DOES YOUR INFANT OR TODDLER HAVE A VISION PROBLEM?

Identifying Infant and Toddler Vision Problems

Vision is our dominant sense, and is especially important in the development of a child. Vision guides child development in the following ways:

• Vision guides gross motor development by serving as a stimulus for movement such as crawling or walking towards an object or person that the child sees, reaching for objects, catching a ball, and sports.
• Vision guides fine motor development by serving as a pattern for drawing, stacking blocks, coloring, pasting, puzzles, and writing.
• Vision helps in language development by identifying objects and people for naming, and allows a child to copy lip and mouth movements to form sounds.
• Vision is important for social and emotional skills: smiling, eye contact, as well as reading facial expressions and body language.
• Vision helps keep a child safe by allowing him to identify hazards in his peripheral vision and environment before it reaches him.

Vision is the most important system for learning. Research indicates that 80% of learning occurs through the visual system. Obvious problems, such as an eye turn, are usually detected by a pediatrician; however, many vision problems are not. A pediatric vision screening is usually only a cursory screening of distance visual acuity (far vision).

A developmental vision examination should be performed at 6 months old (sooner if a problem is noticed) and every year thereafter. A comprehensive vision exam should evaluate for fine motor development such as tracking and eye teaming, near vision (reading distance), depth perception, amblyopia (lazy eye), visual-motor integration, and ocular health problems. Certain problems, if not caught early, can become lifelong problems interfering with academic, athletic and eventually executive achievement.

Vision is often neglected in children because parents can't tell how a child is seeing, and children can't compare how they see to anyone else, so they assume how they see is “normal”. I have seen many young patients who see very blurry, or double, or not at all out of one eye, but when asked why they didn't mention this before their eye exam, the answer is always, “because you didn't ask me if I saw double (blurry). I thought everyone sees like this”.

It is important for parents to identify behavioral signs of vision problems in infants and toddlers. If your child has one of these symptoms, they may have a vision problem, and should be evaluated by a Developmental or Pediatric Optometrist.

Did you observe any of the following eye symptoms?

Research has shown that preschoolers with poor vision have lower scores on developmental tests for skills that are important for academic performance1 Correcting vision problems improves the test scores within 6 weeks of wearing prescription lenses.

A developmental vision evaluation for infants and toddlers is very different than an adult's. We can determine if your child is in need of vision correction even though your child does not read yet. There are special tests and techniques that we perform to evaluate your child's vision. We will check eye movement, eye alignment, reaction to light and darkness, visual acuity, stereovision, and eye health. We will make recommendations to correct and prevent vision problems. Treatment options include Developmental Vision Therapy, visual guidance activities, and prescribing of lenses for stimulation and development of the visual system.