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(Ivanhoe Newswire) Four eyes are okay with kids as long as two of them are contact lenses.
In a study aimed at finding out how contacts would impact various self perceptions among children as young as eight years old, researchers from The Ohio State University found switching from glasses to contacts led kids to feel better about their appearance, their athletic abilities, and even their ability to make friends.
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Contacts did not, however, have any affect on a measure called global self-worth defined by researchers as how valuable children believe they are to society. Nor did it affect their beliefs about their own behavior or school performance, although kids who hated wearing glasses prior to switching to contacts did feel more confident scholastically at the end of the research.
The study was conducted among 484 nearsighted kids between the ages of 8 and 11 who were already wearing glasses when the research began. About half were given soft contact lenses, while the other half continued to wear glasses. The children were then followed for three years.
The results on appearance, athletic ability, and acceptance by friends was revealed in a comparison of surveys taken before the group was divided into the two sections, and then again three years later.
The take home message, report the investigators, is that even young children can benefit from wearing contacts. Kids, in consultation with parents, should be able to choose what kind of vision correction they want, study author Jeffrey Walline was quoted as saying. Look at a childs motivation, abilities, maturity, hygiene, eye size lots of those factors but dont look at age. There are 6-year-olds who can wear contact lenses on their own and there are 25-year-olds who cant.
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SOURCE: Optometry and Vision Science, published online March 2, 2009
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