Vision Therapy
Screen Time Can Lead To Eye Strain And Convergence Insufficiency In Children
Now that a couple of years have passed since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, researchers have gotten a clearer picture of the impact that online schooling has had on children’s eyes.
Not only have myopia cases increased, but more children are experiencing symptoms of eye strain and convergence insufficiency due to extended screen time.
Below, we explore what eye strain and convergence insufficiency are, and how vision therapy can help counteract the negative effects of online learning.
Symptoms of Digital Eye Strain
Prolonged use of digital devices like computers or smartphones can cause a condition called computer vision syndrome, also known as digital eye strain. This condition affects around 50% of adults and children.
Symptoms of digital eye strain include:
- Sore eyes
- Blurred vision
- Neck and shoulder pain
- Headaches
Children who complain of any of these symptoms should have their eyes evaluated by a developmental optometrist to ensure that vision problems aren’t exacerbating their symptoms.
What is Convergence Insufficiency?
Normally, when your eyes focus on a very near object, like a pencil near your nose, they must point slightly inwards to see a unified and clear image.
With convergence insufficiency, the eyes aren’t able to work in unison to point inward. Instead, one eye may point outward when trying to focus on a near object, leading to blurred or double vision.
Children with convergence insufficiency may struggle to perform visually demanding near tasks like reading and homework. In fact, many children who have vision-related learning problems are often misdiagnosed as having learning disabilities.
How Does Screen Time Lead to Eye Strain and Convergence Insufficiency?
Experts at Wills Eye Hospital recently studied the correlation between prolonged screen time and its effects on children’s eyes. They surveyed 110 students aged 10-17 who attended classes online. Prior to the beginning of online sessions, the students all had healthy vision.
The researchers discovered that the number of hours spent in front of a screen directly correlated to the likelihood of developing digital eye strain and convergence insufficiency. More than half of the students experienced symptoms of both visual conditions, with 17% of cases being severe convergence insufficiency.
These important and timely findings should alert parents to the risks that come with online learning, and encourage them to find solutions and take preventative measures to keep their kids’ eyes healthy. Fortunately, that’s where vision therapy comes in.
How Can Vision Therapy Help?
Vision therapy trains the eyes and brain to work together efficiently to resolve a wide range of visual dysfunctions.
Restoring healthy binocular vision is the goal for children with convergence insufficiency, and vision therapy is a primary treatment for accomplishing that.
According to the National Eye Institute, most children with convergence insufficiency experience significant improvement after just 12 weeks of vision therapy.
Vision therapy can also be effective for treating symptoms of digital eye strain in children. According to the Optometrists Network, a free and extensive online library for eye care, vision therapy can relieve symptoms of digital eye strain by strengthening the visual system.
To learn more about the benefits of vision therapy or to schedule your child’s functional visual evaluation, contact Harrel Vision Therapy Center today!
Harrel Vision Therapy Center offers vision therapy to patients from Tulsa, Broken Arrow, Oklahoma City, and Fort Smith, AK, Oklahoma and surrounding communities.
Q: What is a functional vision evaluation?
- A: A functional visual evaluation assesses a multitude of visual skills that normally aren’t tested in standard eye exams or vision screenings. Some examples of those visual skills include convergence, eye tracking and teaming, visual processing, eye movement, focusing, eye alignment and accommodation flexibility.
Q: Who is a candidate for vision therapy?
- A: Children and adults who have varying degrees of visual dysfunction are ideal candidates for vision therapy. Many patients may not be aware of problems with their visual systems but suffer from symptoms like headaches or dizziness, which may be rooted in their vision. Children with learning problems or any visual symptoms may benefit from a customized vision therapy program.
4 Reasons Why Your Child May Be Refusing to Read
Reading involves the simultaneous coordination of a number of basic visual skills. For children who have not yet mastered some of these skills, reading can be an exercise in frustration, leading them to avoid reading altogether.
