Archive for the ‘Children's Vision’ category

Cool sunglasses for children

February 21st, 2010

Children are more susceptible to damages from the UV rays, so cool sunglasses are necessary for children to avoid eyes damages also look cute.

Children as young as about three years old should be wearing sunglasses when play outside in a bright sunshine. But their parents may not realize the problems about the eyes damage due to the harmful rays from the sun, or children do not like the additional accessory in front of their eyes. Cool sunglasses could be a great help to intrigue children’s interest on wearing them, for cool sunglasses can make children the center of attention and they feel wonderful on that.

Children may not know how to choose a pair of cool sunglasses, so it is parent’s term to make a decision. We know, children are active and tend to spend much more time outdoors than adults. The long exposure to the sun can lead to everything from painful from easily healed surface burns to irreversible eye diseases, so sunglasses for children should be 100 percent UV rays blocked. Furthermore, children are curious about everything, in order to give the children a perfect and real vision of the around world, cool sunglasses with no vision distortion are required.

Sunglasses for children should be made from an impact-resistant material which can handle a lot of roughness. That means the sunglasses should be very strong, light and durable, impossible to shatter, especially for those children who are active, or are involved in sports games. Plastic frames and polycarbonate lenses are the mainly materials in manufacturing children’s sunglasses.

Children are more interested in the cool sunglasses which have cartoon meanings, so Mickey Mouse sunglasses and other popular cartoon characters-shaped cool sunglasses may excite the children to wear them. It is a good idea to take the children to purchase the sunglasses by themselves so as to pick their favorite cool sunglasses. In that way, children may be willing to wear the cool sunglasses.

Besides, parents should set a good example by wearing sunglasses, or the school should give the children lessons about the benefits on wearing cool sunglasses and suggest all the children to wear them. Children like to imitate what others do, if their parents and friends all take the cool sunglasses when they go outside, they must be happy to do the same.

Cool sunglasses are a great way to instill the importance of health and safety to children. A light, comfortable, high quality and cool sunglasses will surely protect the children’s eyes and at the same time make them stylish.

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How to determine kid’s prescription and make prescription eyewear

January 13th, 2010

For kids under age of 12 parents and doctors should be cautious to determine the prescription and make prescription eyewear for them. Kids with refractive errors, if deemed to permanent, also need to be corrected by using prescription eyewear.

Same as adult, the kid’s vision errors also include nearsightedness, farsightedness and astigmatism. The rules for making kid’s prescription eyewear are different from that for adults.

For kid’s nearsightedness, doctors usually pick the lowest possible diopter degrees to get the clearest possible vision. For patients with very high diopter degrees, doctors will recommend to reduce the diopter by 1/3. As long as the kid can read and write after wearing the customized prescription eyewear, it is ok. This kind of prescription eyewear with reduced degrees helps benefit the growth of kid’s eyes.

If the kids before school age are physiologically farsighted without too much vision disorder and strabismus, there is no need to wear prescription eyewear. If the hyperopia kid has the symptom of vision fatigue, then a pair of prescription eyewear is necessary. Kids with farsightedness +3.00 or above, prescription eyewear should be worn, but the lenses power should be reduced by 1/3.

For kids with low power of astigmatism, no prescription eyewear needed. For higher degrees of astigmatism, prescription eyewear will also be made in reduced degrees.

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What we should be aware of Amblyopia

November 13th, 2009

Amblyopia, also known as the lazy eye, is the disorder of eye system which can not recognize the image. In most conditions, the amblyopia usually happens to one eye.

The cause of the problem is not due to the eye disease, but due to no transmission or poor transmission of images to the brain. So the commonly used word “lazy eye” is not very accurate, it is more accurate to call the “lazy brain”. It is the brain but not the eye that does not react to images. In fact, the brain becomes lazy by the reason of not being stimulated properly in childhood. Therefore, it is important for parents to be careful about the eyes of children, and always take the children to the specialist for a regular eye test.

Amblyopia is not the same with intermittent strabismus. Strabismus is a condition of the misaligned eyes. In this situation, your one eye can see the images correctly, while the strabismic eye just can not see the abnormal thing. If the strabismus does not happen very often, you call it intermittent strabismus; otherwise you call it constant one. The symptom is considered to be normal to children up to 6 months. However, not the same with strabismus, amblyopia is difficult to be found out, even by some pediatricians. Furthermore, amblyopia is more likely to be completely cured when you are young compared with the adult.

