As a parent, ensuring your child’s success in school involves more than just providing them with the right supplies and a good study environment. One crucial aspect often overlooked is their vision health. Good vision is essential for reading, writing, and participating fully in classroom activities. To promote your child’s academic success, here are three simple steps focused on maintaining healthy vision.
Schedule Regular Eye Exams for Healthy Vision
The foundation of healthy vision starts with regular vision exams. Many vision problems in children can go unnoticed because kids often don’t realize they are seeing things differently than they should. An eye exam before the school year begins can lead to success in school by ensuring that any issues are detected and corrected early.
- Why it’s important: Undiagnosed vision problems like nearsightedness, farsightedness, or astigmatism can lead to difficulties in reading and writing, ultimately affecting your child’s academic performance.
- What to expect: During an eye exam, we will check for visual acuity, focusing ability, and eye coordination. We may also look for signs of more serious conditions such as amblyopia (lazy eye) or strabismus (crossed eyes).
- How often: It’s generally recommended that children have their first eye exam at 6 months, another at age 3, and then annually once they start school.
Create a Vision-Friendly Study Environment
At home, the right environment can help support your child’s overall eye health, especially during homework and study sessions, which can encourage overall success in school.
- Proper Lighting: Ensure that the study area is well-lit to prevent eye strain. Natural light is best, but if that’s not possible, use bright, evenly distributed lighting.
- Screen Time Management: Prolonged screen time can cause digital eye strain. Encourage the 20-20-20 rule: every 20 minutes, look at something 20 feet away for at least 20 seconds. This simple practice helps reduce eye fatigue.
- Reading Materials: Make sure books and reading materials are at an appropriate distance—about 14-16 inches from the eyes—and encourage regular breaks to avoid overworking the eyes.
Communicate with Teachers
Teachers play a key role in noticing potential vision problems in the classroom. Regular communication with your child’s teacher can help you stay informed about any signs of vision issues that may affect your child’s learning.
- Check-in regularly: Ask the teacher if they’ve noticed any behaviors that could indicate vision problems, such as squinting, holding books too close, or frequent headaches.
- Encourage seating adjustments: If your child has difficulty seeing the board, sitting closer to the front of the classroom can help. Make sure the teacher is aware of any corrections your child needs, such as wearing glasses or contacts.
- Support vision-friendly activities: Encourage your child’s teacher to include activities that are not just screen-based. Hands-on projects and outdoor activities help give their eyes a break from close-up work and screens.
Promoting healthy vision is a simple yet impactful way to support your child’s success in school. By scheduling regular eye exams, creating a vision-friendly study environment, and maintaining open communication with teachers, you can help ensure that vision problems don’t stand in the way of your child’s learning. Start these practices today, and give your child the clear sight they need to thrive academically. At Family Vision Development Center, we are dedicated to helping our young patients achieve the success in school that they deserve by correcting any vision disorders that may be holding them back. To assure your child’s healthy vision, reach out to schedule your appointment by calling 630-862-2020.
Family Vision Development Center is a full-service vision center offering innovative vision therapy services, sports vision therapy services, post-concussive vision rehabilitation, comprehensive vision exams for eyeglasses and contact lenses, management of ocular diseases including glaucoma, diabetes, macular degeneration and cataracts, and a state-of-the-art optical center offering the latest designs in eyewear.
For many people, driving at night is no more difficult than driving during the day. But for others, nighttime driving presents additional challenges that they don’t experience when the sun is out. For example, certain vision issues can cause people to see halos around lights or increased glare on the roads. Additionally, they might experience blurred or clouded vision or eye fatigue when driving after dark.
If you experience difficulty driving at night, it may be due to one of the following reasons.
Nearsightedness
The answer to your vision problems at night may be as simple as nearsightedness, or myopia, which causes objects in the distance to be blurred. People with myopia often have difficulty driving at night. If this is the case, prescription eyeglasses or contact lenses could be the solution you need to restore your nighttime vision.
Cataracts
Cataracts occur when the eye’s lens becomes cloudy. This cloudiness causes things to become blurry, hazy or less colorful. Driving at night with cataracts is especially difficult, as they can cause light sensitivity, especially with oncoming headlights, as well as overall problems seeing in dark conditions. Glasses or contact lenses can help improve the symptoms of cataracts. However, if symptoms progress, surgery to remove them is also an option.
Vitamin or Nutrient Deficiency
Perhaps surprisingly, a lack of certain vitamins or minerals can have an effect on the ability to see clearly while driving at night. Vitamin A helps keep the retina healthy, and can be found in carrots and green leafy vegetables. People with low levels of Vitamin A, as is often the case for those with Crohn’s disease or celiac disease, often experience night vision issues. Additionally, a zinc deficiency reduces the positive effects of Vitamin A in the eye, which can contribute to poor night vision. Increasing these important nutrients might help to alleviate some difficulty while driving at night.
Retinal Diseases
Retinitis pigmentosa is a genetic disorder that affects the retina and how it responds to light. Although rare, a main side effect of this disorder is loss of night vision. While your vision may be normal during the day, it may take longer to adjust to the dark, thereby making driving at night much more difficult. A more common retinal disease that can affect night vision is age-related macular degeneration (AMD). One of the first signs of AMD is difficulty seeing at night, which happens during the early stages of this disease. It is important to visit your eye doctor as the first sign of night vision problems, so eye diseases can be detected and treated as early as possible.
Driving at night without proper visual skills can be an obvious safety hazard. If you feel like it is becoming more difficult to see clearly on the road when the sun goes down, please come see us for a vision evaluation. We have the appropriate tests to determine the cause of your nighttime vision problems, as well as effective treatment options to help improve your symptoms. Family Vision Development Center provides a wide range of eye care services for the whole family in a safe, comfortable environment. Give us a call at 630-862-2020 to schedule your appointment today.
Unlike problems that involve actual eyesight or sharpness of vision, visual processing disorders affect how visual information is processed by the brain. A child may have 20/20 vision, but still struggle with processing things like symbols, pictures or distances. Visual processing disorders can hinder a child’s ability to learn properly in the classroom and can also present challenges while playing sports or socializing with peers, all of which can have a negative effect on their self-esteem.
Signs of Visual Processing Disorder
There are certain signs or symptoms to watch for that would indicate that a child may have trouble with visual processing. These could include:
- Difficulty distinguishing between similar letters, shapes or objects.
- Difficulty distinguishing a figure from its background
- Tendency to skip lines when reading, or read the same line over and over
- Trouble writing within the lines, copying from a book or bumping into things when walking
- Trouble remembering what they’ve seen or read
- Difficulty determining how close objects are to each other
- Difficulty identifying an object when only parts of the object are showing
- Frequent reversal of numbers, letters or words
- Organization problems
- Untidy handwriting
- Poor retention of visual classroom material
Vision Therapy is One Treatment Option
Vision therapy is a kind of physical therapy for the visual system which includes the eyes and brain, and can produce successful results for correcting visual processing disorders. In-office, one-on-one vision therapy treatments can improve visual processing speed, visual memory, visual-motor integration and more in order to improve a child’s visual processing issues and in turn help them to improve in the classroom, on the field, and with their peers.
Family Vision Development Center’s Dr. Martin has focused extensively on vision therapy techniques and applies his expertise and understanding of this form of vision treatment to his clients of all ages. Contact us at 630-862-2020 or click here to schedule an appointment where Dr. Martin can thoroughly evaluate your vision issues and determine the most effective treatment options.
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