Since my son is reading a lot (almost 5 years old) I am kind of worried a little about his eyes. I haven’t noticed anything yet but I started to think about some kind of eye exercises or apps. If anybody have any idea and want to share, would be appreciated.
reading glasses while reading is fairly good insurance. Additionally, breaks from reading to work distance vision a bit
Three years ago my infant had amblyopia and I was reading sources like these
====
http://www.unleash-your-vision.com/myopia-causes-2/myopia-causes-is-it-really-the-eye/
Myopia Causes… Is It Really The Eye?
… The truth is that the cause for myopia is not in your eyes at all. Your eye problem is merely a symptom of the cause. The real cause is psychological. And there are few psychological reasons, which we will cover over a serious of articles.
You see, our mind is so strong, that it can literally cause us to black out what we don’t want to see. In our mid to late teens or early twenties we are faced with the question what we want or should do with the rest of our life. But the concept of days in relationship to a life-time can’t be understood as yet, that only comes around by the time we are 40 – 50 years old (see “The Continuum Concept†by Jean Liedloff, p 43). How should we understand what we want to do every day of our life?
So when we are faced with the question what to do for the rest of our life, we get scared, and I mean real scared. But what does that have to do with myopia causes? Great question, hang in there.
How Does THAT Cause Myopia?
Humans in a state of fear get stressed. So stressed that our muscles become tense and tighten up. Now if that happens in our eye muscles, the muscles flatten out the eyeball, extending it like the zoom on a photo lens, and thereby altering the shape of the lens. The shape of the lens becomes stepper because the eyeball is filled with liquid and when it is squashed together, the extension causes a steeper shape of the lens.
Now putting glasses in front of the stressed eyes doesn’t solve the problem because we are still under stress, in a state of fear, and our eye muscles are still tight as. The glasses only help us to see into the distance, the very distance we didn’t want to see in the first place. So, as strong as our mind is, it just tightens the muscles a bit more, squeezes the eyeball further, and viola there is the next level of myopia, and you need new glasses.
This keeps going until you resolve the underlying reasons. Resolving the underlying reasons is much easier than wearing glasses, totally natural, cheap as chips in comparison to a life-time of paying for glasses, and you and your mind can get rid of myopia easily. Glasses on the other hand won’t cut it, they will just increase the tension over time, worsening your eyesight every so often.
The way to deal with your psychological causes for myopia is to do natural vision correction. That’s it!
Now the fear of the future is only one possible underlying cause for myopia, there are many more myopia causes, but the concept is always the same. Your mind is putting tension on the eye muscles, which extend the eyeball, and therefore alter the shape of the lens.
=======
http://www.effortlessvision.com/docs/Myopia_As_An_Adaptation.pdf
Myopia As An Adaptation
By Robert Lichtman
… In particular, fear and anxiety play a large role in the production of myopia by
introducing factors that affect the ability to form a clear image on the retina as well as regulate
the elongation of the eye. I will propose a theory as to how emotions become thoughts, thoughts
become motor impulses, motor impulses affect the eye and visual cortex, and how these
3 phenomena ultimately blur vision. It is important to note that since these processes are dynamic
and since there is no organic damage to the myopic eye, the condition is reversible.
…
Blur begins with a fear of not being able to cope. In hundreds of interviews with myopes
conducted by the author, those who became myopic before the age of 15 tend to report the onset
of myopia as occurring within a year or so of a stressful situation such as moving to a new
country, problems at home, learning to read, or adolescence. Late onset myopia most often
occurs during college, when perhaps the stress of being away form home mixes with the stress of
reading large amounts of unattractive material and being forced to write papers on deadline.
…
From here comes the correlation between education and myopia, though it is really a correlation between
being willing to submit to strain for the sake of social approbation and myopia.
…
Beyond all this, though, there is one intriguing if not sinister advantage to myopia: while
anxiety brought on by the fear of not living up to expectations may be an underlying cause of
myopia, myopia ironically becomes somewhat of a palliative for anxiety. In her doctoral
dissertation, Carolyn Ziegler showed myopes reported more anxiety than emmetropes, but only
up to about -3 diopters of myopia. Beyond that, the anxiety levels went down as vision got
worse. By around -6 diopters, the border of severe myopia, the anxiety levels of the myopes were
similar to those of emmetropes (Zeiger, 1976). Her work further suggests that treating myopia
would concomitantly treat anxiety, though severe myopes would likely report an increase in
anxiety as their vision improved into the -3 diopter zone.
