Child Myopia. This is one that gets Jake upset on a regular basis. Children (in most cases) don’t need glasses! What they need is educated parents who understand eye strain, ciliary muscle spasm, the impact of lots of close-up reading time, of staring at smart phones and computer screens.
An ounce of prevention, as they say. Read carefully through this section for lots of tips about preventing and reversing child myopia, find parents who had success banishing their child’s myopia, get hope an motivation to keep your own children’s eyes healthy!
Selling Glasses To Children: Should Be Illegal?
Welcome back to the blog, dear kitteh. Pull up a chair, let uncle Jake tell you a story. Uncle Jake recently had a little baby boy (eight months recent, as of this writing). While that was a bit of a semi-unplanned event, it's changed Jakey's perspective on quite a few things. Among them, the thing you really get as a parent, protecting the small and innocent. If you're a parent, you know what I'm talking about. You will straight up [...]
Glasses Cause Serious Psychological Stress In Children
Kairi posts a great study link in the forum today (published in OVPJournal, site here), looking at psychological stress in children from myopia development.As you already know, myopia isn't a real illness. Giving glasses to children for myopia is a terrible idea. I've been saying this for years, while working to help parents use a more holistic approach to manage their child's healthy eyesight. As usual, there is science substantiating these common sense premises:Psychological Stress in Childhood and Myopia Development [...]
Torturing Kids: You Might Not Want To Read This One
People sometimes suggest that I'm too hard on mainstream optometry. Hopefully lately the tone has been a little less definitive on that front. I'm trying to be more inclusive of potentially open minded optometrists! Progress, right? And as I point out, my strong bias comes from being exposed to hundreds and thousands (really!) of stories about individual's experiences with myopia. When you just have your own, perhaps not traumatizing experience, the things I say sometimes may sound harsh. Hey [...]
Squinting Child: What Does It Say About Eyesight? (also, 20/50 to 20/25!)
I was told recently that things around here started looking quite professional. Cat meme, to fix that entire misconception. If you're a regular reader here, you know that it's a good idea not to be squinting at things. You can blink, especially if you understand active focus, and get a much better result than squinting. You'll also avoid all sorts of squinty-wrinkles in the long run! ;) Why the squint topic today? It's a quick aside along with [...]
Good News: Myopia Free Kids
If you've been around my Twitter feed today, you're maybe not feeling all happy and full of sunshine. The DuPont story in particular makes me not keep much faith in humanity. They poison millions of people and irreversibly pollute our planet, and they're not being rounded up, fed their own chemicals, with a live video feed of their demise to warn all the other profit crazed maniacs. Nope, none of that. There are guys out there right now enjoying all [...]
Breast Feeding: Why It Matters to Baby Eyesight
This article, just a short intro to some infant eye development concepts. If you'd told me in my 20's that I'd one be talking in a quasi-expert capacity about infant eyesight, I'd have told you that you're crazy. Back then I was mostly just interested in offshore boats and vintage motorcycles, and ways to amusingly shorten my life expectancy. But here we are, a decade or two later. Old man Jake is going to tell you things about infant eyesight. [...]