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Families in the modern era are faced with a multitude of electronic multimedia such as tablets, computers, television, smart phones that have entered their children’s lives for good. And while multimedia plays a very important role in their education through the recall, storage, and processing of information, their abuse can have devastating consequences for their vision.

Unfortunately, today’s statistics are disheartening. On average, children spend 6.5 hours a day in front of screens, of which 4.5 hours in front of the television. If we do a quick calculation, we will find that children spend an average of 105 days a year in front of the television.

Screen abuse can have serious consequences for children’s eye health. Our eye adaptation system reacts very well to images that have clear outlines and good contrast between the background and the words or symbols they contain.

The characters that appear on the computer screen are made up of many very small points or pixels that do not have the same degree of clarity and contrast. On the contrary, they are brighter in the center and less so in the periphery, and our eyes have difficulty focusing on them for a long time.

Thus, children often complain of headaches, blurred vision, a feeling of a foreign body in the eyes, tearing, symptoms that constitute digital eye strain syndrome.

However, the most important impact of electronic multimedia abuse concerns the development of myopia in children. Studies have shown that children who are exposed to screens for more than 3 hours a day at an age younger than 3 years have a much higher chance of developing myopia in preschool.

The development of myopia is accompanied by complications in adulthood such as retinal tears, retinal detachment, myopic macular degeneration, and early onset glaucoma, which have devastating consequences for children’s vision.

So what can we do to help our children?

There are 4 simple rules of “eye health” that we should follow, such as:

• The “elbow rule”, i.e. the computer screen should be at a distance equal to or greater than the distance between the elbow and the hand and no closer.
• The “2-hour rule”, i.e. children should not be in front of the screen for more than 2 hours a day.
• The “20/20 rule”, i.e. for every 20 minutes of screen exposure, children should take a 20-second break during which they should focus on something far away.
• The “outdoor play rule”. Exposure to natural light prevents the onset of myopia in children. That is why daily exposure to natural light (about one hour a day) in the form of play in the park or playground is recommended.

The American Academy of Pediatrics has issued the following guidelines for the safe use of multimedia by children:

• Children up to the age of 2 should not be exposed to any screen.
• Children aged 2 to 5 should not be exposed to more than 1 hour a day to a screen (time that includes television, laptop, smart phone, etc. in total).
• Children aged 6 and older should not be exposed to more than 2 hours a day to a screen.

Regarding the visit to the pediatric ophthalmologist, this should be done promptly and frequently, given that children They rarely complain about their vision. And that’s because they don’t know what they can’t see.

However, the purpose of this article is not to demonize screens. Screens have been and will continue to be a key tool in our children’s education. For this reason, multimedia should be used properly and not abused.

It is also extremely important to supervise our children and identify early signs that they have been affected by screens, as well as to lead them by example.