Approximately 840,000 children suffer eye injuries each year. Many of these injuries could be prevented through a safety-first mindset and making a few simple changes to your home and routine. Follow these five tips to help protect your child’s eye health.

1. Make Sure Your Home is Well-Lit

One of the best things you can do to protect your child’s eye health is to make sure that your home is well-lit, indoors and out.

Adequate lighting is especially important around stairs, where you may want to install motion-detecting lights to ensure nighttime coverage. And don’t overlook other areas of your home, too. Ample lighting throughout the home can help kids avoid accidental contact with sharp corners on furniture and countertops or tripping over clutter.

Outdoor lighting is also important. Make sure that walkways and play areas are brightly lit. A slip and fall due to unseen hazards on a sidewalk or outdoor steps can easily lead to a child injuring their eyes.

2. Install Corner Protectors on Furniture

Children love to run in the house, and they’re rarely as careful as they should be. It’s all too easy (and common) for a toddler to stumble into the corner of a table, TV stand, dresser or other furniture and injure their eyes.

Inexpensive corner protectors or bumpers made of silicone or foam pad the sharp edges of your furniture to help prevent injuries. They’re an easy and affordable preventative measure, and they won’t damage your furniture. 

3. Keep Chemicals Out of Reach 

Many of the chemicals we keep in and around our homes, including ammonia, bleach, oven cleaner, anti-freeze and bathroom cleaners, to name a few, can cause chemical burns or even blindness if they come into contact with the eyes.

Make sure these items are securely stored outside of your child’s reach. And after using these products, be sure to wash your hands thoroughly to prevent any accidental transfer of these substances onto your children.

4. Practice Safety-First When Playing Sports

More than 30,000 sports-related eye injuries are treated in emergency rooms each year. Most of these injuries could be prevented by wearing protective eyewear and taking a safety-first approach.

If your child plays sports, talk to a local eye doctor about how to protect their eyes and which eye protection solution will work best for their sport.

Protective sports eyewear is typically made with impact-resistant polycarbonate, and available with either prescription or non-prescription lenses. 

5. Don’t Forget UV Light Protection

Another critical aspect of children's vision safety is UV protection. Many children spend a lot of time playing outdoors, whether in the backyard, at the park or on the school playground. Their eyes are just as vulnerable to UV damage as adults’, but because they often spend more time outdoors than adults, eye protection is even more critical.

Proper sunglasses can help protect your child’s eyes from harmful UV rays. When selecting sunglasses, be sure to select a pair that protects against both UV-A and UV-B rays. This is not true for all sunglasses, which could leave your child’s eyes at risk.

Your child’s eyes are designed to last a lifetime. Following the tips above will limit the risk of potential injury so they can retain these precious windows to the world. 

If it’s been a while since your child’s last comprehensive eye exam or if your child has known vision needs, we hope you’ll consider scheduling an appointment with the talented eye physicians at North Florida Cataract Specialists and Vision Care.

Contact us today at 352-373-4300.