It’s not abnormal for children to prefer playtime over reading or homework. But cause for concern may arise if your child has a hard time keeping up with the rest of their classmates in reading, takes a long time on her homework, skips whole sentences, or can’t keep track of where they are on the page. 

Many parents who recognize these difficulties for their children often first investigate learning disabilities. If the child tests negative for learning disabilities, this can leave both parent and child feeling hopeless and confused. This is where Vision Therapy comes in. 

Nearly 80% of all child learning happens through visual components, and 1 in 10 children have a vision problem (whether diagnosed or undiagnosed) that affects their learning. Even if your child has perfect, 20/20 vision, the amount of visual skills – which are learned during development – may be contributing to, or the cause of, your child’s school struggles. 

Difficulties with vision skills can occur in the following areas: 

• Eye movement control – the ability to fixate, track, follow a target, or read a line accurately.
• Focusing ability – the ability to see a clear image from all distances. 
• Eye alignment – being able to use both eyes together accurately. 
• Peripheral vision – the ability to see things around you without directly looking at them. 
• Visual motor skills – the ability to translate a visual image into an accurate motor action. 
• Visual perception and integration – the set of skills we use to gather visual information from the environment and translate them into meaning. These skills include visual discrimination, memory, directionality, and spatial relationships. 

If you want to strengthen your or your child’s visual skills, vision therapy is the answer for you! 

What is Vision Therapy

Just like you have to exercise to strengthen your muscles, vision therapy is the “exercise” to strengthen your visual skills. Vision therapy is a fully customizable and personalized treatment program to increase and strengthen visual skills and teach the patient how the brain controls the eyes. 

Vision therapy is designed to treat specific conditions, including but not limited to: 

• Convergence insufficiency
• Amblyopia (lazy eye)
• Strabismus (crossed eyes)
• Double-vision
• Eye teaming and tracking problems
• Focusing difficulties 
• Eye fatigue
• Depth perception and 3D vision difficulties
• Hand-eye coordination difficulties
• Visual perception and processing issues 

How Vision Therapy Can Help

At the Washington Vision Therapy Center, we’ll begin with an initial Functional Evaluation to determine a diagnosis and the severity of the condition. After that, we’ll present our recommended treatment plan that is personalized specifically for the patient. 

Because nearly everything that is taught in school has a visual component, whether it’s reading, looking at the board, writing, etc, strengthened visual skills can greatly increase a student’s participation and success in school. Hundreds of our patients finish therapy much happier and more confident than when they first began, and even more see significant increases in reading levels and test scores. 

Feel free to read more testimonials from happy parents and patients, here. If you have additional questions about vision therapy, please contact us at 509-654-9256. We’ll be happy to answer any of your questions!