Children’s Vision Care

Child Vision Services

We at Point Grey Eyecare love working with children, and our optometrists and office environment alike are designed to help kids to feel comfortable when they visit our pediatric eye care center. Please schedule an appointment today if your child needs any of the following:

• Eye Exams
• Testing
• Vision Therapy (See bottom of page)
• New Glasses

You can schedule an appointment here. We look forward to meeting you and your child. Find our patient information form here, with a helpful checklist to help you determine what you need.

When Does my Child Need Vision Care

Your baby has an entire lifetime to see and learn. However, your baby also has to learn to see! The Canadian Association of Optometrists recommends thorough eye examinations should begin at 6 months of age.

With equipment and techniques specific for this age, our optometrists examine for excessive and/or unequal amounts of nearsightedness, farsightedness, and astigmatism, as well as for other visual development and eye health problems. Assessments at this time will also include detection of amblyopia, strabismus, eye movement/ tracking, and congenital eye health conditions.

After that, it’s recommended that you be watching closely for any changes as the following vision milestones pass.

Milestones in Vision Development

Birth to Four Months

•         At birth, babies have not yet developed the ability to easily tell the difference between two targets or move their eyes between the two images.
•         Their primary focus is about 20 to 25 cm, roughly the distance to a parent’s face
•         Hand-eye coordination begins to develop as the infant starts to track moving objects
•         Until the third month, the eyes may appear ‘crossed’ as they are not yet well coordinated

Five to Eight Months

•         Eyes start to work together to form 3D views and start perceiving depth
•         Start to develop good colour vision
•         Continued crawling at this ago helps to further develop hand-eye coordination

Nine to Twelve

•         Babies can judge distances, and the development of hand-eye coordination allows precision when throwing objects

Preschool/Two to Five Years Old

Preschoolers rely on their vision to learn tasks that will prepare them for school. They are developing the visually-guided eye-hand-body coordination, fine motor skills, and visual perceptual abilities necessary to learn to read and write.

Parents need to be aware of crossed or lazy eyes that can start to develop at this age. These conditions may or may not be evident without proper examinations. Any indication of developmental delays, such as difficulty with the recognition of colours, shapes, and letters can occur in the presence of a vision problem. Steps taken during these years to help ensure vision is developing normally can provide a child with a good start for school.

80% of all learning is achieved through vision

1 of 6 preschool children has a vision problem severe enough to affect learning ability. This number jumps to 1 in 4 by the 6th grade.

Studies have shown that, on average, 60% of children identified as having learning disabilities also have undiagnosed vision disorders. They may:

•         Lose their place while reading
•         Have a short attention span when doing close work
•         Skip words when reading
•         Have a greater potential than grades may indicate

Because they may present with similar signs and symptoms, recent studies have

shown that many children with learning disorders due to poor visual function are misdiagnosed with ADD or ADHD

“Good Vision” involves:

•         Visual acuity: the ability of the eyes to see and distinguish details
•         Visual integration: the ability to process and integrate visual information so we can understand what we see
•         Eye teaming: the ability of the eyes to work properly together
•         Eye focusing: the ability of the eyes to easily focus and shift focus to near and distant points
•         Eye motility: the eye ability to move together

Vision Therapy

Many vision disorders can be successfully treated by with corrective lenses such as glasses or contact lenses, while some others may be most effectively treated with Vision Therapy administered by a pediatric eye care specialist or other doctor, or a combination of the two. The goal of Vision Therapy is to improve your child’s visual function, relieve associated signs and symptoms, and improve the child’s social growth and overall quality of life.

Vision Therapy has been shown to be effective in treating accommodative disorders (focusing problems), binocular dysfunction (poor/ inefficient eye teaming), ocular motility dysfunctions (eye movement disorders), strabismus (eye turn), amblyopia (“lazy eye”), and perceptual dysfunctions.