Children are lucky to have the world at their feet and infinite possibilities. Their future is long and bright, but they need your help to ensure they can realise their full potential.
One of the ways you, as parents, can do this is to care for your children’s eyes. Book that appointment with an eye doctor in Dubai and read on to learn why your children’s vision is essential and how you can care for their eyes.
Why It’s Important to Take Care of Your Children’s Eyesight
Vision problems can become considerable obstacles to a child’s life and future.
#1. Academic Performance and Cognitive Development
Your child’s vision is crucial to learning, comprehension, communication, and imagination. Children need to see well to recognise letters and, ultimately, read. They must be able to read to understand signs, learn from books, and acquire knowledge through written text.
Children need to focus and maintain eye contact to understand what other people are saying and convey what they want to say. Seeing and recognising colours is crucial to engagement and developing creativity, and good eyesight is necessary for developing hand-eye coordination.
All these are crucial and good vision makes them possible. Vision impairment can hinder them, leading to slower cognitive development and poor academic performance.
#2. Social and Emotional Well-Being
Children with poor eyesight can become socially awkward; they can be clumsy and fail to recognise people they’ve already met. Vision problems that are physically apparent to onlookers (e.g., strabismus or misalignment of the eyes, nystagmus or eye-shaking) may also lead to difficulties socialising and forming bonds with peers and, ultimately, self-esteem issues.
Children with vision problems may withdraw from social activities. Even if they want to participate, their poor eyesight may render them incapable of doing so, especially in sports and other recreational activities.
#3. Mobility and Safety
Children with impaired vision may feel uncertain about independently navigating and exploring their environment. Additionally, poor vision can be a safety concern; children may find it challenging to detect obstacles in their paths. In the future, having refractive and depth perception issues may mean they will be unable to drive.
#4. Future Career Prospects
It may be too early to plan your children’s future careers but, as parents, you probably want to ensure they will be free to do whatever they want in the future. Unfortunately, vision impairment can limit career options. For instance, air or army pilots, air traffic controllers, police officers, firefighters, and surgeons must have good vision.
Taking Care of Your Children’s Eyes
It’s important to maintain eye health in children. The following are some of the ways you can accomplish that.
#1. Book an eye exam.
Book an appointment with an ophthalmologist for a vision screening and eye exam, and do this regularly after that. This preventive measure will help you detect vision problems early.
The earlier you can detect issues, the earlier you can intervene. That can increase the chances of restoring clear eyesight or resolving problems.
Even if your child’s condition may not be fully resolvable, early detection means you can adopt coping mechanisms to minimise its impact on her cognitive development, academic performance, well-being, mobility, safety, and quality of life. Early detection can also help prevent complications or prevent the condition from worsening.
#2. Limit screen time.
Limit your children’s screen time. As a guide, organisations such as the American Academy of Pediatrics recommend only up to one hour of screen time per day for children two to five years old. For older children and teenagers, up to two hours of screen time is recommended by the NHS in the UK. Make sure to enforce lengthy screen-time breaks.
When you work in front of a computer monitor or spend extended periods staring at your mobile phone screen, you don’t blink as often as you usually do. In fact, your blink rate falls from around 15-17 times per minute to only about 4-7 times per minute.
Blinking is a physiological mechanism that maintains a thin layer of tears – i.e., moisture – on the surface of the eyes. When your blink rate falls, your eyes dry out. When left unaddressed, eye dryness can cause inflammation and corneal surface abrasion that may eventually lead to vision problems.
Staring at a screen for too long can also cause eyestrain. This can be due to the glare of the screen; thus, it’s recommended to spend screen time in well-lit spaces. It may also be due to focusing too intently even though one has blurry eyesight or other issues; thus, an eye exam to detect vision problems is vital.
#3. Spend time outdoors.
Spending time playing outside is crucial to eye health. Staring at objects in the distance (instead of always focusing on near objects) can be refreshing and relieve eye strain and eye fatigue.
Additionally, the body needs the sun’s ultraviolet B (UVB) rays to metabolise vitamin D3, which is needed for optimal tear function. In addition, the problem of Vitamin D deficiency has been associated with poor eyesight and an increased risk for cataracts, macular degeneration, glaucoma, and other conditions.
That said, excessive exposure to UV rays is harmful. Therefore, make your children wear UV-protective sunglasses when playing outside.
Paediatric Eye Care
Get paediatric eye exams even if your children have no symptoms of vision problems, spend time outdoors and limit screen time. These measures will help keep your children’s eyes healthy, maintain their good vision, and prevent vision problems that may hinder them from realising their full potential.
Beth is Cloudmineinc’s senior health editor and a certified personal trainer. She has over 10 years experience as a science journalist and is the author of two books. She deadlifts over 315 lbs.