Children's Eyesight Problems

A Father With No Plan

Once upon a time, I became a father for the very first time. My first child was my son James.

At that point I had absolutely no experience in parenting. I had very little idea of what it meant to be a father, particularly because I grew up with my mother and without one. I was always a hardworking man, and I still consider myself one: I work far more than forty hours a week and rarely take even a full day off in a year. During the first year or two, I mostly believed that taking care of a child was the woman's job.

A great many fathers think that. They delegate it to their wife and assume it is under control.

The truth is that most women, especially first-time mothers, have very little more idea of what the plan should be. At the same time they are expected to teach the child skills, languages, sports and everything else. Many mothers also work, so they can be just as busy as fathers, and once you count cooking and cleaning a good many of them have less free time than their husbands do. It is no wonder that mothers develop strategies to occupy a child while they get something else done. Sometimes the strategy is toys. Sometimes cartoons. Sometimes a game on a phone or a tablet.

That is not because mothers do not care. It is because somebody has to cook, and a small child cannot be left in the middle of the room.

It is also harder to keep children outdoors than it used to be, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. A child can touch something dangerous, get lost, forget the way home, or — the fear nobody says out loud — be taken. So I do not blame any parent who would rather have their child inside where they can see them.

But I have to say the next part, because it is the whole reason for this book. Those three strategies — keeping children indoors, handing them a screen, and building the day around indoor distraction — are among the reasons children's eyesight is getting worse. Not the only reasons. Not in a simple way. And not in the way I first thought, which I will come to. But they are in the picture, and by the end of Part Two you will know exactly which parts of that picture are worth your effort and which are not.

Way Too Much Blinking

When James was about two and a half, we had begun occasionally giving him an iPad.

I want to be precise about what was on it, because it matters to the story. We chose educational apps — learning the alphabet in two languages, interactive games — and sometimes cartoons. Even the cartoons were chosen carefully, mostly in languages he knew less well, so that watching them was not only entertainment but also a little bit of work. That was the whole point of it. As far as we were concerned, it was the good screen.

Then James began blinking. Way too much blinking.

At first it was subtle. Over time it became alarming. I was terrified. I love my children more than anything and I wanted them to be healthy in every way, and the thought of poor eyesight, glasses, or something worse than either was unbearable to me.

The blinking led to arguments with my wife. I blamed her for choosing the wrong ingredients for meals. She blamed me for letting James use the iPad and watch cartoons.

Neither of us had answers. We knew nothing about eye health at that time. What we had was two frightened people in one kitchen, each reaching for the only explanation available to them, which happened to be the other one.

So I did what I always do when something matters and I am ignorant about it. I began researching.

I Googled "what types of food are good for eyesight." I watched countless YouTube videos. I worked through health books and nutrition books, late at night, after work. And slowly we began to make changes. We changed our diet. We increased healthy sun exposure. We adjusted sleeping habits. We experimented with periods of no iPad and no TV that ran for weeks, and sometimes for months at a time.

Sometimes the blinking would subside. Other times it returned. Each recurrence was frightening, and sometimes frustrating.

My motivation never wavered. My picture of what was happening was almost entirely wrong, and it took me about a year to find that out.

Everyone Wore Glasses and Nobody Seemed Worried

Our family is mixed. My wife is Chinese, and we lived in China for a period, which sharpened all of this considerably.

What I could not stop noticing there was the glasses. Not on one child — on what felt like half of them. Small faces behind thick lenses, in shops, on the street, coming out of school in the afternoon. And what struck me almost more than the glasses was that nobody around them seemed concerned.

When I asked, the answer was always a version of the same sentence, said with a shrug and a little pride: we study harder than anyone else, so naturally many of us wear glasses. Look at how often Chinese students win maths competitions.

That explanation intrigued me and it also bothered me, because it was too comfortable. It made poor eyesight sound like a medal.

I remembered Malcolm Gladwell's argument that Chinese students' success in mathematics is not purely a matter of studying harder — that it is partly the language. When people count in their heads, they silently say the numbers to themselves, and Chinese numbers are short, mostly one syllable: yī, èr, sān, sì, wǔ, liù, qī, bā, jiǔ, shí. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, and sān is the longest of them. That brevity speeds up mental arithmetic. So at least part of the maths-competition story had nothing to do with hours at a desk.

Which left me with the questions this book is an attempt to answer.

Was poor eyesight simply a matter of genetics? Or of studying too hard? Could parenting, diet and habits really influence it? Was it within our control at all — or were we supposed to cross our fingers and hope?