How a Growth Spurt Affects Your Child’s Vision

A Growth Spurt Affects Vision

What you may not realize is that a growth spurt affects your child’s vision in significant ways. If your child is growing taller, than you can expect that their eyes are also growing. This can make the eyeball longer and lead to refractive errors that may not have been there the week before!

Most commonly, your child can begin to show signs of myopia right after a growth spurt. What this means is your child will have a more difficult time seeing things far away, like the board in their classroom. They may still feel comfortable reading things up close.

According to one doctor, children experience the greatest growth spurts before the age of ten. That doesn’t mean the growth spurts stop though! There will be another significant time of growth when your child hits puberty. They will probably experience more growth spurts throughout their teen years.

Temporary Vision Changes

In many cases, this change in vision can be temporary. As their eyes adjust to the changes, they can sometimes self-correct. In other cases, your child may be ready to wear prescription lenses. If they already are wearing glasses, they may require a stronger prescription.

During this time, the child’s eyes can change and re-adjust a number of times as they grow with their body. For this reason, most optometrists recommend that children get an annual eye examination. This way, any changes in your child’s eyesight can be closely monitored and their vision can be compared from year-to-year to track significant changes.

Because so much of your child’s learning takes place with the help of his or her eyes, stretching out the time period between eye exams to any longer than one year could have a significant impact on your child’s performance in school. If your child shows any signs of struggle in the classroom, suspect that vision problems could be at play and rule those out before seeking other forms of correction. Your child may have been seeing just fine a month ago, but thanks to a growth spurt, everything that once was clear could now be fuzzy.

Talk to your optometrist to see if your child’s vision may have been affected by a recent growth spurt, or learn more about spotting other vision problems in children.