With summer activities gearing up, we thought you might like some information to share with your friends and family about how vision problems can impact summer activities. Here are ideas on different signs to let you know if a child may have an eye coordination or eye movement problem that could be impacting sports and/or academic performance.
As your children have been busy enjoying summer activities, have you noticed that they have trouble doing different things? For example, problems catching or hitting balls, difficulty shooting baskets, clumsiness with physical activities, avoiding reading, or having trouble seeing 3D movies? These are all clues that your child may have a vision problem.
Some additional signs that a visual problem, rather than lack of practice or mastery of a sport, may be hampering performance:
- Difficulty knowing where the ball or other players are at all times
- Over or under-estimating the distance of the ball, players or boundaries
- Great athlete but cannot do ball sports
- Little improvement with practice
- Having trouble remembering plays
- headaches when reading
- difficulty copying from board or paper
- avoidance of reading
- poor reading comprehension
- frequent loss of place while reading
- complains words move or “swim” on the page
- short attention span
- smart in everything but school
- ADD, ADHD, dyslexic, learning challenged
- working below potential
❝ Vision is a complex process that involves 17 visual skills. ❞
As you may know, when the doctor says your child can see “20/20”, that means that he or she is able to see a certain size letter at a distance of 20 feet – but that is all it means! Vision is a complex process that involves 17 visual skills.
Any of the above symptoms is a sign that a vision problem may be at the root of your child’s difficulties. But the good news is, once the vision problem is detected, it is usually 100% correctable. The first step is a Developmental Vision Evaluation by a Developmental Optometrist who provides an in-office program of Optometric vision therapy. Doctors who are members of the non-profit organization Vision Therapy Canada, www.visiontherapycanada.com. These doctors provide specialized testing to evaluate all the visual skills required for academic success.
We hope you find this information helpful. As always, we are here if you have any questions or concerns.