When you are under the age of two, it is possible to go back to the 20/20 vision with the help of special drops or a kid eye patch. When your brain’s vision system develops completely, especially when you are older than 17 eyes old, the chance of amblyopia cure is impossible, you can only do aerobics to get the eye a little improved. Moreover, unlike the common myopia, amblyopia can not be corrected by spectacles or contacts, and there is no LASIK surgery up to now, either. Amblyopia is a neurological problem. You can only bear it if you have this problem when you are young, and you miss the crucial period to fix it.

Vision development is very important in the life of people. You must be careful about the eyesight when you are young and do eye treatment regularly. If you find that you have eyesight problems when young, please seize the turning point. There is no way to solve the problem of amblyopia, but we should believe that with the development of technology, the amblyopia surgery will be as easy as the myopia surgery.

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Vision Development and Therapy for Preschoolers

November 11th, 2009

Puerile time is a key period of children’s development, including intellectual, social and physical development. They learn much knowledge about the nature, science and human communications while they grow up rapidly physically. Parents will pay much attention at these aspects to provide their children a well-balanced growth condition. However, preschool visual development and vision therapy is often ignored, which can be critical in children’s study and school performance during their puerile period.

In general preschool development, there is a specific development points called milestones. These specific time frames are charted to see if the child has physical development problems or intellectual challenges. It is usually very useful and easy to find problems which can be solved in time after suitable therapy.

However, it is much harder to find the children’s vision problems by setting such milestones. What we do now to exam the visual system of children? Most of the parents, teachers or even optometrists just exam the child to see if they can see properly, for instance, can they see 20/20 line clearly? Optometrists may do more to exam if the children’s eye is straight. But, these exams are really not enough in judging the health condition of their visual system.

Experts in the children’s vision development and vision therapy have suggested a higher standard that may change a child’s whole life. It is found that kids with identifiable learning disabilities have vast majority to have problems of their visual system. It is a pity that almost all of the children can pass the Optometrists’ eye tests. In other words, passing the eye tests is just a base level, there is much more to learning about how to develop the children’s visual system by a series of vision therapy.

Vision therapy is researched to develop preschool vision skills of the children. These vision therapy include eye coordination and focus, eye movements at all directions, coding, sequencing, gross and fine motor, balance, visual memory, and so on. These therapies are not only used to develop the visual system but also have amazing effects on the development of learning skills such as reading, writing, and remember spelling words without magic pill or magic glasses. All these skills can be trained!

So don’t hesitate doing the right vision therapies, it can help developing your child’s learning ability as well as their vision system.

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The Development of Children’s Vision

November 9th, 2009

Children’s vision develops significantly fast in the first year of their lives.

When a child is born, they can see only black, white and grey. That is because newborns have only the mechanism of vision but not full ability to see every aspect of things. Infants usually prefer to see people’s faces first, and after that they will be interested in other objects. Make sure that the child has healthy eyes in the first 12 weeks of life which is a very important period of the development of vision. It is recommended that the child be check for the health condition of its eyes by paediatrician. From 8 weeks old to 4 months, infants begin to follow objects, moving their eyes or moving their head together in the same direction of their vision.

Between 4 and 6 months old, children’s visual acuity or sharpness has developed as their eye muscles begin to have the ability to coordinate the movements of their eyes. And what is more exciting, children can see in color by 4 months’ old. During this period, children also develop other skills, such as roll, push, move themselves. And you may find that they are interested in putting everything that they can reach into their mouths for exploration.

From 6 to 12 months, as children develop their ability of walking instead of crawling, their visual perceptual skills developed, and children begin to have the ability of judging distance. Besides, their eye-hand coordination also improves greatly during this half of year.

During the preschool years of children’s lives, eye problem such as myopia, hyperopia, astigmatism, poor coordination of eyes, turned eye, or poor eye-hand coordination may occurred. Parents should pay more attention to their child’s behavior which can be signs of a vision problem. For example, children blink their eyes frequently, sit close or squint their eyes whilst watching television, hold a book very close to the eyes, tilt head noticeably or cover or close one eye when reading, rub eyes frequently. As children may not have the ability of telling blurred vision or sore eyes, when parents notice these behaviors frequently, please contact a behavioral optometrist for help.

