How Poor Eyesight can Impact Learning

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CLEVELAND - August is Children’s Eye Health and Safety Month.

If you haven’t taken your child to the eye doctor in a while, now is a good time to do it, especially with school starting soon.

“It's important to make sure that your child can see when they're in school, and all the time it's important for them to be able to see, but especially when they're starting to learn,” said Allison Babiuch, MD, ophthalmologist for Cleveland Clinic Children’s. “And as they're getting older and the font that they're reading gets smaller, they need to see the fine details. We need to make sure that they can see well enough to be able to learn and we don't want anything holding them back.”

Dr. Babiuch said your child may need glasses if they tend to squint, tilt their head or move closer to see something better, like the television.

And you would think older kids would be more vocal about having trouble seeing, but she said that’s not always the case.

Vision changes happen slowly, so they may not even realize there’s a problem.

More screen time at school also seems to be affecting children’s eyesight.

Dr. Babiuch said they’ve seen an increase in cases of near-sightedness, or what they call myopia, and it appears to only be getting worse.

“We are encouraging kids to take breaks from the screens as much as possible and trying to do a combination of the things that you have to do on the screen, do on the screen,” she said. “But, if you can do things on paper or an actual physical copy of a book to give the eyes a bit of a break from that screen light, that would be good.”

She said it’s never too early to take your child for an eye exam.

Even if they don’t know their letters yet, there are other ways to check their vision to find out if they need glasses.