Preschool Development And Vision Therapy

Vision therapy has been proven to be an efficient treatment of vision development trouble in primary school children. As a Behavioral Optometrist I have worked with vision therapy and children with learning disabilities for over 20 years, and I see the usefulness of the right techniques every day. Nevertheless, I am often asked, Can vision therapy also be successful for preschool children?

Vision therapy is an enormously efficient tool when it comes to increasing visual skills. It is significantly more than the conventional eye exercises, which are tedious, boring and purely intended to improve eye coordination and focus skills, which are more concerned with what we Optometrists are measuring rather than the child's actual performance.

But in vision therapy we have the possibility to invest time and effort into developing visual skills that in reality count when it comes to helping children overcome learning disabilities. It's not merely about the eyes, it is about developing true skills which go far further than just eyeballs!

The skills enhanced by vision therapy embrace the following:

Eye movements- which facilitate children flow in their reading and stops them misreading words or missing lines, and it also helps in ball sports.

Focus and Eye teaming- which helps children to concentrate and apply themselves to their school activities.

Visualization and Recall- which helps children to efficiently recall sight words and spelling, giving them a large vocabulary to assist them to read.

Laterality and Directionality- which aids children with learning disabilities to triumph over reversals, or writing lettering or numbers back to front.

Cross Patterning- which leads children to employ both sides of their brain efficiently.

Other developmental areas- including coding, sequencing, fine and gross motor, etc.

Now, it is simple to see how this can have a mammoth impact on children who display learning disabilities, but what about the younger children, the preschoolers who may or may not be exhibiting signs of insufficiency.

Allow me to propose this: if your preschool or kindergarten child is showing signs of being behind the others in the class, then vision therapy is a highly efficient tool in developing the visual skills that child may need to catch up and move ahead. It is successful because these skills, which must be developing in children through this period, sometimes are not developed or underdeveloped. If we can improve them speedily and proficiently, the child will pick up appreciably.

Nonetheless, I have also found that, if we do vision therapy and push through the development of average children, we can speed up their performance and by this means increase the learning ability of even normal children.

In both of these situations, what we need to do is tailor our system to match the preschool or kindergarten level. That's why I have published a home based vision therapy program just for preschoolers, and it works very usefully in making struggling preschoolers far better, and preschoolers who were performing well, rise to be even better.

This is achieved by training the precise areas that really matter in children and their visual development. For more information and some free material, visit our website for more details.