Does your child suffer from attention problems? Or behavior problems?
You’re probably wondering, “What does this have to do with vision?”
Attention is highly correlated with vision! If someone struggles to make the eyes:
- work together
- focus
- stay on an object
- use peripheral vision
…it makes it much harder to attend to something or maintain attention on a task. We often find that patients with vision problems are misdiagnosed with ADHD, ADD, or learning problems.
Those with “normal” visual function often struggle to understand how a vision problem can cause issues in the classroom or with homework. If a patient has blurry or double vision, the brain (which controls the visual system) concentrates on making the vision single or clear. This leaves less energy to focus on reading or what the teacher is saying. Many times, children don’t know this isn’t normal, or may not experience the double or blurry vision because they have developed inefficient ways to compensate.
Attention is complicated because our brains are always going through many thoughts. It takes energy to actively ignore or push thoughts until later. If you’re a parent, you know how hard it can be to read when your brain brings up all the tasks needing to be done or when you are constantly interrupted by your kids. By the time you finish a page you can’t remember what you read or read the same sentence 3 times! Similarly, patients with vision problems either subconsciously think so hard about making the visual system work well or think about anything that is easier to avoid the challenging task (talk to friends or look out the window).
The most important thing for parents to know is that there is help besides medication. It is important to have your child evaluated by an FCOVD or a developmental optometrist who can evaluate how the eyes function, rather than simply making sure vision is clear and the eyes are healthy. Our visual system is an amazing system that does a significant number of tasks that happen automatically for many people. An optometrist that looks at visual function will be able to identify if there are issues that may be impacting attention such as eye movement control, focusing, or eye teaming. Once these components of the visual system are evaluated glasses, vision therapy, or both may be prescribed.
Vision therapy is specially designed to develop skills to control the visual system. Many times, patients don’t know there is a problem or don’t know how to fix it. Therapy functions to develop a person’s self-awareness, to recognize when attention is off task, to know where attention is, and to self-redirect.
Now what about behavior?
Behaviors are related to a person’s sensory systems.
- If you experience pain or discomfort, you’ll change positions.
- If you smell something bad, you’ll either try to figure out where the smell is coming from or move somewhere else to avoid it.
When it comes to the visual system, if information isn’t efficiently obtained or it’s processed poorly it can lead to behaviors to avoid or poorly solve the problem. We often see that children (and adults!) that can’t trust their visual system will be:
- anxious
- stressed
- easily frustrated
- quickly fatigued
- or unwilling to try new things.
Our sensory system is designed so that if there is stress or a challenge, we rely on our fight, flight, or freeze system to help us. When the visual system is stressed when having to make words clear and single, pointing the eyes at the correct word, and processing and individual word’s or group of words’ meaning, it will sometimes cause patients to go into a fight, flight, or freeze response. This results in homework wars, acting out, and an inability to take feedback or listen to directions or suggestions. Sometimes, people can get “stuck” and not be able to relax which leads to a spiral of problems or simply exhaustion. Sometimes behavior issues are due to people feeling out of control because they don’t know how to control their vision.
Vision therapy helps to develop skills to put patients in the driver’s seat to control how the eyes are working. People often don’t understand how their vision is improperly working and how to control their vision. Therapy uses specially designed procedures to provide feedback so to know how vision is functioning inefficiently, and then we help to develop skills to change what they are thinking to properly control the visual system.
