How to Protect Your Children's Eye Health and Preserve Natural Vision: A Story of Myopic Monkeys

By Chang Oh

 

If you have suffered from bad eyesight all of your life and had to rely on eyeglasses or contact lenses for a long time, wouldn't you want your children to have a different life? To do that, you need to first notice that you have bad eyesight for a reason. Your children might be modeling your bad habits without even knowing while at the same time being exposed to an environment not friendly to good eyesight. That is, in order for you to protect your children's eye health, you must know what causes bad eyesight. This article shows how you can do just that.

In 1993, a couple of Taiwanese researchers conducted an interesting experiment. They made two 3-month-old monkeys watch TV for 12 hours a day, just 3 feet away from it. After one year of this, the two monkeys were raised the same as other "normal" monkeys. When the researchers had eye tests for these two monkeys after one year of normal raising, they showed little difference in eyesight from other monkeys - only -0.25 diopter. However, the difference became dramatic afterwards; -4.0 after two years, and a whopping -8.0 after three years. The catch is that they didn't watch TV for a minute after that one year of "treatment!"

What can be inferred from this experiment is that early age is more critical to eyesight development than any other age. Even if you keep your children away from TV, it can only be a little help if you had left them exposed when they were infants. This is all the more reason why you should pay extra attention to your environment and your habits, which can be harming your children's eyesight without you even knowing it.

One such condition is how your children's room is lit. Sure, how bright or how dark it is lit is important, yet how long is also very important. Before the advent of electric light bulbs, our eyes were accustomed to a certain cycle of daylight and darkness. This cycle allowed the eyes to relax and recuperate in order for it to work another day. Today our rooms are kept brightly lit well after sunset. Think about what infants have to go through during their birth. They were used to the cozy darkness of their mothers' womb; then in an instant they are abruptly exposed to the bright hospital lights.

How do you think this affects the children? The iris, the part that controls the amount of light coming into your eye, has to sustain a constant strain. This surely decreases the iris' capability, just like the case where a constant strain on your muscle without time to relax won't allow your muscle to work properly. Conversely, if you ensure that a proper amount of time is allotted for relaxation, you can protect your children's natural vision.

Almost every good habit for the eyes circles around relaxation and removing strain. In addition to the points mentioned above, you can tell your children to blink more often when watching TV or reading a book, to move their eyes away from TV or the book and look at a distant object once in a while, and to sit up straight when using computer. These are all good habits for removing excess strain on your children's eyes.

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