While many of us take our eyes’ ability to converge, focus and track for granted, those with underdeveloped visual skills often struggle to keep track of where they are on the page and to fully understand and remember what they’ve just read.
We’ve outlined four of the top vision-related reasons why children refuse to read, and how vision therapy can help your child become a more confident reader.
1. Eye Tracking Problems
Eye tracking is the eyes’ ability to move smoothly and accurately from place to place. Good eye tracking skills allow a child to keep their eyes on an incoming baseball or move successfully from word to word on a page of text without losing their place.
For a child with eye-tracking issues, eye movements will be slow and inaccurate, often seen as eye flickering or requiring extra head movements, to compensate for the reduced visual skill.
Poor eye tracking can cause a child to frequently lose their spot and skip words or even whole lines of text while reading. In this case, the child uses a lot more energy than their peers to simply keep track of where they are on the page, causing difficulty with reading comprehension and fluency.
2. Difficulties With Eye Teaming
Eye teaming is the eyes’ ability to work together to send accurate visual information to the brain. Although each eye sends a slightly different image, the brain is able to combine these two images into a single picture, allowing for three-dimensional vision and depth perception.
When children have problems with eye teaming, their eyes are unable to work together. They send two very distinct images to the brain, which struggles to easily combine the two images into a single clear, cohesive image.
A child attempting to read with eye teaming issues may experience eye strain, headaches or even double vision. Often, words on a page will look blurry or appear to ‘float’ on the page. Eye teaming difficulties may also cause the child to have a reduced attention span, and lead them to avoid reading or not read at grade level.
3. [Visualization] Problems
Visualization refers to the ability to see something in the mind’s eye even if that thing is not right there in front of us. This skill allows a child to recall words and remember how to spell words that they’ve previously seen. [Visualization] allows many of us to read a story and then ‘see’ the characters and events play through our mind as if we are watching a film.
For some children, however, this doesn’t happen. The brain has a hard time taking the visual information it’s receiving from the eyes and interpreting it into larger images and concepts. This can result in poor reading comprehension and may render that reading is a chore and an unenjoyable experience.
4. Issues with Accommodation
Accommodation is the ability to refocus the eyes each time we shift our gaze from one image or object to the next. This happens as a result of the swift and accurate contraction and relaxation of muscles in the eye to quickly focus and refocus as the eye moves.
In children with accommodation problems, the focusing muscles in the eyes do not smoothly contract and relax efficiently as their eyes move across the page from word to word or from a book (or screen) to the board and back. They need to stop and refocus their vision every time they read another word. This stop-and-start type of reading harms reading comprehension, and the constant need to refocus can cause headaches and eye strain.
So What’s The Solution?
All of the problems mentioned above are due to reduced visual skills and can be frustrating for children and parents alike. Fortunately, there is a solution: vision therapy.
Vision therapy is a personalized, doctor-prescribed evidence-based regimen of in-office and at-home eye exercises to teach your child’s eyes and brain to more effectively work together. Depending on your child’s needs, the customized program may include vision therapy aids such as prism glasses, devices and specialized therapy computer programs.
Contact Harrel Vision Therapy Center to help your child get back on track with their reading and learning.
Harrel Vision Therapy Center offers vision therapy to patients from Tulsa, Broken Arrow, Oklahoma City, and Fort Smith, AK, Oklahoma and surrounding communities.
Can Vision Therapy Help Those With Autism?
Visual problems in autistic children commonly go undetected and untreated. Often mistaken for symptoms of autism, visual problems can make it much more difficult for individuals with autism to process what they are seeing.
In a 2019 review of eye clinic records, the Journal of the American Association for Pediatric Ophthalmology and Strabismus found that many autistic children have undetected vision problems.
“Among 2,555 children at a university autism clinic, about 11% had significant vision disorders, including strabismus (eye misalignment) and amblyopia, in which poor vision in one or both eyes results from abnormal early visual development,” the researchers said.
