The Top 4 Secrets to Protecting Your Children's Eyesight

The new normal has a lot of new things for all of us. While most of us are gradually moving from work-from-home to attending regular office and shops, our children are waking up to the reality of spending a great deal of their academic year in front of screens. Indeed, online education is the new normal for our children and it seems to be staying around for quite sometime.

Online education brings out some potential challenges that we will need to address, sooner rather than later to ensure that they perform just as well as they did at their regular school.

MINIMISE THE BLUES

There is a lot of awareness about blue light from digital screens on the internet. A lot of symptoms have been attributed to it. That may not be entirely true. This post addresses some of the symptoms below, however, blue light does have the theoretical possibility affect a child’s productivity in another way.

Prolonged exposure to blue light via the device screens and the use of such devices closer to their sleeping time delays the onset of sleep. This potential disruption in sleep cycle can cause poorer quality of sleep. Blue light filtering spectacles may have a role to play according to some leading bio-hackers like Dave Asprey and sleep specialists like Harpreet Singh, the creator of the sleep tracking device Oura ring. Do check out our large selection of ready-to-wear Blue Light Filtering spectacles at our showrooms.

KEEP FATIGUE AT A SAFE DISTANCE

Leaning on a computer, laptop or tablet means the children have to constantly look at a device that is at one hand’s distance, typically 60-70 cm as against alternately looking between a classroom board that is at least 10-20 feet away and their books on a desk. The constant near fixation causes fatigue and the child begins to get disinterested in studying after 1-2 hours.

The fatigue can be due to weak external muscles of the eye that cause eye movements. Fixating eye constantly at near can tire these muscles. Fortunately these muscles can be trained with exercises suggested by an optometrist. You can download a easy to do home exercise from this link.

CORRECT THE ERRORS

Often, there are small amount of spectacle numbers that go undetected as the internal eye muscles compensate for them at a young age. Small cylindrical powers (astigmatism) are often compensated by the child squeezing the eyes. This compensation becomes more pronounced when constantly working at near causing headaches and eye strain.

A proper consultation with an optometrist and a vision test can help prescribe the right spectacles to alleviate these symptoms.

BLINK IT RIGHT

If you observe people working on computers you will realise that they tend to stare. Probably in an attempt to focus harder they tend to open their eyes wider. This causes them to blink less often than one normally should. The normal blink rate in humans should be 14-16 blinks in a minute. While on a computer screen, the blink rate comes down to 8-9 per minute.

Lower blink rate causes the eyes to dry faster which in turn cause watering and redness of eyes. Inculcating a practice of consciously blinking once every 5 seconds can help ease the symptoms.

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