Every parent, and every non-parent, laments the amount of screen time that children engage in these days. Of course there are concerns about the value of what children are viewing on their screens but there is also the worry of what they are not doing while they are hooked up to a screen. Parental conversations are predictably Pythonesque these days as they pronounce in words similar to these, “In our day we used to play outside from the crack of dawn till it was dark then our mum had to come and drag us inside using a cat-nine-tails and a small bulldozer, but you try to tell young people with their ipads and notebooks that today, and they don’t believe you” (it would help if you can imagine that being said in a broad Yorkshire accent). Unfortunately, those parental concerns have been further fuelled by a new report which suggests that lack of exposure to outdoor light is bad for the eyes.
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The report comes from the Queensland University of Technology where researchers measured children’s eye growth and matched this against their outdoor light exposure. This latter outdoor light exposure was measured by having the children wear a wristwatch light sensor for two weeks during cooler months and then two weeks during warmer months. This gave an overall, year round, estimate of each child’s exposure to outdoor light.
According to the researchers the children exposed to the least outdoor light had faster eye growth and hence faster myopia (short-sightedness) progression. The researchers say it is not near work on screens that is the problem but lack of outdoor light. They say that less than 60 minutes outdoor light exposure per day is a risk factor for myopia.
Global research suggests 10 per cent of the world’s population will be at risk if blindness by 2050 if steps are not taken to prevent to myopia turning into high myopia (a severe form myopia in which the eyeball stretches and becomes too long, possibly leading to holes or tears in the retina and retinal detachment or abnormal blood vessels growing under the retina and cause changes in vision).
Maybe it’s time that we all see the light.
