Children's Eye Care
What you can do to look after your children's eyes
There are three ways you can help keep your children’s eyes healthy:
- Take breaks when looking at a computer screen. Some problems are caused by bad positioning of the screen, or the keyboard, or the chair, or sometimes all three. But most often there’s too much light bouncing off the screen, which starts to hurt the eyes, without it being noticed. So encourage your child to take short breaks every so often. At the very least, look away from the screen every hour or so and focus the eyes on objects that are close and then far away.
- Protect the eyes from UV light. When it’s sunny, there’s a lot of ultraviolet light about, and it can damage the retina. So do whatever you can to make kids wear a hat and/or some cool sunglasses! But make sure that the sunglasses have the CE mark: it means they conform to safety and quality standards set by the European Union and will block out harmful UV light.
- Eat the right kinds of food. You will have heard about carrots helping you to see in the dark! Well, that’s not exactly right, but we do know that fruits and vegetables, particularly dark coloured ones, are very good for the eyes. That’s because they contain lutein or zeaxanthin which help the eyes to stay healthy into older age. Especially good choices for kids are kiwi fruit, grapes, oranges, mango, papaya, peaches, sweetcorn and every child’s favourites: spinach, broccoli and Brussels sprouts!
