ADHD or Convergence Insufficiency?
There are 9 major symptoms used to diagnose ADHD in children. Of these nine symptoms, five of them overlap with the symptoms of a common visual disorder called convergence insufficiency
Normal Vision Development in Children
New parents should be aware of how their child’s vision develops over time, and what is normal. Infants and young children don’t typically outgrow vision problems, but I’ve seen firsthand that the sooner these problems are treated the better chance they have of being fully corrected. So as soon as you suspect a problem, schedule an eye exam.
How Vision Therapy can Improve Saccadic Eye Movements and Help Reading Problems
What are saccadic eye movements? Saccadic eye movements are very fast jumps from one eye position to another. These are the eye movements used in reading or searching. This scanning of the visual field is learned during the first years of life, developing as a child explores their environment. In fact, saccades are the very first eye movements that develop! How saccadic deficiencies affect reading These eye movements are critical to success and speed of reading. If they do not develop well, it can result in the opposite effect: slow, frustrated reading. When learning to read the eyes must be able to align and track together (or form saccades) letter-by-letter, word-by-word, and line-by-line. Errors can be made when the eyes lose their place and have to backtrack (leading to re-reading and slow reading). Or instead of moving smoothly they skip around (leading to ‘words moving on a page’ or loss of place when reading and/or misreading words like ‘saw’ instead of ‘was’). When errors like these happen frequently, so much effort is put into trying to coordinate the eyes that reading comprehension declines dramatically.
Catching Eye Problems Early: The a-b-See Campaign
Here is a statistic for you: 1 in 5 kids have a vision disorder Many kids with vision problems just assume their poor vision is normal, because they’ve never experienced anything different. If these vision problems are not checked, they can cause serious long-term effects.
Grace’s outward turned eye
A little girl named Grace came into our practice with a very prominent eye turn outward – these outward turned eyes are referred to as exotropia. She was seeing double and blurred vision, and other kids would ask her whether she was looking at them, noticing that one eye was facing another direction. She also felt eye strain, and got frequent headaches.
