Children's Eye Exams: Screening for Eye Coordination Problems

Your eyes are a team; they’re built to work together to give you a clear picture of the world around you. Each of your eyes gives your brain a slightly different picture, and in turn, your brain blends the two into a single 3D picture that you recognize. When your eyes are well-coordinated, you get a clear picture, but when your eye coordination is misaligned, it can cause fatigue, headaches and double vision.

At Market Mall Optometry in Calgary, our team conducts extensive eye exams on all of our patients including children, adults and seniors to test for proper eye coordination.

What can affect eye coordination?

Your eye coordination develops in childhood. When there’s a lack of visual stimulation or poor visual development, children can grow up with insufficient eye muscle control. It’s rare, but sometimes tumors, injury or disease can also disrupt eye coordination.

How does eye coordination affect vision?

Although the images captured by each of our eyes are slightly different, they have to be extremely similar for our brain to properly fuse them together into a single 3D image. In order to make the two images very similar, people with poor eye coordination have to exert a lot of effort on their eye muscles to achieve alignment. In some serious cases, the muscles can’t sufficiently move the eyes, resulting in double vision, and the brain’s automatic reaction is sometimes to blank out one of the images. In children, if the problem continues for a long time, it can hinder the development of a child’s eyes, even to the point that neither glasses nor contact lenses can correct their vision. This is called lazy eye, or amblyopia.

That’s why bringing your children in for a children’s eye exam to check for any problems with eye coordination is key to their eye health.

Call our Calgary optometry clinic today to book your children’s eye exam at 403-286-4884.