Children’s Eye Health and Safety Month: A Guide to Protecting your Children’s Eyes
The key to a child’s physical development is good vision. Keeping that in mind, August is the Children’s eye health and safety month, which is meant to spread awareness about the need to keep children’s eyesight and vision healthy and vivid. And in order to do so, it is important to understand the basic eye disorders in children.
Amblyopia (Lazy Eye)
Amblyopia, commonly known as the lazy eye, is a condition in children where they experience decreased vision resulting from abnormal visual development during infancy and early childhood. This is also one of the leading causes of decreased sight amongst children.
Such a condition develops when nerve pathways between the eye and the bran are not sufficiently stimulated. As a consequence, the brain tends to favour one particular eye, typically due to poor vision in the other eye causing the brain to ignore signals from the other eye. In such cases, treatments include eye patches, glasses or contact lenses, eye drops or in severe cases, surgical treatment.
Strabismus (Crossed Eyes)
Strabismus, also known as crossed eyes, is a condition in children where their eyes do not line up properly. To understand if your child has this disorder, check if your child’s eyes are looking in different directions, with each eye focusing on a different object.
It is quite common in children, affecting about 4% of children of age six or younger. Although nobody knows why some children are born with this condition, it does tend to run in families. To add to it, crossed eyes can usually be corrected with eyeglasses and in other cases, surgery.
Sports safety
In India, the leading causes of blindness in children are eye injuries and to put it in words, most of these injuries are sports-related. Protective eyewear available on Smart Medical Buyer, is key to sports eye safety, considering the fact that about 90% of sports-related eye injuries can be avoided by simply using protective eyewear.
This is where the role of parents become all the more important – even if your child’s sports league does not require eyewear, it is your right as a parent to insist on protecting your child’s eyesight through protective eyewear.
Now that you understand the basics of eye disorders, a regular eye check-up for children is also quite essential and in fact, recommended. However, as we know, prevention is better than cure. Below are 3 ways which can help protect your child’s eyes:
- Encourage Outdoor Activities: We live in a world where children are constantly on their smartphones. As opposed to the harmful light emanating from smartphones, the natural light outside will not only make the child adapt to nature and a healthy lifestyle, but will also protect their vision. However, it is also important to make sure that your child is using an alcohol based hand sanitizer gel to maintain hygiene when they are outside in order to prevent the contamination of germs. Our bodies require sunlight and natural air for respiration and proper growth. To sum it up, it is important to encourage your child to engage in outdoor activities so as to protect their sight.
- Provide A Healthy Diet: The various parts of our body can only protect itself and grow properly if it receives proper nutrition and the eyes are no exception. It is important to fill your child’s daily diet with fruits, nuts, eggs, vegetables and the likes. In fact, nutrients such as zinc, Vitamin E & C as well as fatty acids are good for eye health. As a parent, you must ensure that your child’s meals are such that they contain all such nutrients.
- Provide Visually Stimulating Toys: As the world moves on, especially at a time when everyone including children and adults are stuck in their homes, unable to step outside, it is necessary to not let your child develop the habit of using smartphones as toys. You can do this by simply providing him with the appropriate toys that can help in visual development as well as enhance motor and eye-hand coordination skills. Few visually stimulating toys include modelling clay, building blocks, finger paints and sketchbooks.
So this children’s eye health and safety month, take an oath to protect and maintain your child’s eye health & vision and also encourage the use of 3 ply face masks, protective eyewear and PPE kits in order to protect them from being infected by any bacteria, virus or germs.
