Eye Health: How Can Vision Problems Make It Difficult For Your Child To Focus In School?

Dr. Sima Das, Director of Ocular Oncology and Oculoplasty, Dr. Shroff Charity Eye Hospital, Daryaganj tells you everything that you need to know.

Vision issues can affect the learning of a child by making it difficult for the child to read the small print on paper or even the blackboard. Most of the parents complain that their child is not able to see the blackboard clearly, so all the instructions written on the blackboard or on the whiteboard are lost because the child cannot see properly, and this affects their learning. This also negatively affects the child’s growth and makes them feel like they are lagging behind. It is important that whenever your child squeezes the eye to see something very distant, or when the child is having a little bit of a faith stone and turns the head to see something at a distance, or there’s excessive watering in the eye, all these are symptoms that will tell you that the child is not seeing clearly.

We examine several paediatric eye-related difficulties in this piece, and Dr. Sima Das, Director of Ocular Oncology and Oculoplasty, Dr. Shroff Charity Eye Hospital, Daryaganj, joins us to further our understanding.

How Can Your Child’s Body Coordination Be Affected By Poor Vision?

Hand-eye coordination is very important, but poor eye vision can affect the body’s coordination. A lot of children with cerebral palsy or those who had some birth history where the brain has been affected and does not have good motor development of the hand or have been on occupational therapy. It was found that these Children have a problem reading and writing they are not able to write in straight lines and even while walking they fall. All of these symptoms show that the child has some problem with vision, which is related to brain development. Such a condition has to be handled at an early stage as the child can’t see clearly and may feel scared in the environment that they might fall, or they may start avoiding sports or any other form of activity that requires a lot of body coordination. This will hamper the Child’s development and even their academic development will be very slow because they can’t write properly, and their performance is affected. It is important that we help them by guiding them, helping them, giving them extra time, and finding out how to improve it.

How can early intervention and diagnosis help to minimise the developmental damage linked to vision problems in your child?

Early intervention is very important. The first three years of a child’s life are crucial to his overall development. They develop their milestones and their personalities. The connections in a child’s brain are most adaptable during the first three years of life, and these connections are called neural circuits, which are the foundation of learning behaviour and health. It is important that we treat early. An early intervention specialist can help the child adapt and teach them how to improve their hand-eye coordination, build their perceptual skills by doing perceptual skill training, and improve their muscle problems by giving them vision therapy exercises and improving their coordination. The earlier the treatment is given to the child, the better the chances of the child achieving their full potential.

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Why Is An Annual Eye Exam of Your Child’s Eyes Important?

It is advised that parents take their child for an annual checkup with a paediatric ophthalmologist. A doctor will examine the child’s vision to see if they have any refractive error or if they need glasses if they are farsighted or nearsighted. A check will help the doctor understand if a child has refractive error, blurred vision, or is having difficulty in either reading or having blurred sight at a distance that can be corrected with glasses. It is important that a Child should undergo an annual checkup if the parents also have a history of refractive error. The rule is that every child should be checked at three years of age for a vision checkup because sometimes one eye may be good and we do not realise that the one eye vision is very good, but maybe one eye can become lazy, which can be a sign that the child has only one normal eye and they might have a problem in the other eye. In case the Child’s sibling also has a history of eye defects then they require six monthly checkups.