How Do I Know If My Child Needs Vision Therapy? 

If your child is struggling in school, you may be thinking about vision therapy. But what does a vision therapist do? How can they help? Is it really worth the cost? 

To answer these questions, we first need to understand what exactly a vision problem means and how it manifests itself in children.

Read on as a Hartland, MI optometrist discusses vision therapy and how to tell if your child can benefit from it.

Vision-Related Tasks

Many people don’t know that nearsightedness, farsightedness, and astigmatism are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to vision problems. While clarity of vision is important, other visual tasks, such as focusing and tracking can greatly affect your child’s ability to excel in the classroom.

So, when a child struggles with vision-related tasks, it may be time to consider vision therapy. 

Reading Problems

Sometimes parents don’t realize their child has a vision problem because they expect their child to learn how to read without difficulty. Many parents think dyslexia or attention deficit disorder are the only reasons kids struggle at school. However, often there’s an underlying visual processing problem that is the culprit.

Visual processing involves the brain, eyes, and vision system working together to process what we see. When children experience difficulty in this area, it can result in a variety of issues including difficulty with reading comprehension, reading speed, and handwriting.

If your child struggles with reading comprehension, he or she may have a visual processing problem that can be remediated with vision therapy. 

How Vision Therapy Can Help

Reading involves multiple steps: recognizing words, understanding their meaning, and putting them together in context. When any one of these steps is interrupted or slowed down by visual stress, reading comprehension suffers greatly. Research has shown that treating eye movement dysfunction with vision therapy results in increased reading speed as well as accuracy and fluency—all contributing to improved reading comprehension.

If your child has some of these symptoms, don’t worry! You can still get him or her tested by an optometrist trained in visual function assessment. This is usually sufficient to determine if learning disabilities are present.

Also, it’s important to have your child evaluated if you’re concerned about their academic performance. If they do have a visual processing problem, then vision therapy can help them improve their reading comprehension skills while also improving other aspects of school such as attention span and focus.

If you have more questions or wish to schedule a consultation, please don’t hesitate to call our Hartland, MI optometry office today!