Protect Your Eyes From Too Much Screentime

By R. Siva Kumar - 27 Apr '15 19:28PM

Children nowadays are becoming obsessed with their screen time. According to a study by the Joan Ganz Cooney Center, children right from the age of two years upto 10 years spend an average of two hours and 7 minutes a day with screen media.

It points out that with products on the market like the Fisher-Price Apptivity Seat and the SnuggWugg Interactive Baby Pillow, even babies are getting ready for screen time, in spite of recommendations from the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) opposing exposure before the age of two, according to mashable.

Spending too much time staring at bright screens on laptops, smartphones and tablets can lead to tension headaches, eye strain and dry eye, according to livescience.

What is the effect on children's long term health?

Fortunately, screen time does not impact children's vision completely. Mark S. Borchert, MD, director of both the Eye Birth Defects and Eye Technology Institutes in The Vision Center at Children's Hospital Los Angeles, states: "Multiple large population-based epidemiologic studies suggest that screen time does not affect the predisposition for glasses. At least 90% of the risk for needing glasses is genetic."

AAP does not encourage screen time for children under two years and advises just one to two hours for older kids, according to commonsensemedia.

Dr. Hunter has a few tips to help protect your eyes in a digital world:

Check for eye disease for all children, especially preschoolers, so that you can identify treatable medical problems like amblyopia ("lazy eye") and strabismus (misaligned eyes).
Too much screentime has medical physical as well as intellectual problems, as it affects children's health as well as brain. Hence, it is necessaty to motivate children to get out of the house as much as possible.
To prevent children from staring too long at the screen, which would dry the eyes out and cause eye strain, you could learn to regularly look away from the screen and not suppress the "normal blink reflex".
Finally, there is no accurate limit on the distance from the TV. Hence, you don't really need to maintain a specific distance from the TV.