My phone pinged with a reminder about my biennial eye check. Good timing because, while I’ve needed specs for driving since I was 27, when reading lately, my eyesight doesn’t seem as sharp as before.
Also, sometimes a jellyfish outline dances across my vision, but that’s long been a thing. I never told my optician, though. She and I had a good old catch-up.
She’s off to Australia with her family for six weeks over Christmas and I thought, wow, there’s money in glasses. She asked about my sons, and I told her I’d become a granny.
Meanwhile, she determined my eyes were fine: there’s a miniscule deterioration in my close-up vision, but I could still read the bottom line of her charts with no trouble. No reading glasses required.
Then she told me something that shocked me. She’s seeing huge numbers of little children who need glasses for myopia, or short-sightedness. “It’s crazy,” she said. “They come in with your prescription” – negligible – “and six months later they’re back needing reading glasses.”
Why? She sighed. Before the age of six, kids really need not to be on screens. Young eyes need plenty of daily time outdoors, where looking into the distance is natural and in bright daylight, so that their developing eyeballs don’t lengthen into myopia.
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If screens must be used, they should literally be at arms’ length. And even when indoors, Granny was right: children need bright light for reading so they don’t strain their eyes.
“Tell your son,” she said. Tell the world, I thought. Because, if current trends continue, by 2050, over half of all the young people in the world will need reading glasses for short-sightedness. It’s not fixable, but it is largely preventable. And that is my boring, but necessary, public health announcement.
If you’ve got this far, you may be wondering about the jelly blobs in my eyes (and maybe yours). Okay… She asks if I get them. Yes, I squeak. Nothing to worry about: it’s just tiny floaters of eyeball jelly detaching, as it will.
I sigh with relief because I googled it once years ago, and you know what it said? Syphilis. I think my optician is probably still laughing.
So yeah, get off that stupid screen. Get out of doors. And take the kids with you.
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