“Seeing” seems so normal to us that we end up forgetting that the eye is a vital organ throughout our lives. Sight is the sense we use most in our daily lives: 84% of our sensory information is attributed to and processed by the visual system and the occipital brain; hearing, touch, smell and taste account for an almost negligible share, with only 16% of the total. At school, more than 80% of learning involves children’s visual system. Taking care of our children’s eyesight means sparing them any falling behind that could put them at risk of school failure.
Yet children’s vision is increasingly affected by longer screen time and the early start of digital use among the youngest. Scientists are warning of the exponential increase in myopia among young people, affected by new digital uses, for whom the genetic factor is no longer the only one responsible. By 2050, half of the planet will be short-sighted, a doubling of the number of myopes in just 3 decades. Myopia in the ophthalmological sense of the term is a pathology: it is not only a refractive anomaly affecting distance vision, but also an anomaly of the retina, which is thinner and therefore more fragile; it also involves an optic nerve with abnormal physiology.
Why are screens an aggravating factor for myopia in children?
There are multifactorial reasons:
- Screens place enormous demands on the child’s near vision, as do reading or writing tasks. The child therefore strongly stimulates the accommodative part of their eye (= its ability to adjust focus). Added to this is excessive digital time, which accelerates the risk factors for developing myopia.
- Medical studies find that children spend more time indoors lit by artificial light; yet natural light has a positive impact on the development of the child’s eye: the photons of light slow excessive growth of the eye and thus greatly reduce the risk of becoming myopic.
- Digital screens emit blue light that inhibits melatonin secretion at the end of the day; it thus disturbs the quality of children’s sleep.
- Finally, the child’s eye is more vulnerable because it is not fully mature.
Today, ophthalmologists are sounding the alarm; they all speak of a global pandemic of myopia directly linked to screens. Faced with the use of digital tools, which keeps growing a little more each year, it is essential to advocate and practise a “responsible” use of screens; the aim is to preserve children’s visual health and reduce the risk that they develop “galloping” myopia likely to leave them with a disability.
New habits can be adopted to allow calm use that protects children’s visual health:
- Encourage children’s exposure to natural light by prompting them, for example, to go and play outside. Besides the fact that light limits excessive growth of the eye, the child will not only stimulate their distance vision, but also be less sedentary and more active, which has positive consequences for their metabolism. This approach has already been put in place in some Asian countries where myopia affects 9 children out of 10. Classrooms with glass roofs, for example, have been built in some schools to continuously expose pupils’ eyes to natural light. In other Asian countries, daily outdoor time has been imposed within class time to increase exposure to natural light.
- Control screen time by following the 3-6-9-12 rule defined for each age group.
- Limit all digital screens in the evening, to encourage the secretion of melatonin. And in particular close-range screens: the smaller they are, the closer they are to the eyes and, consequently, the more intense the exposure to blue light and the greater the effects on the quality of the child’s sleep.
- Offer short visual breaks of 20 seconds, every 20 minutes, looking into the distance to break the eyes’ fixed focus.
Your child’s eyesight is essential for their psychomotor development as well as for acquiring their learning. Preserving it from the earliest age through responsible use of screens gives your child every chance to grow up well.
Nathalie Willart
Orthoptist
Https://www.coachforeyes.com
Source: Vision Impact Institute
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31954142/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32821053/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29901472/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33224523/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26497977/
