Does your child get frustrated with homework, avoid reading, or seem inattentive in class? Sometimes what looks like a focus or behavior problem is actually a vision challenge. Because kids can’t always explain how they see the world, it’s up to parents and teachers to spot the signs.
My name is Sara Pereira, I’m an occupational therapist and co-owner of Sensational Development Occupational Therapy on Long Island, New York. I wanted to take a few minutes today to discuss something that we address every day in therapy, which is vision.
Vision Is More Than 20/20 Eyesight
A lot of times, parents and teachers will ask if their child’s vision can impact their behavior. And the answer is yes. There are a lot of ways that a child’s behavior is their way of communicating. Children aren’t able to tell us that something’s wrong visually, if this is the way that they’ve always seen the world.
So, we might have to use our detective skills to notice that this child’s really struggling or having a lot of behaviors around coloring or doing puzzles in early childhood. Or maybe a kiddo who is in elementary school is avoiding close work, showing a lot of inattentive behaviors, struggling with reading, or their handwriting is poor. We might notice very slight behaviors, like a child tilting their head when they’re writing and only working out of one eye.
Ocular Motor Skills Help Kids Focus, Track, and Shift Gaze
There are a lot of other visual skills that are important other than just seeing clearly. We need our eyes to:
- Move together to focus on an object
- Be able to track a moving target
- Move from one point to another smoothly
- Look up, down, left, and right without losing focus
- Focus on something close up and something far away
- Take a picture of the world that our brains can turn into a 3D image
If you are a child sitting at your desk, you need to be able to maintain clear vision while you are reading a book, writing, coloring, or doing any kind of project close up. And if you can’t do that, if you’re seeing double or struggle to see close up, it can look like you’re inattentive.
You might have a child that actually sees a line of print start to move on its own as their eye fatigues. And this isn’t always something that a child can articulate because this is just the way they’ve always seen the world, so they’re not necessarily understanding that this is problematic.
Visual Issues Can Look Like Attention or Behavior Problems
Something important to consider is that some children will be okay learning to read. But once things become more difficult, as they get further along in their education, they have to read in order to learn. They’re reading more text. The text font is smaller. There’s a lot more math problems or words on a page. They’ve held it together up until this point, they’ve been able to learn to read, they’re doing okay, but now it gets harder and they’re done. They’re just going to avoid it altogether, which again, can come up as behavioral difficulties, opposition and inattention, where the real problem might just be complete overwhelm.
They have just seen too much and they know it is going to be way too hard. Before they have even put pencil to paper or read the first line of text, they just visually see the volume that’s there, and it’s too much for them to bear. At that point, you’ll see kiddos that start to get really frustrated and just upset, they’re homework’s taking forever, and so on.
Occupational Therapy Can Support Visual Motor and Visual Perceptual Development
Occupational therapists use play-based intervention to address these areas of vision. We may make accommodations for a child, such as reducing the amount of text on a page by covering it up or using highlighters. There are a lot of things that we can implement for homework and at school that will make these things easier.
And there are a host of interventions that we can use with children that are play-based and fun. At the same time, we’re making accommodations for them so that the child is able to keep up, engage, move through their academics, or excel and progress in sports or any activity that was causing them trouble to begin with.
The goal for intervention might be to strengthen a skill, and the way to get there will look different for each child depending on where their areas of weakness are. But it’s important that, as occupational therapists, we advocate for a visual assessment. We like a child to be seen by a developmental optometrist to help find their visual baseline, typically when they’re entering kindergarten or first grade.
Reach Out to Sensational Development for Expert Support
If you are experiencing any of these challenges with your children, reach out to our occupational therapists here at Sensational Development. We offer consultations, and our OTs are happy to get on the phone with you to determine if evaluation and intervention is the right fit for your child.