How can I tell how much my child sees?

Children cope with focusing errors and things that commonly affect adults quiet well, they may have quite bad problems in 1 eye, or even quite bad vision overall and appear to be seeing OK.

Having an eye check early in life is a good idea, with the Pre-school vision check from age 3 or 4 being the earliest organised attempt to pick up problems. Your teachers or other adults may notice things, but these are often quite unreliable. An eye check at any stage by an eye surgeon (Doctor) or a local optometrist is a great idea, especially if your family has alot of eye problems.

Difficulty seeing the board at school:

This is usually not a feature until children are older, when board work becomes a part of school. It can be a symptom of important problems.

'Squinting' (closing the eyelids) when trying to see things:

Is one of the more suggestive signs that your child can't see well, they are trying to make a "pinhole" effect to adjust for out-of-focus eyes.

Increasing difficulty at school, dropping behind when they used to be doing well

It pays to have an eye test as visual problems are very easily fixed, while more complex learning issues are difficult.

Vision in babies 

Why isn't my baby smiling yet, or looking at things?

An infant's vision is actually pretty poor until they are around 3 months of age, with a poorly formed 'image sensor' inside the eye (the macula), and a brain that is just beginning to learn how to process all the visual information coming into it.

The age a baby smiles for a face or an object is quite variable: seldom really before 6 weeks, usually present by 6 months.

A baby's visual attention tends to shift around. They may not seem to show alot of interest in any particular thing until their vision and abilities really take off at around 6 months.

What is Delayed Visual Maturation?

The variable nature of vision development, particularly within the brain, means that an occasional child shows very little sign of any visual interest until they are quite 'old', ie up to a year of age. However after this they catch up and their vision is normal in later life.

This is quite different from the situation where a baby has an eye disease that prevents them from seeing, such as a retinal or optic nerve problem, or if they have a cataract or hazy front of the eye (cornea) that prevents an image forming in the eye. These children have an obvious abnormality when examined, and their eyes tend to either roll or rove around randomly, or show pendulum-like oscillations (nystagmus).

It is important that no child without these sort of problems is ever labelled as 'blind' by medical professionals until they have had a chance to develop.

Some babies with profound birth difficulties or hypoxic brain injury are very slow to develop visual responses, in keeping with their overall delayed development. A few have selective injury to the vision part of the brain (occipital cortex), which may cause a type of delayed visual maturation or may result in cortical blindness. It again often takes time to know what the outcome will be.