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Families today face a wide range of digital media, including tablets, computers, television and smartphones, which have become firmly established in their children’s lives. Although digital media play a very important role in education by enabling information to be retrieved, stored and processed, excessive use can have devastating consequences for children’s vision.

Unfortunately, today’s statistics are discouraging. On average, children spend 6.5 hours a day in front of screens, including 4.5 hours watching television. A quick calculation shows that children spend an average of 105 days a year in front of the television.

Excessive screen use can have serious consequences for children’s eye health. Our eyes’ focusing system responds very well to images with clearly defined outlines and good contrast between the background and the words or symbols they contain.

The characters displayed on a computer screen are made up of many tiny dots, or pixels, that do not have the same degree of sharpness and contrast. Instead, they are brighter in the centre and dimmer around the edges, and our eyes find it difficult to focus on them for long periods.

As a result, children often complain of headaches, blurred vision, a feeling of something in their eyes and watery eyes. These symptoms are characteristic of digital eye strain syndrome.

However, the most significant effect of excessive digital media use is the development of myopia in children. Studies have shown that children under the age of 3 who are exposed to screens for prolonged periods, more than 3 hours a day, are much more likely to develop myopia during the preschool years.

The development of myopia is associated with complications in adulthood, such as retinal tears, retinal detachment, myopic macular degeneration and the early onset of glaucoma, which can have devastating consequences for vision.

So what can we do to help our children?

There are 4 simple rules of “eye hygiene” that we should follow:

• The “elbow rule”: the computer screen should be at least as far away as the distance from the elbow to the hand, and no closer.
• The “2-hour rule”: children should not spend more than 2 hours a day in front of a screen.
• The “20/20 rule”: for every 20 minutes of screen time, children should take a 20-second break and focus on something in the distance.
• The “outdoor play rule”. Exposure to natural light prevents the onset of myopia in children. Daily exposure to natural light, for about an hour a day, is therefore recommended through play in a park or playground.

The American Academy of Pediatrics has issued the following guidelines for children’s safe use of digital media:

• Children up to the age of 2 should not be exposed to any screens.
• Children aged 2 to 5 should not be exposed to screens for more than 1 hour a day in total, including television, laptops, smartphones and other devices.
• Children aged 6 and over should not be exposed to screens for more than 2 hours a day.

Visits to a paediatric ophthalmologist should begin early and take place regularly, because children rarely complain about their vision. This is because they do not know what they cannot see.

However, the purpose of this article is not to demonise screens. Screens have been, and will continue to be, a key tool in our children’s education. We should therefore ensure that digital media are used appropriately, rather than excessively.

It is also extremely important to supervise our children, recognise early signs that screens have affected them, and guide them by our own example.