Will Vision Therapy Benefit Your Child?

We all want the best for our kids. We try to feed them healthy foods, take them to the doctor annually, get them involved in activities that are good for them – the list goes on. Of course, one of the most important things we can do for our kids is take care of their vision. But what kind of care should we seek for our children?

Vision therapy may be a good option when it comes to children with vision conditions. School can be tough enough without adding the extra stress of not being able to see. If your child is having trouble seeing, even if it isn’t a serious condition, vision therapy may be the way to go.

Eyesight in the Classroom

Sight is the most used sense when it comes to learning. School curricula are almost always based on visual learning (with the exception of specialized schools that work with blind, deaf, or mute children). In fact, learning begins as soon as infants begin to play and crawl. This is why it’s so important to pay attention to your child’s vision early on.

Building blocks with letters on them are a classic tool used in visually learning the alphabet. This foundation will help with reading and writing. Fast forward a few years when your child begins school, but can’t quite make out the blackboard or what’s on the pages in front of them, and you can see how learning can quickly become frustrating.

This type of frustration can often discourage kids from even wanting to learn. The worst part about this is that these children can’t learn because of something that isn’t their fault. Most of them don’t understand this issue. So, they often misconstrue vision problems as a lack of intelligence.

These vision problems in children can cause both learning and self-esteem issues. No one so young should have to deal with these issues just yet. Vision therapy may be the key to your child’s academic success.

What Is Vision Therapy?

Vision therapy is a natural way to teach your child’s eyes to correct themselves. Much like eye exercises, vision therapy is used as a healthy substitute for glasses, contacts, eye surgery, and any other type of temporary corrective methods.

That is one problem with glasses and contacts. Corrective lenses provide a temporary solution to a seemingly permanent problem. This limits children in all sorts of ways, especially when it comes to sports. Sure, prescription safety goggles are available to buy, but they don’t come cheap.

Surgery, on the other hand, is something very dangerous for young eyes (or any aged eyes) to go through. To go in and alter the anatomy of a child’s eye doesn’t seem to make much sense. An eye that is still developing needs time to develop naturally. Who knows, maybe by the time their eyes have stabilized, they will have outgrown their eye condition.

Vision therapy works based on the principle that children’s eyes can be improved through a series of training-type exercises. Vision therapy uses an array of tools and techniques to achieve corrected vision in children.

Some tools used are special lenses, prisms, metronomes, visual computer aids, and non-computer visual aids. These tools only work if everyone involved is dedicated to helping your child; that means the doctor carrying out the treatment, you as parents, and your child must all be on board.

Conditions That May Benefit from Vision Therapy

Studies have shown that vision therapy can indeed help children with vision conditions that prevent them from efficiently reading and writing. It can also help reduce eye strain and headaches due to digital eye strain (tip: this works on adults too!).

Here are some of the most common conditions that can be treated with vision therapy:

• Amblyopia (or lazy eye)
• Strabismus (or crossed eyes)
• Eye movement disorders
• Nearsightedness
• Farsightedness
• Other vision problems associated with eye misalignment that aren’t as severe as amblyopia and strabismus

Who Needs Vision Therapy?

Not all children will need vision therapy. If your child is in perfectly good eye health, there isn’t really a reason for therapy. Feeding healthy eyes the right nutrients can help maintain eye health, so there’s not always a need to splurge on a series of vision therapy sessions.

Children who need it most are, of course, those suffering from the aforementioned list of vision disorders. If your child is diagnosed with any of them, consider vision therapy as an alternative to glasses or contacts. They will benefit from therapy a lot more, especially in the long run.

Children who may also benefit from vision therapy are those with learning disabilities, such as ADHD. These vision training techniques are meant to work the eyes and strengthen them, but they also help with learning to focus. Vision training hasn’t been proven to treat learning disabilities, but it could help your child learn to focus more on one task at a time.

Adults and Vision Therapy

We’ve been talking a lot about children, but they aren’t the only ones who can benefit from vision therapy. Mom and Dad could learn a thing or two as well! We talked about digital eye strain, which is something very common in our digital age. Parents are not exempt from this.

A report found that most adults spend as much as 12 hours per day looking at a screen. This is bound to take a toll on anyone’s eyes.

Parents who work long hours on a computer five days a week will most definitely benefit from a vision therapy session. It will alleviate digital eye strain symptoms (some of which can be painful and uncomfortable) and strengthen your eyes to fight age-related vision conditions such as presbyopia.

If your child needs glasses, surgery, or any other sort of eye correction tools, see if vision therapy is for you. It’s hard to say what sort of techniques will be used, since vision therapy is really a personalized activity.

Doctors will work with your child to ensure the best vision therapy techniques for their individualized condition. No child is the same, so why should the eyes be treated generically like a scrape on the knee?

If vision therapy is something you think your child may benefit from, speak to your doctor about getting started on the right path. Taking care of your child’s eye health early is so important for future development.