How are Vision and Learning linked?

Did you know that much of what you learn comes through your visual system? If a child is struggling with school and says things like, "I am not smart," "I can't," and "it's too hard," you begin to do everything you can to help your child to succeed. You get them a tutor, you have them stay after school to get help, you spend countless hours helping them with homework and at the end of the day your child is frustrated, unmotivated and overly tired. This sounds all too familar, right?

Studies show that children who have problems with reading, spelling, writing, math, and/or many social skills are often deficient in the execution of many types of eye movements.

• They do not work both eyes well together as a team (binocularity)
• They move their eyes asymmetrically when trying to converge (point the eyes closer)
• They diverge (point the eyes further away) their eyes
• They have difficulty keeping a target clear where they are looking (focusing and accommodation)
• They make errors when trying to fixate or track a moving object (saccades and pursuits)

These poor eye movement skills play a large role in understanding the problems that children encounter when attempting to perform school work and other visual tasks. They have caused their vision to perform inaccurately, to be much less useful for them than for other individuals, and to cause a variety of visual perceptual problems.

Here are ten examples of how vision impacts your child in school:

1. When children are first learning to read, vision problems can impede the development of basic reading skills. 
2. When children are reading to learn, as is the case with older readers, blurry or double vision can impact their ability to read for long periods of time.  Reading comprehension can be severely reduced.
3. When children have trouble seeing things as clear and single (instead of two images, as is the case with double vision), they may have trouble identifying decimals and/or signs in math.
4. When children have poor visual skills, it impacts their ability to organize their writing, and may impair their ability to line up numbers in math.
5. In math, not seeing the numbers correctly can lead to miscalculations. When children lack visualization skills, they may have to count on their fingers or verbalize number sequences, which can affect their performance on timed tests.
6. When children are adept at math, they may still do poorly because their vision problems affect their ability to read story problems correctly and efficiently.
7. When children have problems with visual recall, which is the ability to create a visual image based on past visual experience, they may have difficulty with spelling.
8. When children have vision problems, their handwriting may suffer. Vision leads the hand when writing, and a poorly functioning visual system can lead to difficulty with neatness and organization of handwriting.
9. When children have laterality and directionality problems, they will have problems differentiating similarly-shaped letters in different orientations (b, d, p, q) and may read or write them backwards.
10. When children have poor visualization skills, they may not be able to organize and reorganize a composition in their head, which can affect their writing.

As you can imagine, these are just a few of the many examples of how vision and learning are intricately intertwined. The relationship exists on many levels and affects virtually every subject, which is why a vision problem can be so debilitating to a young learner.

Our goal at Optometric Physicians is to effectively get your child's eyes working together as a team. This blog is a great tool on understanding how your child's vision is affecting them to learn and process information. Please call our office if you have any further question at 615-386-3036.

Does Your Child Have Bad Handwriting?

Parents and educators tend to be the first people who will determine if there is a need for vision therapy for children. Once they understand the telltale symptoms, such as handwriting issues, they can spot children who may have a vision problem.

One area in which vision problems manifest is in a child’s handwriting. Take a look at some handwriting issues experienced by students with vision problems:


These are some examples of how handwriting can be affected by a vision problem. However, another common symptom is that a child has very neat handwriting, but they’re very slow when it comes to actually writing.

As you examine your child’s handwriting, look for the other symptoms typical of vision problems. Some typical symptoms include rubbing eyes, having watery eyes or avoiding writing. Children may also suffer from headaches or have a short attention span while writing. Check out our first blog for the long list of symptoms of vision problems.

Is there correlation between ADD/ADHD and vision problems?

When meeting with parents or guardians or our patients, this is what we hear when they are discuss thier child and ADD/ADHD:

"You think you are doing the right thing when you are putting your child through all these tests and trying to figure out what's wrong with them. You ask yourself questions like, 'Why isn’t he doing well in school?...He's a smart kid...I know he can do it...Is he lazy?' It's so quick and easy to slap the ADD or ADHD label on the child and medicate them. Where this might work for some children, we never really saw a result."

Does this situation sound familiar to what you and your child have gone through? If so, let me help you understand how symptoms for ADD/ADHD and vision problems are often the same.

Below is a chart that better helps your visualize the similarities.

                                  *DSM IV – Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
                                              **American Optometric Association

Due to these similarities, some children with vision problems are mislabeled as having ADHD. COVD states:

A recent study by researchers at the Children's Eye Center, University of San Diego, uncovered a relationship between a common vision disorder, convergence insufficiency, and ADHD. The study "showed that children with convergence insufficiency are three times as likely to be diagnosed  with ADHD than children without the disorder."

Dr. Granet of the Children's Eye Center commented, "We don't know if convergence insufficiency makes ADHD worse or if convergence insufficiency is misdiagnosed as ADHD.  What we do know is that more research must be done on this subject and that patients diagnosed with ADHD should also be evaluated for convergence insufficiency and treated accordingly."

What can we learn from this? Before we mislabel our children, they should be evaluated for convergence insufficiency and treated accordingly. If this article relates to you, don't hesitate to call our office to find out more information and set up an appointment: 615-386-3036.

Welcome to Optometric Physicians First Blog Post!

Optometric Physicians Vision Therapy is excited to announce we are starting a blog! Our passion is to improve the quality of life for every person that walks through our door and we wanted to be able to reach as many of you as possible. We also started a Facebook group called Nashville Vision Therapy. We will be posting a blog each week of different topics relating to Vision Therapy. Feedback and questions are much appreciated.

Let's start off this blog right and start with the basics! What is Vision Therapy? Vision therapy, visual training, or vision training is an individualized, supervised treatment program designed to correct visual-motor and/or perceptual deficiencies. Vision therapy trains the entire visual system which includes eyes, brain and body. The goal of VT (vision therapy) is to train the brain to use the eyes to receive information effectively, comprehend it quickly and react appropriately. You are probably wondering what Vision Therapy includes. Vision therapy sessions include non-surgical procedures designed to enhance the brain's ability to control eye alignment, eye movements, focusing abilities, and eye teaming. State-of-the-art technology and software allows vision therapist to offer patients challenging programs for the enhancement of eye teaming, focusing, binocularity, fusional skills, convergence skills, and perceptual skills. Vision therapy programs are individually designed for each person for maximum improvement. Each office session is approximately 30-45 minutes of one-on-one training with the vision therapist and at home exercises are given to help with self-reinforcing. Studies show that 1 out of 5 (20%) school age children have an undiagnosed visual issue that affects learning. This percentage dramatically increases within the special education, learning disabled and remedial reading populations, where as many as 70% of these students have a significant visual component to their learning problems.

Vision Therapy can help the following behaviors or disorders:

• Lazy eye, crossed-eyes, or wandering eyes
• Turn or tilts head to see
• Squinting or covering one eye to see
• Excessive blinking
• Short attention span (diagnosed with ADHD or ADD)
• Daydreaming
• Poor handwriting
• Poor visual/motor skills (hand-eye coordination)
• Frequently drops things or bumps into things
• Omits words while reading
• Reverses words or numbers
• Frequently looses place while reading
• Uses finger to keep place while reading
• Complains of headaches, eyestrain, dizziness or nausea while reading
• Complains of double vision
• Birth injury
• Brain trauma

Thank you for joining us on our first blog! We can’t wait to teach you more about what we are passionate about, Vision Therapy!