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The Importance of a Corpus Christi Children’s Eye Exam
Children's ability to learn, discover, explore and build physical coordination depends largely on how well they can see even during the first year of life. Refractive abnormalities in the eyes, poor eye function and visual coordination problems can all have an enormous impact on your child's development, comfort, safety and quality of life. That's why it's so important to schedule a Corpus Christi children’s eye exam for your little one at regular intervals. Here at Family Vision Associates, any Corpus Christi optometrist on our skilled team will be happy to check your child's eyes and vision.
Visual and eye development occurs in unison with brain development. This is no surprise, since proper vision hinges on the brain's ability to interpret the eyes' data, and the eyes depend on the brain to direct them in a coordinated manner for normal binocular vision and the ability to converge their focus on objects. (Newborns can't see all that well simply because their eyes and brains haven't yet embarked on this collaborative effort.) The ability to judge distance and depth is also critical when your child learns how to crawl, stand, walk and manipulate objects using hand-to-eye coordination. Any eye health or functional issues that interfere with these important developments need to be identified and treated by our Corpus Christi optometrist.
The school years place even more demands on a child's visual acuity. When reading and writing become everyday concerns, many children suddenly experience headaches and eye strain due to undiagnosed refractive errors that make images blurry or fuzzy. This can drastically impact their ability to keep up in class to the extent that they are sometimes misdiagnosed as learning disabled! A Corpus Christi children’s eye exam can detect those refractive errors so they can be corrected for a lifetime of successful study.
Schedule a Corpus Christi Eye Exam for Your Child
We advise parents to schedule their child's first Corpus Christi eye exam at the age of 6 months, with the next exams occurring at the age of 3, then kindergarten age, and then every 2 years after that. Even though infants can't tell us how well they're seeing, we can measure such objective factors as eye teaming and coordination, the ability of the eyes to follow objects and the presence of conditions such as exotropia (misaligned eyes). As your child becomes old enough to communicate with us, our Corpus Christi optometrist can perform tests to check:
- Near vision
- Distance vision
- Focusing skills
- Peripheral awareness
- Hand-eye coordination
Even if your child can't yet identify the letters of the alphabet, our Corpus Christi eye exam can determine visual acuity using a "tumbling E" eye chart instead of the standard chart. If your child has a refractive issue such as nearsightedness, farsightedness or astigmatism, we want to correct it as early as possible with corrective lenses. Call 361-854-1833 today for the sake of your child's eyesight!