Performance in School and Sports Can Be Improved with Vision Therapy

No one knows a child better than their parent. Your child is very bright, has a vivid imagination, loves art, computer games, playing during recess, and enjoys time with friends. However, you notice that they have trouble keeping up with reading in school, homework takes a long time, letters are often reversed, or whole sentences skipped; even the baseball is hard to hit during P.E. class.

What could be causing these difficulties?

Sometimes the diagnosis is certain health conditions or learning disabilities. But it is also a good idea to consider an undiagnosed vision problem.

Up to 80% of a child’s learning in school occurs through vision, and 1 in 10 children has a vision problem that affects their learning.

Maybe you’ve taken your child to the eye doctor and found out they have “perfect eyesight – 20/20”! But, even with “20/20” eyesight, their lack of visual skills – which are learned during development, may be contributing to, or the very cause of their issues in school and in sports.

Difficulties can exist in the following areas:

Eye movement control:  the ability to fixate, track, and follow a target or read a line accurately.

Focusing ability: can form a clear image at both distance and near.

Eye alignment: being able to use two eyes together accurately.

Peripheral vision: the ability to see around us, not just directly in front of us.

Visual motor skills: the capability to integrate our vision with the rest of our body so that we can correctly perform tasks, from playing sports to writing an essay.

Visual perception and integration: using our eyes to be aware of our environment and visual field, in order to perform multiple tasks throughout our day in school or outside of school. These skills include visual discrimination, memory, laterality and directionality, figure-ground, closure, spatial relationships, and form constancy.

A Developmental Optometrist can help to identify and diminish a number of obstacles to learning by building up underdeveloped visual skills through Vision Therapy

Vision Therapy is a safe, non-surgical, and drug free program that takes place at the developmental eye doctor’s office. It provides developmental and rehabilitative treatment, aiming to improve visual skills such as those listed above.  

Through the use of specialized tools, computer programs, and optical devices, visual skills are reinforced and made more efficient through repetition and a development-based series of activities.

Developmental optometrists often work in conjunction with occupational therapists, speech therapists, educational specialists, and pediatric neuro-psychologists.

In a fun educational setting, under the supervision of an eye doctor, Vision Therapy exercises and improves the visual system, which is an important basis for all of these areas.

 Clinical results, as well as many published research studies, have shown that in-office Vision Therapy produces statistically significant improvement in vision symptoms. These improvements are best noted by parents and their kids, who oftentimes see a dramatic improvement in school and in sports.