Friday, April 10, 2009

Does Your Child Have a Head Tilt?

This could be a sign that your child favors one eye over the other. She may tilt her head because each eye may have a different visual acuity at near or in the distance. Perhaps she sees better and clearer with one of her eyes.

Another cause of your child's head tilt could be the result of a convergence insufficiency or a convergence excess. These conditions may indicate that she is having difficulty teaming both eyes together without experiencing blur or double vision. Her coping strategy could be to suppress the visual information received by one eye, shutting it off, in effect, by tilting her head.

If your child has always experienced these visual conditions, she may not even realize that it is abnormal.

So, if your child has a head tilt, don't scold her about her posture until after you take her to a developmental optometrist for a comprehensive eye exam. She may need glasses or a program of professionally supervised in-office vision therapy. You can find a developmental optometrist in your area at www.covd.org by plugging in your zip code.

2 comments:

lasik eye center said...

Eye examination is an important part of health maintenance for everyone especially for children. It can detect visual difficulty, eye diseases and general health problems even before you are aware that a problem exists.

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Cobra said...

I asked Google about the relation between reading and the tilting of the head and I'm glad, yet also sad to learn, how bad my vision has gotten. I mean it makes so much sense because even my nose, jaw, neck and shoulders could feel that something wasn't right. I've been reading like that for so long that I didn't even notice how it was affecting other parts of my body! I've found the best way to know whether you have this problem, besides having an eye exam, is to draw an imaginary line down the middle of the body and make sure you have no jaw pain/stiffness, there should be no ear pain when laying on either side, and no tightness in the clavicle/chest. I'm so used to adjusting my eyes to whatever position and situation, so this is going to be hard habit to break since I've been doing it for so many years without realizing it, plus I got so used to forcing myself to read/study when I was exhausted that it was even harder to notice the changes in my vision. Unfortunately, it's undeniable now that I screwed up my vision in the name of knowledge!