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How to select kids glasses

November 6th, 2009

Kids glasses market is expanding at a rapid speed. As the overwhelming spread of TV and Internet, the number of kids that get myopia is increasing. Of course, kids eyeglasses are not only for vision correction. Sometimes, kids want fashion too. You can find kids glasses in a variety of styles and kid-friendly colors.

There are some factors you should keep in mind while shopping for kids eyeglasses. Polycarbonate lenses are impact-resistant and lightweight so that most of kids glasses are made of them. Scratch-resistant coatings make kids glasses more resistant since kids are mischievous. Kids eyeglasses with this coating usually last a little longer. Silicone nose pads are more softer and comfortable so they often appear in kids glasses. They also have a non-slip surface that makes the glasses stable. Kids eyeglasses should be equipped with spring hinges. These hinges allow the temples to bend outward when putting on the glasses or taking off. This is important because some kids are lazy and always yank off the glasses with a single hand. Since kids grow up quickly, a one-year warranty of kids glasses is enough. But you should ask for a scratch warranty.

The taste of kids towards eyeglasses is significantly influenced by popular characters or childhood icons. Harry Potter, Sponge Bob and Barbie set some fashions for kids glasses. Some trends of kids eyeglasses also exist. Many kids like the classic designs worn by adults, just in different scale. Branded or licensed kids glasses are becoming popular. Kids sunglasses are useful to protect kids’ eyes from harmful rays.

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Kids and eye wear

November 5th, 2009

In today’s world higher percentage of kids are getting disorders of eyesight, mostly nearsighted. Some of the kids get pseudomyopia which needs to be treated by doctors and they may recover to normal. While for some other kids the disorder of their eyesight become irreversible, then these kids need to buy eye wear to correct their sight.

Eye wear for kids range from eye wear with childhood marks or logos to some mature styles or a combination of both. When choosing eye wear for kids, one thing that should keep in mind is that we must let kids be an active participant to selecting the eye wear for them. This ensures that they will like to wear their eye wear. If kids do not like the eye wear, their frequent taking-off or eye wear from their heads will only worsen their eyesight.

On the frame materials, experts recommend parents to buy plastic eye wear instead of metal ones. In choosing the lenses, better quality anti-scratch lenses will be the first choice, as kids may use unsuitable cloth or paper to clean the lenses which will cause scratches and make the lenses blurry.

As kids are in the ages of fast growing, one pair of eye wear may become unfit in a short time. So a new pair of eye wear is necessary if the frame size does not fit again.

Another thing worth pointing is that parents need to carefully observe the reaction of kids after putting on a new eye wear, and be sensitively aware of any change of eyesight. If unfavorable thing occurs, consult and see a doctor for a new prescription, and get a new eye wear.

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Children’s vision care

October 15th, 2009

Nowadays, there are an increasing number of children who have various vision problems, yet some of which frequently go unrecognized and untreated, and the kids may not get proper vision care. But if parents also do not pay attention to children’s vision care, vision problems may affect the kids’ whole lives. So children’s vision eye care is absolutely important.

Vision care is effective for children’s vision improvement when they are very young. Many researchers believe that the vision care can help visual system to develop better visual acuity up to about age 8 to 10. Vision eye care includes some individualized vision care programs and some other methods to correct problems such as amblyopia, eye movement and alignment problems. Also, the rate of getting a nearsightedness, farsightedness or astigmatism can be decreased a lot through an appropriate vision eye care.

Some children’s vision problems such as myopia may be inherited from their parents, so the parents who have myopia should pay more attention to vision care of the kids. Most of children’s vision problems caused by environments, especially myopia. In Asia, the pressure from children’s study is so big that plenty of kids have to spend a lot of time reading books or staring at computer screens without any idea of vision eye care, on this point, the kids in this country is mush easier. So the consciousness of vision care should be held both by kids and parents.

Indubitably, vision care is so important for children that may benefit a kid’s whole life. Having a properly vision eye care can improve not only the children’s vision but also the efficiency of their study.

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