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All parents recognize how vital good vision is to their children's development. As children grow and mature, over 80% of what they learn is processed through their eyes.  However, most people have a limited understanding of what good vision means.  Good vision involves much more than just seeing clearly without glasses.  

When most parents think about vision, they think about their child's clearness of sight, or visual acuity--in other words, the sharpness of vision as measured by the eye chart.  When a child has 20/20 vision, it means that each of his eyes can see what an average person sees at a distance of 20 feet.  If a child fails the eye chart test, he can get glasses or contacts to correct his blurry vision.  But the eye chart's use is limited to only checking a child's sharpness of vision, usually measured at distance.  

The eye chart cannot test many other important visual skills that children need to succeed in today's modern world, especially at school.  For example, the eye chart can't check how well children team or coordinate their eyes at the close distances required for reading, how well they can track a line of print without losing their place, how well they can adjust focus changes from near to far distances, or how well they can understand and make sense of what they see.  These are problems glasses can't correct.  Children can have good sharpness of vision (20/20) and still have serious problems in these other areas. 

The only eye test most children have is a brief screening at school which only checks their distance vision using the eye chart.   Each year thousands of children suffer from undetected vision problems that can make school and life difficult. Many are misdiagnosed as having a learning disability or ADD. In addition, children with crossed eyes and lazy eyes face especially demanding challenges.  Children with poor visual skills may struggle to read, have short attentions, perform poorly in sports, develop low self-esteem, and have doors closed to many future careers because of poor visual skills. 

Is your child at risk for vision-based learning problems?  A simple screening checklist can accurately rate your child's risk by flagging tell-tale symptoms. Click here for more information. .For more information on learning-related vision problems, click here.

  
 

The Children's Vision Information Network was created to raise public awareness about potential vision problems in children.  This site is not intended as a substitute for a complete eye exam and professional advice from your family optometrist.   Parents, teachers, occupational therapists, psychologists, and related professionals have permission to make paper copies of information contained in the site for educational, non-profit purposes only, with the condition that credit is given to this site and the URL is included.  We invite other websites with related missions to link to our site; however, please extend us the professional courtesy of not copying our content directly to your site without written permission.