5 Best & Easy Exercises for Children’s Eye Health

Dr.Prashaant Chaudhry, 3 mins read

Exercising has always been a special component of a healthy life. This is also true for our eyes. While there are no particular exercises to correct refractive errors like astigmatism, myopia, or hyperopia, certain exercises can help improve the visual skills of your child. 

These skills include improving eye alignment and focus, as well as correcting lazy eyes (amblyopia), eye turn (strabismus), eye strain, eye tracking (saccadic dysfunction), and eye teaming (convergence insufficiency). This makes such exercises more impactful for children, as they are in a developmental and learning phase. 

These exercises are collectively called visual therapy. During a visual therapy session, a doctor teaches some exercises for the eyes that can be performed at home later on. So, always consult your doctor first before inculcating any eye exercise in your child’s routine.

Does Your Child Need Eye Exercise?

Like we said above, exercise is important for a healthy life, and so is eye exercise for healthy eyes. That means every child should do some kind of eye exercise daily to relieve their eye after a whole day of strain. 

However, if your child often experiences the following problems, you should definitely consider these exercises for them:

• Skipping words or lines while reading
• Eyestrain
• Headache

5 Exercises for Eye Health

Palming

Palming is a form of yoga that helps relax fatigued eyes. Start by rubbing your palms together to warm them, and then close your eyes. Now, place each palm on the corresponding closed eye. Breathe deeply for 5 minutes. You can repeat this process several times a day whenever your eyes feel fatigued.

Blinking Drill

These days, children spend a significant amount of time on screens, which reduces their blink rate, putting their eyes at risk of drying. This makes the eyes sandy, gritty, and tired. So, encourage them to blink their eyes rapidly for 10 seconds while using screens. Blinking stimulates oil glands in the eyelids to produce lubrication and spread tears over the eyes. This refreshes eyes and boosts alertness. 

Near and Far Focus

Changing the focus from near to far trains the focusing system to relax and engage appropriately. For this purpose, keep the thumb almost 6 inches away from the face and then focus on it for 15 seconds. Thereafter, focus on something 20 feet away for 15 seconds. Then again, look at the thumb for 10 seconds and repeat this process. 

Figure Eight 

Children with difficulty tracking objects can practice the figure eight exercise. Look 10 feet away and trace an imaginary figure eight for 30 seconds, and then switch direction. This will help improve coordination and visual tracking. 

20-20-20 Rule

Using the eyes for near work for a long time can make the eyes fatigued. This puts them at risk of dryness. Thus, it is important to encourage your child to take short breaks. So, for every 20 minutes of near work, look at something 20 feet away for 20 seconds. 

For more stubborn cases of muscle weakness, exercises are performed on a machine called a synoptophore.

If your child is suffering from any vision problem, get expert consultation from our renowned doctors at Aakash Healthcare.