Do you have concerns about whether a vision problem is affecting your child’s learning ability or if your child has a lazy eye?
- Children’s vision exam
- Vision therapy
- Eye tracking
- Eye teaming
- Visual perceptual disorders
Wondering how well your child is seeing?
How well are the two eyes working together as a team, providing depth perception and accurate spatial information for coordinated movement? Optometrists can use objective methods to check the need for prescription eye wear and for eye health. We use a variety of “eye games” to be able to verify normal visual development, eye teaming and tracking. If your child is working harder than they need to in order to attend to a page of print or see the board clearly, this can certainly affect their learning. Sometimes all they need is glasses, other times they may also need vision therapy.
What is vision therapy?
Dr. Chaikin’s approach to vision therapy (VT) is to create a therapeutic environment for developing various visual skills then use multi-sensory stimulation to foster integration between the various processing systems. She uses movement, rhythm and auditory stimuli to reach therapy goals. As an occupational therapist Dr. Chaikin has found that a movement based approach along with VT is very effective for generalizing skills.
Visiontherapy.org is an excellent website that can give you additional ideas about VT.
Sometimes we also recommend syntonics or light therapy. Light therapy can be very helpful to balance the autonomic nervous system in a very gentle manner. This involves sitting in a quiet dark room gazing at a particular color frequency for about 20 minutes. Alternatively sometimes we use tinted lenses to achieve a similar effect.
The website of the College of Syntonic Optometry has some excellent information about this therapeutic modality.