Vision Problems and Autistic Behaviors
Though many of the following autistic behaviors may appear to be unrelated to vision impairment, in reality, a high number of them are due to poor vision or visual skills.
- Light sensitivity
- Amblyopia/lazy eye
- Lack of reciprocal play
- Eye alignment (eye turns)
- Common eye-rolling
- Looking through/beyond objects
- Difficulty accurately tracking moving objects
- Inability to maintain eye contact with people
- Visual stimming (flapping fingers in front of eyes)
- Looking at objects from the side of the eyes
- Extreme fear or absence of fear of heights
Vision Therapy for Children with Autism
Vision therapy is a proven treatment that strengthens the neurological connections between the brain and eyes to improve visual abilities.
A vision therapy program for an autistic child will help them improve visual processing, which in turn, will help them better understand their surroundings and improve associated behaviors, like anxiety.
Each vision therapy program is tailored to the child’s specific needs and includes age-appropriate exercises and activities.
Vision therapy tends to focus on improving the following skills in autistic kids:
- Central vision
- Peripheral stability
- Efficient eye coordination
- Visual-spatial organization
- Visual information processing
Yoked or ambient prisms
Vision problems, particularly visual-spatial misperceptions such as bodies/objects/people moving in space, can make an autistic child feel frightened, confused or distressed, leading to certain behavioral responses like poor eye contact or looking beyond an object.
Yoked or ambient prism lenses assist autistic children in making better use of their vision. Prisms can enhance posture, balance, and attention almost immediately, thus considerably boosting the child’s sense of physical safety and comfort while reducing anxiety and sensory overload.
Prism lenses can be worn on a daily basis or for the duration of a vision therapy program, which generally leads to significant improvements.
The purpose of vision therapy is to make ordinary tasks easier to complete and reduce the challenges that both you and your autistic child confront on a daily basis.
Please note that vision therapy should be a part of an interdisciplinary strategy aimed at improving a patient’s capacity to function and enhance their quality of life.
Harrel Vision Therapy Center serves patients from Tulsa, Broken Arrow, Oklahoma City, and Fort Smith, AK, Oklahoma and surrounding communities.
Q: How long does vision therapy take to work?
- A: Although it varies from person to person, most children will see a difference within the first 10 weeks. Adult vision therapy takes a little longer because adult brains are less flexible than children’s brains.
Q: What is vision therapy?
- A: Vision therapy is a specific program that involves a series of progressive therapeutic eye exercises that help patients improve their visual abilities. Their visual abilities improve as their eyes and brain communicate more effectively. It’s a one-of-a-kind, treatment program that’s usually combined with vision correction (glasses or contacts, such as in the case of myopia or presbyopia).
What’s the Link Between Vision Therapy and Self-Confidence?
When most people think of vision, they think of how well a person can see up close or from afar. Many schools perform a simple vision screening to identify students who may be having difficulty seeing the board in the classroom.
Unfortunately, these vision screenings don’t evaluate a child’s functional vision, which comprises all of the fundamental visual skills required for learning.
As a result, many children with inadequate vision skills go undiagnosed and end up struggling in school and on the sports field. Often, these children are considered clumsy and sluggish and tend to be misdiagnosed and labeled as having a learning disability, dyslexia or ADHD.
Improving visual skills enables many of these students to read more effortlessly, boost grades and improve athletic performance.
Visual skills can be learned and retrained with vision therapy, particularly during childhood and adolescence, when the brain is still developing.
What Is Vision Therapy?
Vision therapy is a specialized treatment program that aims to enhance visual processing by developing and/or improving the communication between the eyes and the brain. The training is typically made up of specialized lenses, prisms, and eye exercises.
The following eye conditions can be effectively treated with vision therapy:
- Amblyopia (lazy eye)
- Strabismus (eye turns)
- Convergence insufficiency
- Eye movement problems
- Binocular vision problems
- Accommodative/focusing disorders
- Visual processing difficulties
- Visual disturbances from a brain injury