August is Children’s Eye Health and Safety Month, and if you haven’t taken your child to the eye doctor in a while, now is a good time to do it, especially with school back in session.
“It’s important to make sure that your child can see when they’re in school,” said Dr. Allison Babiuch an ophthalmologist with Cleveland Clinic Children’s. “And all the time it’s important for them to be able to see, but especially when they’re starting to learn. And as they’re getting older and the font that they’re reading gets smaller, they need to see the fine details. We need to make sure that they can see well enough to be able to learn and we don’t want anything holding them back.”
She said your child may need glasses if they tend to squint, tilt their head or move closer to see something better, like the TV, and you would think older kids would be more vocal about having trouble seeing, but Babiuch said that’s not always the case.
Vision changes happen slowly, so they may not even realize there’s a problem.
More screen time at school also seems to be affecting children’s eyesight.
Babiuch said they’ve seen an increase in cases of near-sightedness, or what they call “myopia,” and it appears to only be getting worse.
“We are encouraging kids to take breaks from the screens as much as possible and trying to do a combination of, you know, the things that you have to do on the screen, do on the screen. But if you can do things on paper or an actual physical copy of a book to give the eyes a bit of a break from that screen light, that would be good,” Babiuch said.
Babiuch said it’s never too early to take your child for an eye exam, even if they don’t know their letters yet. There are other ways to check their vision to find out if they need glasses.