My wife and I both have astigmatism and fairly strong prescription lenses. Our son, who is 18 months old and can correctly identify all the capital letters, can easily call out the names of letters from a size/distance that look like a blur to us (5 feet, letters are ~16-18 pt.). He does not appear to be squinting, leaning forward, or making any special effort to read these letters.
I’m wondering if this indicates in any way how good his vision may be at the ages kids normally would be fitted for glasses. In short, does visual acuity routinely make significant changes in the pre-school years?
Both of my parents have glasses. As a child I had 20/20 vision until around middle school. After that my vision has slowly declined to where it is today. Assuming im not some freak I would imagine this is pretty common.
When our daughter was about that age or perhaps two, she was doing a lot of squinting (and we’re both high myopes), so we took her to a pediatric ophthalmologist. As it turned out, she had a squinting affectation.
The ophthalmologist told us that a fairly reliable indicator of visual acuity in toddlers is to present them with a handful of baking nonpareils, like the coloured sprinkles you would put on ice cream or cupcakes. If the child can manage to grasp one and get it to her mouth, her vision is reasonably good.
Myopia does not usually make an appearance until, classically, age 6-9.
I was about nine or ten when my left eye started going south on me (myopia, not bad, but only on the one side, oddly). There’s no guarantee your kid won’t need glasses in the future, but for now he’s probably fine.
We took my son in for his first eye exam at almost 3. He had 20/20 vision. The opthalmologist told us that toddlers are normally far sighted, and that as they grow the curvature of the eye flattens and they move into the normal vision range, and that he would almost certainly be near sighted as he grew, since he wasn’t showing any farsightedness. He’s been wearing glasses since he was 8, and now has a -5.25 diopter in both eyes. That’s fairly myopic for someone who’s only been wearing glasses for four years.
IOW, yes, normally visual acuity does change in the preschool years, at least according to the pediatric ophtalmogist in Vicenza who examined my son.