August Is Children’s Eye Health and Safety Month
Published: August 21, 2022
By: Dr. Justin Bazan
With August being Children’s Eye Health and Safety Month, Dr. Justin Bazan, Medical Advisor to The Vision Council, lends his expertise to offer some great tips for parents of children who may need glasses. With back-to-school season ahead of us, Dr. Bazan’s tips can ensure your child will walk into the fall school year with their vision up-to-date.
Parents can keep their kids safe with having insight on the world around them and keeping an eye on their child’s eyesight. Whether it’s safety on the playground, high contact sports, preventing eye strain or even just catching early signs, keeping up with eye health is crucial to your child’s well-being.
Dr Bazan offers the following tips on eye exams:
- Do not to wait for your child, school or pediatrician to advise you that your child may need glasses or contacts. The parent is assuming their child will speak up if they can’t see something or are having issues with their eyes. The child has no idea they are seeing blurry, their eyes aren’t teaming well, or they have issues focusing. They don’t know what normal is. They don’t know how things should look. Most importantly, there often aren’t any overt signs that they could have picked up on.
- With healthy eyes and optimal vision at the very core of sports and academia, your child deserves an in-person eye exam with an eye doctor to ensure top performance. Remember, your child needs an eye exam every school year – Reading the eye chart at the pediatrician or the eye chart at the school’s nurses office is not a comprehensive eye exam with an eye doctor. It simply is not a substitute and even when done correctly, it only addresses distance vision but does not even begin to scratch the surface of all of the important testing done at the eye doctor.
Dr Bazan offers the following tips on eye protection and UV:
- Until the summer sun starts to go down, sunglasses are your best protection.
- The sun is essential for great vision, but its cumulative damaging effects start at birth and continuous exposure is one of the biggest risk factors for future eye disease and damage.
- Set a great example for your child by teaching them the importance of sun protection from a very early age.
- If your child is playing a contact sport, make sure they have impact resistant lenses to prevent damage from sports equipment, fingers, and other potentially dangerous objects.
Remind kids that eyes are off limits when it comes to playtime with their siblings and friends.
Dr. Justin Bazan is the Medical Advisor to The Vision Council.