The Importance of Back to School Eye Exams
Vision plays a very vital role in learning for both children and adults. Imagine yourself sitting in a classroom full of your peers, and you are finding yourself struggling to focus on taking down the notes. You can’t even shift your focus immediately from near to far. Imagine a day without being able to read a single paragraph, everything blurry and double vision. Many children fail to realize that their struggles in the classroom are in no way correlated to intelligence or how hard they should be trying; rather they are unable to process the data put before them visually.
How Vision Issues Negatively Impact School Performance?
Sometimes when children find difficulty reading the board in the classroom or the books on their desks, teachers, and parents feel eyeglasses and lenses can help them, and they are right. It is very obvious vision discomforts linked to the way the eyes function and how the brain operates visual information can also restrict your child’s ability to understand. Generally, children perform poorly in school due to poor eyesight since over 80 percent of learning is visual.
Let’s know about the “3 R’s”, which include:
Recognition: the ability to recognize the differences between letters and numbers, i.e., the difference between “m” and “n.”
Reading comprehension: capturing and interpreting what they are reading & learning, i.e., being able to visualize and understand the paragraph that they just read.
Retention: the ability to recall specific information read.
The consequences of poor eyesight on the 3 R’s can also lead to low self-esteem, as well as fatigue and headaches.
Importance of Eye Exam in School
One of the main reasons people don’t exactly rush to get their children’s eyes checked is because of expense. It can be challenging to pay necessary bills, food, electricity, and clothes, so, the addition of what tends to be viewed as an “optional” check-up like eye exams, doesn’t seem to make it onto a family’s monthly expense budget. But it is one of the best investments you can make in your child’s future. Timely identification of a child’s eyesight problem can be the deciding factor in a child’s ability to succeed in a classroom or fall behind in their studies. Along with some new clothing, buying the school requirements, pencils, pens, notebooks, paper, etc. and also understanding that “back-to-school” can be an overwhelming time of year.
Your children may feel nervous about getting an eye exam done. Explain to them the procedure of eye exam and take them to see yours. Encourage them to say what they see, and there is no wrong answer. Take them for treatment when they are well rested as tiredness can affect the accuracy of the result.
Identify even if your child says nothing at all, these are indications to detect and treat quickly before the year advances:
- Loses their pace while reading.
- They will start to avoid close work.
- Will always hold reading pages closer than normal.
- Cultivate the habit of rubbing his or her eyes.
- Will suffer from headaches.
- They will tend to use a finger to maintain place when reading.
- They will skip or be confused with small words when reading.
- The consistency of performing below potential will be frequent.
Eye vision problems can break your child’s confidence, keep your child irritated with eye strain, and quickly become off-task in the classroom losing valuable instruction time. Provide every opportunity to learn this school year and schedule your back to school eye exam(s) today!