Children's Eye Exams

Set Your Children Up For Success With Annual Eye Exams

Growing up, nothing affects a child’s ability to learn and socially interact like their vision. It is heavily recommended that all kids have their eyes tested every 12 months – our exams vary slightly between age groups in order to provide the most useful assessment possible.

Over 70% of learning is visual, so even a small impairment to a child’s eyesight can massively inhibit their growth.

While undiagnosed refractive errors can be troublesome for a child’s development, there are also more severe conditions to which children are uniquely vulnerable, such as congenital glaucoma. Our exams are designed to fully evaluate the health of your child’s eyes, leaving no stone unturned in searching for potentially malignant eye diseases, as well as problems with visual acuity.

Our First Priority Is Your Child’s Sight

The difficulty with children is that they cannot always articulate the fact they have a vision problem, sometimes to the point where they can spend their entire teenage years struggling to see the board at school. It is not uncommon for children to achieve low grades or have their behavior misinterpreted as antisocial as a direct result of an undiagnosed vision problem. That is why annual tests at Twin Lakes Vision Clinic are so vital to their development.

So what can we do?

There is a huge variety of different visual functions which can be tested and evaluated without any direct conscious feedback from the child. These include:

Pupil reaction
Fusion
Visual acuity
Color vision
Motility

This kind of quantitative assessment does not take a long time, however it is an essential part of any exam as it helps paint a broader picture of your child’s visual health. Saying that, there are qualitative observations which can be made at home by parents or friends of the family which can also indicate a visual problem. For school-aged children (i.e. for those around 4 years or older), you should keep an eye out for:

A lack of attention during lessons.
Headaches
Blurred vision
Trouble seeing the board at school
Difficulty with reading comprehension
Need to use fingers to keep track of their place on a page.

Don’t Worry If They Go On the Defensive

It’s very common for kids to get self-conscious about their vision problem. They may internalize feelings of low self-worth or inferiority, without realizing that they simply need to don a pair of specs to be on par with their classmates! It’s a delicate subject, and if you suspect your child of having a problem with their sight, approach it gently before bringing them in for a proper diagnosis.