One of my best friends tells a story of her parents' guilt and embarrassment at scolding her for being a clumsy toddler.

She continued to walk into things while a pre-schooler and at elementary school teachers suggested to her parents mother a nurse, father a general practitioner that she have her eyes tested.

They took heed, and discovered that Sara needed glasses badly.

The story is that when she first put them on, she asked where all the fuzz went and, of course, stopped bumping into things. Sara said her mother cried that despite being a nurse, she hadn't recognised her daughter's deficiency.

Examining the eyes of children is a specialty that sets optometrist Jamie Burgess apart from her Bermuda peers. Had she been in practice years before, she might have helped my friend see the world clearly, sooner.

Dr. Burgess graduated last June from the New York College of Optometry in Manhattan. She had lived in New York City for nine years. After graduating she returned home and began working at Argus Optometry in August. Pregnant at that time, she left to give birth and returned to work in February.

"I see between five and ten children a week," she said. Many are referred to her from occupational therapists in the public school system.

"They have been great at identifying children that have problems with tracking children that have a problem with following a moving object, children that are having difficulty because they are skipping over words when they are reading because their eyes are not properly focusing," she said.

Most of the children referred to her by occupational therapists suffer from convergence insufficiency, Dr. Burgess said.

Although glasses will not fix the problem, it's treatable with vision therapy.

She explained that if the average person gradually moves a finger toward their face until it touches the bridge of their nose, both eyes turn inward to focus on the finger.

"In convergence insufficiency, either one eye doesn't turn in to meet the other, or the near point becomes so visually stressful for the person to focus on that they see double, or the eye is so stressed that they cannot see individual words," said Dr. Burgess.

"They start skipping over words as things seem to be running together. They may skip whole lines," she added.

Reading difficulties usually result and this can lead to an overall deficit in the child's ability to learn.

According to Dr. Burgess, occupational therapists are adept at discovering this problem because their therapy looks at the child as a whole.

"They will be looking at how their visual system is interacting because there is a lot of interaction between the visual system and the motor system. They definitely get a big picture idea of when the visual system is not working as it should be," she added.

Because the test for convergence and tracking moving objects is so easy, she said many occupational therapists do it.

"It's a pretty easy thing to see and it becomes very important when you need to accurately look from a desk to a chalkboard," she explained. "You need to have those skills, otherwise you are constantly looking at everything on the blackboard and not getting to where you need to be. Children with these kinds of problems may have a lot of difficulty copying from the blackboard."

She added: "Then they get behind in class because they are struggling just to get the information down."

Often, by the time the child has copied the information, the teacher has moved on to another topic and the child is lost.

"A lot of times it does get really difficult for the child," said Dr. Burgess. "Sometimes these children are identified as being slow or lazy or inattentive, when really it is just that their visual system isn't able to accurately do what it needs to do."

And English class is not the only area where such children run into difficulty, math can be even more trying as they struggle to make sense of numbers where they may be missing digits.

Children with convergence insufficiency have only seen the world through their eyes and usually have no idea that others see it differently. This is why many cases go undetected.

"Usually the kids become really inattentive," said Dr. Burgess. "Homework and reading become so stressful because it's difficult for their visual system to do what they need it to do. Comprehending what they have read becomes really tiresome and stressful."

And the parents of these children are often stressed because they do not understand why their child is struggling with certain things.

Children with convergence deficit may start struggling from preschool, but may be able to cope until P1 or P2.

"At that point the reading material isn't necessarily that difficult," said Dr. Burgess. "They really start to get into trouble when they reach grades where they have a lot of reading, where they have to read at night, where they have math problems that involve reading comprehension.

"At this point they begin to struggle in subjects like math. Then it reaches the stage where there are just not enough hours in the night to do the homework, because the reading is so slow and laborious."

It's best to discover these problems as early as possible in children so that corrective measures can be taken and they do not become left behind in their ability to learn. Dr. Burgess sees children as young as three, but said it's best not to start them on vision therapy before they reach six or seven years old.

"It is one of those things that the patient needs to have enough maturity to be able to come in and focus on the therapy as it's being prescribed," she said. "It depends on the child, but typically four years old is too soon, it tends to be better to conduct therapy on a seven-year-old that's a great age."

You may be thinking that by the age of seven, a child will have missed so much of its foundation learning.

Said Dr. Burgess: "That's why it is so important to try and identify it early, so that you can at least start some techniques, adding more as they progress."

Dr. Burgess performs comprehensive eye examinations on children as well as adults. She is trained in vision therapies to treat the gamut of eye problems not only convergence deficiencies.