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.