If your child stumbles when they walk, braces themselves on stairs, and has trouble keeping their eyes on the ball during play, it could be more than just general clumsiness — they may have a “lazy eye,” or amblyopia. If you notice your child struggling, our team at Sightwork can help them overcome amblyopia for a better quality of life.

What is Amblyopia (Lazy Eye)?

Amblyopia is the most common cause of impaired vision in children. This condition affects your child’s ability to accurately perceive the world around them, causing them to try and compensate for their lazy eye, resulting in certain symptoms and behaviors. Because vision is our dominant sense, amblyopia affects the entire body, not just the visual system.

Signs of amblyopia could include:

  • An eye that wanders in one direction or doesn’t face straight
  • Limited depth perception and spatial awareness
  • Squinting one eye
  • Head tilting
  • Headaches
  • Poor handwriting
  • Reading fatigue or delayed comprehension
  • Reduced sight

How Does Amblyopia Affect Your Quality of Life?

If your child has amblyopia, it can negatively impact their childhood by hindering their ability to learn and prevent them from enjoying stress-free extracurricular activities. Even if they are in occupational or physical therapy, they also need the proper treatment for their eyes to fully improve. Because of amblyopia’s effects on your child’s vision, things like riding a bike, playing sports, thriving in the classroom, and driving when they’re older will all be more difficult, compared to their peers, if it is not treated.

How Can Vision Therapy Treat a Lazy Eye?

Vision therapy is an effective lazy eye treatment that helps patients improve their depth perception, visual tracking, focusing ability, eye fixation, and hand-eye coordination — all without surgery. Our comprehensive approach involves having your child complete activities and exercises using advanced technology, like virtual reality, vectograms, and more. These therapies target and strengthen your child’s visual skills to improve their sight so they can have more freedom and flexibility in their life.

A common amblyopia treatment is the placement of an eye patch over their stronger eye to force the brain to use the lazy eye. While this method can be successful in helping the eye to read the eye chart, using vision therapy to help improve your child’s lazy eye is uniquely beneficial to all of the visual skills. Our therapy exercises train your child’s eyes to work together, decreasing or eliminating the need for frequent eye patching, which can reduce self-consciousness related to wearing the patch.

Why Trust Sightwork for Vision Therapy?

At Sightwork, our highly trained specialists use a Functional Vision Evaluation to gauge exactly where your child’s vision abilities are, so we can build a customized therapy plan for their lazy eye. We tailor your child’s plan to their individual needs and lifestyle, create a therapeutic schedule so each session helps them improve, and collaborate with others involved in their care, such as their occupational therapist. Our practitioners also continue to stay on the cutting edge of vision therapy, and are certified in Syntonics, an innovative and effective light therapy treatment. We aim to always provide the most engaging (and fun!) treatments for conditions like amblyopia to give your child all the tools they need to grow stronger through sight.