A Visit to your Behavioural Optometrist

For a kid a visit to the Behavioural Optometrist must be interesting and fun. It must be painless, and involve a series of tasks which are like playing games as compared with undergoing tests, but it needs to be something that they can enjoy rather than worry about.

The fact is many Optometrists treat children like small adults. Often they don't even have children's age correlated reading matter. A Behavioural Optometrist, on the other hand, is especially trained to relate to children, also to present tasks and tests which may challenge but never belittle children, especially those battling learning disabilities.

A Behavioural Optometrist Must Relate to Kids

In my practice we use loads of jokes as we greet the child and run basic vision, convergence and eye movement tests. When I examine the retina, I ensure that I use a cartoon to keep the child amused and engaged, and I ask a number of fun questions about their school, their family or whatever they appear to enjoy, from dancing class to football.

Then we do the bulk of your tests with children's charts, and fun things like stereo 3-D tests, which usually gets the kids excited!

I will rarely use drops for a child, and only when I am needing to obtain a result that I cannot get some other way. The drops paralyse their focus, which is what I want to test under normal conditions! These drops blur their vision for a day, sting after they go in and in my experience really get the child offside.

And ultimately, I involve the child themselves in our discussion, relating my findings to how they feel whilst doing homework or sitting in class. I need both parents and kids to understand what must be done.

Sometimes vision therapy is necessary, and as a Behavioural Optometrist, I try and make the exercises into games where ever I can. No one likes doing exercises of any sort (I know I don't!), and youngsters especially need to have fun as they train their vision. Being unsatisfied while using the more traditional Behavioural Optometry exercises, I have designed my very own therapies which are closely related to games, and we discover we've got a lot of success because the kids enjoy doing them!

That's what being a Behavioural Optometrist is all about to me!

If you need new information related to this short article you can visit our web site by clicking here - http://www.eyecuoptometrist.com.au/what-is-behavioural-optometry/. You might also visit vision therapy for some supplementary facts.