Promote Back-to-School Eye Exams

Promote back-to-school eye exams to your patients. They need to be part of their children's preparations, notes Dr. Ida Chung, COVD (College of Optometrists in Vision Development) president. When a child struggles with reading, attentive parents often can see something wrong. Teachers might say a child has a  "tracking" problem. Pediatricians, however, cannot always identify the problem, as Suzanne Torres, mother of five, discovered. Her middle daughter, Mary, was in first grade. She developed difficulties reading. She knew her "wall words" (words put up on the classroom wall for Spelling), but she couldn't recognize them in a paragraph. Her pediatrician said that Mary's vision was fine. Her mother noticed that Mary's eyes, though, didn't move "correctly" when she read. Read more.