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During your first visit to our office

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Child Eye Care Associates is geared towards children, with a waiting room play area, and staff who work well with, and enjoy, young patients. Our doctors and staff are skilled at eliciting cooperation from most children.

 

For infants and toddlers, it is helpful to time the appointment to avoid naptime, so that your child is awake and happy for the visit. For many children, siblings can be a distraction during the exam. If possible, scheduling an appointment time for your child when young siblings are elsewhere allows your child to be examined even better.  It allows you to be focused on facilitating your child's cooperation and on discussing the doctor's findings and recommendations.

Our exams are oriented towards children, with videos and toys to gain their attention, picture charts for those who will talk but don't yet know their letters, and Teller card vision testing for preverbal children.

 

You can expect a new, comprehensive exam to take about 2 hours. This includes a 30-40 minute waiting time while the pupils dilate after the eyedrops have been given. Dilating the eyes is usually required as an important part of a new patient exam.  This is in order to measure refractive errors accurately, and to examine the retina and the optic nerve. Our office uses drops particularly designed for children. They do sting briefly, but we do our best to minimize the discomfort. After dilation, vision is a bit blurry for the rest of the day, and the pupils remain dilated for many patients even overnight.

Your child will see several members of our team during their visit.

Initially a technician will call you and your child back to an exam room to take a detailed history about your child and what you have been noticing. They will measure your child's vision with age-appropriate tests, evaluate eye movements, binocular vision and pupil responses. If eye misalignment is suspected, our orthoptist will conduct a thorough evaluation of your child's eye alignment and movements.  

 

Eye drops are usually given and if so, you will be asked to wait 30-40 minutes for the drops to take effect.

 

Once the pupils are fully dilated the doctor completes the exam and discusses the results and answers any questions you may have.

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