including:

  • Distance vision: being able to see the board
  • Near vision: being able to look at the words in a book without effort
  • Focusing flexibility: being able to maintain clear vision while shifting focus from a distant object to a near one
  • Tracking/eye movement skills: being able to aim both eyes accurately and move smoothly across a line of print or from object to object with ease
  • Eye-hand coordination: being able to use their eyes to guide the hands
  • Eye teaming: being able to coordinate the two eyes together so that they are precisely directed at the same object at the same time
  • Eye focusing: maintaining, for long periods of time, completely clear vision while looking at near or distant objects

Common symptoms that get overlooked

Many children suffer hidden vision problems because there is a misunderstanding that good vision is the same as clear sight. But it’s not.  Children won’t necessarily know or tell you if something is wrong with their eyesight, so don’t assume everything is normal.

Some of the most common signs that are often overlooked are:

 

  • Headaches or sore eyes
  • Slow reading
  • Blurred vision
  • Rereading a lot or forgetting what you’ve read
  • Poor comprehension
  • Tired, itchy or watery eyes
  • Concentration problems
  • Tiredness after computer work or reading
  • Poor depth judgment
  • Difficulties with 3D vision
  • Behavioural changes

While it’s recommended that a child’s eyes be checked at least every two years, if your child is showing these signs they should be tested immediately.

The need for regularly communicating with teachers

Given teachers see your children day after day, during extended periods of work, they are most likely to recognise symptoms before you would. With this in mind, it is vital as a parent to maintain regular communication with your child’s teacher to make sure issues are picked up sooner rather than later.

Don’t feel you need to wait for school parent-teacher nights though, here is a list of questions you can choose from to ask your child’s teacher during brief chats at school drop off or pick-up times.

  • How is my child performing at school?
  • Do you find he/she loses concentration or gets easily distracted?
  • Is he/she picking up the information as fast as he/she should? Or is he/she falling behind?
  • How is his/her comprehension?
  • Does he/she rub his/her eyes a lot through class?
  • Does he/she skip words, squint or close one eye when he/she is reading?
  • Does he/she play up at school when there is work to be done?
  • Does he/she try to avoid doing work?
  • Does he/she complain of headaches, aches around their eyes, dizziness or nausea?
  • Does he/she complain of itching or burning sensations in their eyes or excessive tearing?
  • Does he/she look overly tired, or get red or irritated eyes?

Often just by initiating these types of questions, you might spark a teacher to realise they have been seeing these signs or symptoms but not recognised it could be something more.

Concerned in any way? Arrange a time to come in so we can help you rule our or identify vision problems that might be affecting your child’s learning. Call 07 5520 5900

Five Common but Hidden Eye Conditions in Children Explained

Five common but hidden eye conditions in children explained

Many people suffer hidden vision problems because they think that good vision is the same as clear sight. But the truth is vision is so much more than being able to see the whiteboard or read an eye chart. To help you pick up on the signs of hidden vision problems, here are five common but hidden eye conditions explained.

1. Convergence insufficiency

Convergence insufficiency occurs when you have difficulties maintaining how your eyes point together (converge) to focus on near work or read close. It can lead to headaches, eyestrain, double vision, blurred vision and reduced visual performance.

Interestingly enough, not everyone with convergence insufficiency experiences obvious symptoms, and many people can still pass the 20/20 eye chart test. There are many performance related issues that can occur with convergence insufficiency including loss of place with reading, reading avoidance and reduced concentration.

The following is a summary of some of the signs and symptoms that can occur while you’re reading or doing other close work and may include:

• Eyestrain (particularly after computer work or reading)
• Difficulty reading (words blur or move on page)
• Difficulty concentrating
• Short attention span
• Frequently lose their place reading
• Squint or close one eye
• Poor comprehension
• Double vision
• Headaches
• Not completing school work or homework

2. Amblyopia (lazy eye)

Amblyopia, or lazy eye as it is more commonly known, occurs when the eyes don’t work in unison. It often occurs with a difference in prescription between the two eyes or when an eye turn is present (see below). When the brain has difficulty making senses of the input from one eye, it favours the eye that can, by actively suppressing or “tuning out” the conflicting information from the other.

Amblyopia can also occur with Strabismus, is where one eye crosses and is no longer aligned with the fellow eye. The eye can cross in (esotropia) or turn out (exotropia). It’s important to pick this up early in children as their vision can deteriorate in the eye that can’t focus. Because the eyes aren’t working in harmony, it can also cause issues with depth perception, fine motor skills and clumsiness.

Symptoms of lazy eye include:

• An eye that appears to wander either inward or outward
• Squinting, or closing one eye so they can see better
• Complaints about things looking blurry
• Sensitive to sunlight
• Head tilting to try and focus better
• Poor vision
• Bumping into things because they find it difficult to judge distances particularly between objects

3. Accommodative Dysfunction

We often take it for granted that we can shift our focus from near to distance and back again without experiencing blurry vision. This ability to change focus is called accommodation. When accommodation works well, we are blissfully unaware of the process.

For people with Accommodative Dysfunction, holding focus at near distances, and being able to shift focus becomes more difficult. Sometimes this results in obvious symptoms like an intermittent blur, or noticing things take a while to come clear, but other times like with convergence insufficiency, the symptoms are not as obvious. This is because a child can bring things into focus with a lot of concentration so it can go unnoticed, but doing this does put a lot of strain on the eyes and on the ability to concentrate.

Symptoms of Accommodative Dysfunction can include:

• Reading avoidance
• Red or sore eyes
• Headaches
• Difficulty in copying from a board or screen then down on paper
• A diagnosed learning problem

4. Oculomotor Dysfunction read more

Alice Forsyth Optometrist at Harmony Vision

Introducing Alice Forsyth

At Harmony Vision Care we are fortunate to have a team of leading optometrists who are passionate about helping our clients realise their best performance through better vision. One such member is Alice Forsyth, a behavioural optometrist who studied Optometry at UNSW and joined the Harmony Vision Care team in 2014.

In April, Alice traveled to Sydney to attend the 8th International Congress in Behavioural Optometry, along with the rest of the Harmony Vision team. Staying up to date with research and clinical practice is important to Alice, so when not cooking, spending time with her family or enjoying music, Alice enjoys reading and pursuing knowledge. To this end, she is currently studying for her Fellowship, which is a long road, and lots of hours of study!

We recently sat down with Alice for a quick question and answer session to find out why she’s so passionate about behavioural optometry and to help you get to know her a little better.

What inspired you to become a behavioural optometrist?

I was initially drawn into behavioural optometry to find more ways to help my son with his reading. Though I quickly came to appreciate the bigger picture that is vision. Over two million neurons connect the eyes to many areas of the brain (up to 60%), including input to regions that control touch, movement, attention and spatial judgment.

As optometrists, we like to pull things apart to discover how they work, but once we have that understanding we need to link the parts back together again, and there’s always a bigger picture.

What is the most rewarding part of your job? read more

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