Vision therapy has been proven to be an effective treatment of vision development difficulties in primary school children.  As a Behavioral Optometrist I have worked with vision therapy and children with learning disabilities for over twenty years, and I see the efficiency of the right tips every day.  Nonetheless, I am often asked, “Can vision therapy also be effective for preschool children?”

Vision therapy is an enormously efficient tool when it comes to increasing visual skills.  It is considerably more than the traditional eye exercises, which are mind-numbing, repetitive and purely intended to enhance eye coordination and focus skills, which are mainly dealing with what we Optometrists are measuring rather than the child's actual performance.

But in vision therapy we have the possibility to invest time and effort into enhancing visual skills that actually count when it comes to helping children rise above learning disabilities.  It's not just about the eyes, it is about developing true skills which go far beyond merely eyeballs!

The skills developed by vision therapy take in the following:

Eye movements- which help children flow in their reading and stops them misreading words or skipping lines, and it also aids in ball sports.

Focus and Eye teaming- which helps children to concentrate and apply themselves to their classroom work.

Visualization and Recall- which aids children to successfully recall sight words and spelling, giving them a large vocabulary to assist them to read.

Laterality and Directionality- which aids children with learning disabilities to  triumph over reversals, or writing letters or numbers back to front.

Cross Patterning- which allows children to employ both sides of their brain usefully.

Other developmental areas- including coding, sequencing, fine and gross motor, etc.

Now, it is easy to see how this can have a huge impact on children who show learning disabilities, but what about the younger children, the preschoolers who may or may not be showing signs of deficiency.

Permit me to suggest this: if your preschool or kindergarten child is exhibiting signs of being behind the others in the schoolroom, then vision therapy is a extremely successful tool in developing the visual skills that child may need to catch up and move to the front.  It works because these skills, which must be developing in children during this period, at times are not developed or underdeveloped.  If we can pick up them quickly and proficiently, the child will improve significantly.

On the other hand, I have also established that, if we do vision therapy and enhance the development of normal kids, we can speed up their performance and thus accelerate the learning ability of even “average” children.  

In both of these situations, what we need to do is tailor our program to suit the preschool or kindergarten level.  That's why I have published a home based vision therapy program just for preschoolers, and it works very effectively in making struggling preschoolers far better, and preschoolers who were performing OK, rise to be even better.

This is achieved by training the precise areas that really matter in children and their visual development.  For more information and some free gifts, visit our website for more details.