Your optometrist near San Diego offers vision therapy treatment for children.
Does your child need vision therapy? Even with corrected vision, some children still need more help in order to see clearly enough to read, view the whiteboard, learn, play sports, and participate in gym class. The good news is that vision therapy can help your child’s eye function better.
Understanding Vision Therapy for Children
Vision therapy is often described as physical therapy for the eyes or vision training. It involves performing certain eye exercises and tasks in order to improve depth perception, eye tracking and teaming, eye focusing, and hand-eye coordination. It can involve the use of special lenses and computer programs or more conventional therapy that includes the use of specially designed balance boards, metronomes, balls, sticky notes, and pens in order to complete the visual exercises.
What Conditions Vision Therapy Helps
Vision therapy helps treat a myriad of eye conditions that affect the way the eyes move and focus.
- Lazy Eye – called amblyopia and effects eye movement and visual acuity
- Crossed Eyes – called strabismus where one or both eyes are turned inward or outward
- Peripheral Vision Problems – Conditions where your child has difficulty seeing out of the corners of his or her eyes
- Eye Movement Problems – Typically affects your child’s ability to read and view objects near their faces
- Eye Focusing Conditions – Where your child has difficulty focusing on objects with one or both eyes
- Phrias – Which are eye alignment problems that are less severe than crossed eyes and may not be noticeable when viewing your child
Signs Your Child May Benefit from Pediatric Vision Therapy
As a parent, it’s important to pay attention to how your child is behaving and performing in school. Children often can’t tell you that they are having vision difficulties because they have no concept of perfect vision. The only thing they know is how they see objects.
Here are a few signs that may indicate a need for pediatric vision therapy:
- Your child can’t seem to pay attention or has a very short attention span.
- Your child gets frequent headaches and complains of eye pain.
- Your child often confuses words and sentences, even reversing the order of words.
- Your child’s reading skills aren’t improving.
Vision Therapy with our Eye Doctor
Dr. Nathan Anderson provides custom vision therapy treatments for children who are having trouble focusing their eyes and have eye teaming and tracking problems as well as other eye movement and focusing disorders.
In children, eye problems often manifest themselves as learning disorders, being slow to learn how to read or an inability to play sports or participate in gym class when the exercises of the day involve catching and throwing balls. If your child does play a short, you may notice slow improvement or your child stagnating in their mastery of the sport.
The good news is that your child may not have a learning disability or simply be bad at sports. It may be a problem with the way your child’s eyes move and function. Vision therapy helps by objectively determining the functional problems with your child’s eyes.
Once all the conditions and problems are known, a customized vision therapy program will be developed for your child that includes eye exercises to do a home and eye exercises with Dr. Anderson. As your child’s eyes get stronger through vision therapy, you should see improvements in your child’s learning and their development when it comes to learning new tasks and playing sports that involve hand-eye coordination.
For more information on our vision therapy services or to schedule an appointment, give us a call today at 800-462-8749.