As a parent or caregiver, you know how important it is to monitor and promote the health of your children. While you may schedule recommended check-ups with their pediatrician and dental exams with their dentist, it’s equally important to protect their vision with regular visits to their eye doctor!
Even if children are not reporting any issues with their eyes or vision, regular eye exams are crucial for ensuring the quality and health of their vision. Keep reading to learn eight reasons why it’s important to take your children to the eye doctor!
1. For Early Detection of Vision Problems
Children might not realize they have a vision problem because they assume that what they see is normal. This means that they might not know to tell a parent or other caregiver if they experience a change in their vision.
Regular eye exams test for vision problems like nearsightedness or farsightedness, astigmatism, and other eye conditions which can affect your children’s ability to see clearly.
2. To Ensure Learning Readiness
Good vision is essential for learning, but an undiagnosed vision problem can negatively affect your child’s ability to excel at school. Children with untreated vision issues may struggle with simple tasks like reading a chalkboard from a distance or writing while seated at their desks.
Because children do not always immediately realize that their vision is impaired, they may not understand why they are struggling in school because of a problem with their vision.
3. To Maintain the Overall Health of their Eyes
Regular eye exams not only catch visual acuity problems, like nearsightedness or farsightedness, but they also ensure the overall health of your children’s eyes. At an eye exam, an eye doctor can detect and treat eye conditions like strabismus, which is crossed eyes, color blindness, eye infections, allergy irritation and inflammation, and dry eye.
They can also refer your child to an eye specialist if needed.
4. To Prevent Long-Term Eye Conditions
The timely detection and treatment of certain eye conditions in childhood can prevent more serious vision problems later in life. For example, treatment of amblyopia, or lazy eye, in children before the age of seven can significantly improve the success of treatment options and visual outcomes.
5. To Monitor Developmental Milestones
Your children’s vision develops rapidly during the early years of their lives. Scheduling recommended eye exams helps monitor healthy eye development and ensures that visual developmental milestones are met as they age.
When they see your child regularly, their eye doctor can identify any vision delays or abnormalities, allowing prompt intervention and effective treatment.
6. To Ensure Their Eye Prescription is Up-to-Date
If your child wears glasses or contact lenses, regular eye exams are vital to determining whether their eye prescription is up-to-date. Children’s eyesight can change a lot in the course of a single year, resulting in corrective eyewear that no longer does the job.
Annual eye exams help keep their vision clear by keeping their eye prescription up-to-date.
7. To Prevent Eye Strain from the Overuse of Digital Devices
One of the biggest challenges parents face today is controlling the amount of time their children spend in front of a screen. Whether that screen is a smartphone, a tablet, or a computer, prolonged screen time can lead to digital eye strain and fatigue.
Your child’s eye doctor can identify any issues related to digital eye strain and provide both you and your children with helpful guidelines for healthy eye care habits and screen time management.
8. To Discuss Eye Safety Concerns and Injury Prevention
Eye exams provide an opportunity for you to discuss eye safety measures with a knowledgeable professional. An eye doctor can offer sound guidance on protective eyewear for sports and other activities that pose the risk of an eye injury.
Additionally, they can educate your whole family about proper eye care practices, including avoiding harmful habits like excessive eye rubbing and proper contact lens use if your child wears them.
What Happens During a Child’s Eye Exam?
During a complete eye exam, the following tests are performed:
Thorough Evaluation of the Eye
The eye doctor will fully examine the eye and eye area, testing particular muscle movements and the refraction of light on the pupil.
Cover Test
The eye doctor covers one eye at a time and looks for a shift in the eye while exposed to bright light. This test is used to diagnose eye misalignment.
Acuity Test
Depending on the child’s age, they are asked to read either lines of letters or shapes of varying sizes to determine the accuracy of their eyesight.
As they get older, your eye doctor may recommend a dilated eye exam for your child, which allows the eye doctor to have a more in-depth look at the structures within the eye. The drops used to dilate your child’s eye are harmless, and the effects wear off within a few hours.
While your child’s pediatrician will check their eyes during their first year of life and at annual physicals, it is recommended that children have a complete eye exam by the time they start kindergarten. A pediatric eye exam is quick and non-invasive, usually taking less than a half hour, though it can take longer if the doctor recommends a dilated eye exam.
Taking your children to the eye doctor for regular eye exams ensures their eyes are healthy, their vision is optimized, and any potential eye problems or conditions are diagnosed and treated as soon as possible. By prioritizing their visual health, you are setting your children up for healthy eye development as they grow up and teaching them the importance of maintaining clear vision throughout their lives.
Is it time for your child to come in for their first eye exam? Schedule an appointment at Nevada Eye Physicians in Las Vegas, NV, today!
