How Your Children’s Vision May Affect Their Learning

Researchers found that most children are visual learners. In fact, around 80% of what they know has been acquired by what they have seen through demonstrations, pictures or visual aids. This means that your children’s performance in school largely depends on how good their eyesight is.

Insight Vision Center Optometry, your leading provider of scleral lenses and other eye care products and services, explains how underlying vision problems may affect your kids’ learning.

Functional Vision Disorders

How well your children’s eyes work with the brain refers to their functional vision. This includes different ocular functions, such as binocularity, accommodation and fine eye movements. Any problems with the collaboration between your kids’ visual and nervous systems may result in defective functional vision skills.

Convergence insufficiency is one common functional vision disorder among children. Its hallmark symptom is the inability of your kids’ eyes to stay aligned while reading or doing other close work. We may recommend vision therapy to help treat this problem. We’ll prepare a set of eye exercises to improve the joint effort between your children’s eyes.

Refractive Errors

Structural irregularities in your children’s eyes may impair their light-bending cycle. This can lead to refractive errors like myopia (nearsightedness), hyperopia (farsightedness) and astigmatism. These vision problems make it hard to read their books or the notes written on the classroom board. As a result, they may perform poorly in school and receive low marks on their exams. We can prescribe corrective eyeglasses or contact lenses to improve their visual acuity at varying distances.

Perceptual Eyesight Problems

The eyes are responsible for picking up light patterns in their visual field and sending them to the brain for translation. This image and other related information will then be stored in the nervous system. As a result, whenever your children see the same object, their eyes and brain will be able to recognize and identify it.

Your vision therapy experts explain that this process defines your kids’ perceptual vision. A common perceptual vision impairment is color blindness. This may affect your kids’ ability to distinguish one color from another that may have a negative impact on their learning. This is why a color blind test is often included in school vision screenings or eye exams.

Get in touch with us today at (714) 486-3315 to learn more about learning-related vision problems. You may also fill out our form to request an appointment for you and your family. We serve Costa Mesa, Newport Beach and nearby California areas.