Does Your Child Need Multifocal Glasses?

Does your child experience any difficulties when reading? Do the words become blurry or doubled? Does your child find it challenging to clearly see objects at various distances? If so, they may need multifocals.

While most people think of multifocals as reading glasses for people over 40, who become farsighted as they age, children may also require multifocals for reading and schoolwork.

What Are Multifocal Glasses?

Multifocal glasses, or simply multifocals, contain a few distinct vision prescriptions: the bottom of the lens corrects near vision, while the middle section is focused for computer vision and top of the lens corrects distance vision.

Why Was My Child Prescribed Multifocals?

Multifocals are a great option for anyone who has any difficulty seeing both near and far or who struggles with visual problems, such as focusing difficulties or eye turns. Children are naturally far-sighted, so sometimes the eye crossing is due to problems with seeing things up close.

Multifocal lenses can help a child better focus in school and may alleviate eye strain, headaches, blurred vision and fatigue.

Children may need multifocals for the following reasons:

• Inability to change focus quickly from one distance to another, which is a necessary skill when copying notes from a classroom board to a notebook.
• Inadequate focusing power. In conditions such as lazy eye or eye turns, some children cannot attain close focus at all. As this problem progresses, the brain may eventually stop using the weaker eye.
• Over-focusing problems—when the eyes work too hard—can cause additional stress on the eyes. This can lead to headaches, eye strain and even eye turns, resulting in double vision.

These days, one of the significant advantages of multifocals is that they’re available as progressive lenses specifically designed for children to wear. These lenses are free of the telltale line demarcating where one prescription ends and the other begins—so the lenses look like single-vision lenses.

Multifocals and Vision Therapy

If your child’s focusing problem is impacting their school performance, or if they have multiple vision problems, your eye doctor might recommend a vision therapy program in conjunction with multifocal lenses. Vision therapy is a customized program that helps children strengthen their visual skills by improving the communication between their eyes and brain. Vision therapy is an evidence-based program and can be critical to resolving any underlying visual problems affecting your child.

At Silicon Valley Eye Physicians we will examine your child’s eyes to assess which multifocal lenses and/or vision therapy program is most suitable for your child.

Our practice serves patients from Sunnyvale, Los Altos, Mountain View, and Cupertino, California and surrounding communities.