Eye and Vision Care

Children's Eye Health and Safety

The Fall season means football, cooler temperatures, and back to school. This is a good time each year to have your child's vision examined by an eye care professional (optometrist or ophthalmologist). Do not wait until your child complains of blurred vision, red eyes, and/or headaches. And do not rely on the school's vision screening program, since that is designed to only detect the more common eye and vision problems.

Children often do not know how they should be seeing because they assume everyone sees the way they do. Because of this, the American Optometric Association recommends that all children receive a professional eye and vision examination at critical stages in their visual development. These critical stages are

By six months of age
At 3 years of age
Before first grade
At least every two years until age 18

By having your child's eyes examined at these critical stages, permanent vision loss from amblyopia ("lazy eye") and other pediatric eye diseases can be prevented.

A new national program called "InfantSEE", which is co-sponsored by the American Optometric Association (AOA) and the Vision Care Institute of Johnson & Johnson (J&J) Vision Care, was recently launched on the NBC Today show by former President Jimmy Carter. Over 7000 volunteer optometrists throughout the United States will donate pediatric eye exams for America's newest and youngest citizens. To schedule a free eye examination for an infant by an optometrist in your area, please visit www.infantsee.org

Children with signs and/or symptoms of vision problems, like red eyes, tearing eyes, unusual sensitivity to light, eye pain, or squinting should be examined as soon as possible.

Parents often ask how very young patient can be examined. Fortunately, there are many new instruments available today to objectively (i.e., no patient response needed) measure refractive error. In addition, young children enjoy playing the visual acuity game of identifying common objects on a card like school busses, telephones, and birds that are presented in smaller and smaller sizes. And most eye health tests, like pupil responses, external examinations, and internal (ophthalmoscopy) examinations only require children to sit still and watch a cartoon to keep their eyes fixated on a distance target.

For children who need to wear prescription glasses, polycarbonate lenses are usually the safest and most durable lens material. Glass lenses can shatter into dangerous pieces if they are struck by a flying object; and plastic lenses - even with scratch coating - are not as durable as polycarbonate lenses for children. In addition, if a child plays a rough sport like baseball, basketball, or hockey, goggles such as "Rec-Specs" are wonderful eye safety devices.

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Last Reviewed: Jul 25, 2005

Robert D. Newcomb, OD, MPH, FAAO
Professor of Clinical Optometry
College of Optometry
The Ohio State University