August 2025: Children’s Eye Health and Safety Month
August is Children’s Eye Health and Safety Month. This annual observance aims to educate parents and caregivers about the importance of vision and eye health for children’s development, learning, and overall well-being. Prevent Blindness dedicates the month to raising awareness about common vision issues that can severely impact your child, and advocating for access to eye care for children. Myopia, hyperopia, astigmatism, amblyopia – theses are some of the vision related issues that may be hindering your child and affecting them every day- with strabismus, convergence insufficiency and learning related visual problems also coming into the equation.
Vision problems can significantly affect a child’s ability to learn, potentially leading to reading difficulties, frustration, and poor academic performance. In addition, healthy vision is crucial for children’s physical and social development, including activities like playing sports and interacting with their environment. When longevity is considered, Early detection and treatment of vision problems can prevent more serious eye conditions later in life.
So… what can be done?
Awareness is key- not just being aware of the possibility of vision problems for your child, but intentionally keeping an eye out for warning signs that a visual problem may be affecting your child. Some indicators for parents, caregivers, and educators to lookout for include: squinting, rubbing eyes excessively, holding objects too close, sitting very close to the TV, often losing their place when reading or having to use their finger to keep track of where to point there eyes while reading, complaining of headaches, poor coordination and/or being unaware of surroundings- these are just a few of the many warning signs that may be present in a child struggling visually.