…
In my interviews with myopes, the fear of letting go is not only a fear of
losing control, but also a fear of losing parental love. This is even true for adults, who apparently
had the thought as children, took protective measures (held on), and forgot the thought while
remembering to hold on.
…
Borkovic found this anxiety linked to imagery-based worry. His
experiments support the notion that a switch to verbal-based worry from imagery-based
mentation inhibits cardio-vascular activity. In other words, it appears to calm us down.
Appearances can be deceiving, though. The discomfort of the cardiovascular response to image
based worry limits how much worry a person can tolerate. Switching to verbal/thought based
worry allows a person to worry much more without feeling the effects of the worry. In other
words, switching from imagery-based worry to thought-based worry does nothing to reduce the
anxiety, but it is similar to taking a pill that blocks the perception of the anxiety. Just a pain killer
allows an athlete to hurt himself even more, thought based worry allows a person to worry and
be paralyzed by that worry so much more. At the same time, our school systems are biased
toward thought-based mentation so the behavior is rewarded, engaging the child in a vicious
cycle that may last his entire life.
The mechanism by which we switch from imagery-based mentation to worry based
mentation may involve a suppression of high frequency receptor fields. If so, excessive worry
would induce myopia at the same time it palliates anxiety. This resolves the problem of why
people would blur their vision and take on chronic strain: in order to reduce the effects of
anxiety. While anxiety’s purpose is to provide extra energy for a fight or flight response, in our
12
modern world it actually makes our decisionmaking processes less effective. In their study of
how we process fear, Foa and Kozak found anxious persons exaggerated “subjective personal
risk†and made other, similar errors in judgment (1986). Again, the problem is the sympathetic
nervous system’s all or nothing response; every crisis is dealt with the same way we would want
it to deal with a tiger chasing us with no shades of gray (Levine, 1997).
====
interesting but unverified approaches 
Sorry I am not buying it. Interesting. But as someone who has had myopia since I was a teen, I just don’t believe it is that simple.
Thank you.
You do not have to say sorry. I said that it is interesting but unverified. By this I meant that I also do not believe to this as a practical approach. From other side, psychological factors are involved in very many diseases; more or LESS. They do not cause a disease directly but they can add some %. Some people think that they see the link between the disease and environment but they do not have resources to describe it properly so they write strange things
In my book list 3 years ago I had also “Perfect sight without glasses” by W.H.Bates, about miraculous treatments with simple methods. There are many selfhelp books and schools based on this book. But here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bates_method I found that nobody was able to scientifically prove these methods and they should be considered as scam.
At the same time, Meir Schneider was born with cataracts and later certified as permanently legally blind. With Bates method he got his sight back, and now he can drive car and read newspapers.
I was trying to find research on the link between eyesight and psychological factors. I found some studies but it seemed that authors have mixed up the causes and consequences.
Many psychologists believe that myopia is caused by psychological factors (and many of them wear glasses). At the same time, researchers find particular genes linked to myopia.
You can write “improve eyesight” in youtube and you will get plenty of exercises including these of followers of Bates. I have glasses and my parents and grandparents did. I have not done any eye exercises because I think that I am hopeless 
But I believe that I should help my children to be happy.
Along with doing the exercises for improving the eyesight, you may want to pay more attention to the regime. Don’t hesitate to remind your child to make breaks in the process of reading and always ensure proper lighting and position. It’s easier to maintai reading hygiene and prevent the possibl troubles. By the way, when I was a kid, my parents always worried about my eyesight as I was fond of reading. To be honest, I ignored their advice and my eyesight is ok (lucky me). What I mean to say, however, is that you should be careful trying to establish contact with your child and explain why the eyesight hygiene is that important.
Hello!
As a fully qualified optometrist I would suggest getting your child’s eyes tested regularly to determine whether they have any visual problems. Never give them glasses without a proper prescription as it can be very deterimental to their vision. The sooner any visual defects are corrected in childhood, the better the prognosis. This is because, like the rest of the brain, the visual pathways have a ‘critical period’ during which they can still be manipulated. The critical period lasts until around age 7.
Hope this helps!
Yes, simple exercises will help him maintain optimal vision and may also keep those annoying eye floaters at bay. Perform these exercises first thing in the morning, before bedtime, or any time his eyes feel fatigued. Make sure that his hands are clean and that his mood is relaxed. Commit to daily practice and he may just see better results within one month.