Episode Details

Today I want to address the pressing issue of managing children’s digital device use and offer valuable advice to parents seeking to establish effective boundaries. We’ll shed light on the potential pitfalls of excessive screen time – from eye strain to fatigue – and underscore the heightened vulnerability of children due to their less-developed protective eye pigments against blue light. I advocate for a thoughtful approach rooted in negotiation when discussing digital device limits with kids. Enjoy the show!

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Hello, everyone. It’s Dr. Sam. I’d like to welcome you to my EyeClarity podcast. This is a show that offers cutting-edge information on how to improve your vision and overall wellness through holistic methods. I so appreciate you spending part of your day with me. If you have questions, you can send them to hello@drsamberne.com.

Now to the latest EyeClarity episode.

Hey, everyone. Welcome to the episode today. So I want to target parents. I also want to target children, and this has to do with digital devices. And the topic of the podcast is how to set boundaries, digital device boundaries for kids. This is a constant fight that goes on in probably every household. Kids just want to use their screens all day, and parents are really upset that kids are spending so much time staring at their screens, either playing video games or even just schoolwork.

Recently, I was visiting a school and I was doing some consulting, and every classroom I went in, the kids were on their iPad, learning through their digital devices. So we can’t fight it. They’re definitely here. But what’s the research? What’s my clinical experience and how to navigate this conversation? And what is it that we can do to negotiate with our kids? How to set boundaries with digital devices.

So a conservative, mainstream publication this was put out by the American Optometric Association came out and said that, yes, children are at a higher risk of eye strain, eye fatigue, maybe even retinal damage from looking at their digital devices. There was an article that was published a long time ago, 1962, in the Investigative Ophthalmology Journal, and they were studying the difference between children’s lenses in the eye versus adults.

And what the researchers found is that children do not have the pigment developed that deflects the damaging blue light. So this means that. Adults do have this pigment inherently in the lens, but it doesn’t develop till later on in a child’s life. And so young children, school age children, they don’t have this pigment. This means that the blue light can absorb more deeply through the lens to the retina, therefore creating the potential of more retinal damage.

So the American optometric association also wrote in this publication that kids have a higher risk of developing headaches, blurred vision, and eye strain from staring at digital devices. The AOA also said that children may have a disruption in their circadian rhythms which affects their sleep cycle. Now, my clinical practice, what I have seen is kids love the digital devices.

They can’t get enough of it. It creates kind of an addictive focus for them. But at the same time, I’m seeing more kids with blurred vision at distance, red eyes, headaches, eye strain, avoidance of reading. And I thin