Children’s Eye Care in Warminster
We Nurture Healthy Vision
Pediatric eye exams are more than just vision tests—they are crucial for detecting potential eye and vision issues that could affect your child's ability to learn and develop properly.
We tailor our pediatric eye exams to be child-friendly and stress-free. Besides basic visual acuity (distance and near vision), an eye exam may assess the following visual skills that are required for learning and mobility:
- Binocular vision: how the eyes work together as a team
- Focusing
- Peripheral Vision
- Color Vision
- Hand-eye Coordination
- Tracking
Pediatric Eye Exams
Early Detection
Children's eyes change rapidly, making regular eye exams essential to catch and address any vision problems early. These exams are vital for:
- Detecting refractive errors like nearsightedness, farsightedness, and astigmatism.
- Identifying eye health issues that could impact academic performance and quality of life.
- Ensuring the proper development of visual skills needed for effective reading, writing, and classroom learning.
Infants: Birth - 24 Months
A baby’s visual system develops gradually over the first few months of life. They have to learn to focus and move their eyes and use them together as a team. The brain also needs to learn how to process the visual information from the eyes to understand and interact with the world. With the development of eyesight comes also the foundation for motor development, such as crawling, walking, and hand-eye coordination.
You can ensure that your baby is reaching milestones by monitoring what is happening with your infant’s development and by ensuring that you schedule a comprehensive infant eye exam at six months. At this exam, the eye doctor will check that the child is seeing properly and developing on track and look for conditions that could impair eye health or vision (such as strabismus(misalignment or crossing of the eyes), farsightedness, nearsightedness, or astigmatism).
Since there is a higher risk of eye and vision problems if your infant was born prematurely or is showing signs of developmental delay, your eye doctor may require more frequent visits to monitor his or her progress.
Preschool Children From 2-5 Years of Age
The toddler and preschool age is a period where children experience drastic growth in intellectual and motor skills. During this time they will develop fine motor skills, hand-eye coordination, and perceptual abilities that will prepare them to read and write, play sports, and take part in creative activities such as drawing, sculpting, or building. This is all dependent upon good vision and visual processes.
This is the age when parents should look for signs of lazy eye (amblyopia) - when one eye doesn’t see clearly, or crossed eyes (strabismus) - when one or both eyes turn inward or outward. Treating these conditions early increases the success rate.
Parents should also be aware of any developmental delays having to do with object, number- or letter recognition, color recognition, or coordination, as the root of such problems can often be visual.
If you notice your child squinting, rubbing his eyes frequently, sitting very close to the TV or reading material, or avoiding activities such as puzzles or coloring, it is worth a trip to the eye doctor.
School-Aged Children: Ages 6-18
A screening by a pediatrician or school nurse is not a substitute for a comprehensive eye exam. Undetected vision problems can affect children academically, socially, athletically, and personally. If your child struggles in school or activities, an underlying vision issue might be the cause. Good vision and eye coordination are crucial for learning and motor skills.
Children with focusing, reading, or hand-eye coordination issues may experience frustration and behavioral problems, often without realizing their vision is abnormal.
The symptoms of vision problems in older children include:
- Short attention span
- Headaches
- Frequent blinking
- Avoiding reading
- Tilting the head to one side
- Losing their place often while reading
- Double vision
- Poor reading comprehension
