Vision Loss

Parents – There is far more to fear from WHAT your children watch on television than WHERE they sit when they watch it.

I like to sit on the floor. It’s just a personal preference, but I find that a nice, soft carpet and a couple of squishy pillows offer much more in the way of comfortable reclining possibilities than your average sofa. As a child, however, as soon as I would find just the perfect comfortable position on the living room floor, I would invariably receive the following admonishment:

“You’re too close to the TV! If you sit there, you’ll ruin your eyes. Get up and go sit on the couch!”

Grumpily, I would relinquish my chosen spot, knowing full well that an argument would surely result in my not being allowed to watch anything at all, from any distance. But I could not help but ponder whether sitting too close to the TV would actually damage my vision, or if this was just another load of parental hooey.

Turns out, it was the latter. Despite the sureness with which overzealous mothers assert this “wisdom,” there is no evidence whatsoever to support the claim that viewing a television (or any other screen) up close has any effect at all on eyesight.

Poor eyesight is, in almost all cases, a genetic trait. Sitting up close to a television set won’t cause a child to develop nearsightedness, farsightedness, or any similar condition, any more than sitting well away from the set will prevent them from needing glasses if they are genetically predisposed to vision problems.

Watching certain types of programming, however, WILL result in a skewed sense of reality and diminished general intelligence. So stop worrying about where your kids sit and start paying attention to what the heck they’re watching.