Posts Tagged ‘Children Vision’

Vision Development and Therapy for Preschoolers

November 11th, 2009

Puerile time is a key period of children’s development, including intellectual, social and physical development. They learn much knowledge about the nature, science and human communications while they grow up rapidly physically. Parents will pay much attention at these aspects to provide their children a well-balanced growth condition. However, preschool visual development and vision therapy is often ignored, which can be critical in children’s study and school performance during their puerile period.

In general preschool development, there is a specific development points called milestones. These specific time frames are charted to see if the child has physical development problems or intellectual challenges. It is usually very useful and easy to find problems which can be solved in time after suitable therapy.

However, it is much harder to find the children’s vision problems by setting such milestones. What we do now to exam the visual system of children? Most of the parents, teachers or even optometrists just exam the child to see if they can see properly, for instance, can they see 20/20 line clearly? Optometrists may do more to exam if the children’s eye is straight. But, these exams are really not enough in judging the health condition of their visual system.

Experts in the children’s vision development and vision therapy have suggested a higher standard that may change a child’s whole life. It is found that kids with identifiable learning disabilities have vast majority to have problems of their visual system. It is a pity that almost all of the children can pass the Optometrists’ eye tests. In other words, passing the eye tests is just a base level, there is much more to learning about how to develop the children’s visual system by a series of vision therapy.

Vision therapy is researched to develop preschool vision skills of the children. These vision therapy include eye coordination and focus, eye movements at all directions, coding, sequencing, gross and fine motor, balance, visual memory, and so on. These therapies are not only used to develop the visual system but also have amazing effects on the development of learning skills such as reading, writing, and remember spelling words without magic pill or magic glasses. All these skills can be trained!

So don’t hesitate doing the right vision therapies, it can help developing your child’s learning ability as well as their vision system.

The Development of Children’s Vision

November 9th, 2009

Children’s vision develops significantly fast in the first year of their lives.

When a child is born, they can see only black, white and grey. That is because newborns have only the mechanism of vision but not full ability to see every aspect of things. Infants usually prefer to see people’s faces first, and after that they will be interested in other objects. Make sure that the child has healthy eyes in the first 12 weeks of life which is a very important period of the development of vision. It is recommended that the child be check for the health condition of its eyes by paediatrician. From 8 weeks old to 4 months, infants begin to follow objects, moving their eyes or moving their head together in the same direction of their vision.

Between 4 and 6 months old, children’s visual acuity or sharpness has developed as their eye muscles begin to have the ability to coordinate the movements of their eyes. And what is more exciting, children can see in color by 4 months’ old. During this period, children also develop other skills, such as roll, push, move themselves. And you may find that they are interested in putting everything that they can reach into their mouths for exploration.

From 6 to 12 months, as children develop their ability of walking instead of crawling, their visual perceptual skills developed, and children begin to have the ability of judging distance. Besides, their eye-hand coordination also improves greatly during this half of year.

During the preschool years of children’s lives, eye problem such as myopia, hyperopia, astigmatism, poor coordination of eyes, turned eye, or poor eye-hand coordination may occurred. Parents should pay more attention to their child’s behavior which can be signs of a vision problem. For example, children blink their eyes frequently, sit close or squint their eyes whilst watching television, hold a book very close to the eyes, tilt head noticeably or cover or close one eye when reading, rub eyes frequently. As children may not have the ability of telling blurred vision or sore eyes, when parents notice these behaviors frequently, please contact a behavioral optometrist for help.