It has been clinically proven time and time again that the worst thing for your eyes is excess eye strain. When you take on more than our normal workload, the added stress can adversely affect our vision and cause irreversible damage to our eyes. Typically, excessive eye strain problems start developing in childhood, notably of grade school age. Once these habits and initial damage is brought into our older age, the eyes gradually become damaged. It has therefore been found that many of the more common vision problems we suffer today can be traced to bad habits and excessive strain on the eyes.

Naturally, children are always learning and have a tendency to be curious about more than one thing at a time. Ask any youngster whether or not they are excited for school to start, and they almost always enthusiastically answer yes. Pose the same question to a teenager or college student, and you are bound to get a drastically different answer. Why is there such a big divide between the two answers? The main reason is because school children are put under strict discipline, and it is mandatory for them to memorize and learn many different subjects which may not be of interest to them. When a subject is of less interest to a young child, this causes the need for added concentration and excessive eye strain is ultimate result. While it is true that interests are different from one child to the other, it is a proven fact that all children are forced to learn about things they are not remotely interested in.

Take, for instance, the boss who hands out sales numbers to all of his employees. Many of the employees will chalk this up to another useless meeting or handout – they are uninterested in statistical information. In the same way, not all school children are interested in math, the sciences, literature, etc. A higher standard in education should always be a goal to achieve; however, it may be necessary to change the way children learn. When they see better, they remember better, and this has been proven in many scientific studies. Eye strain is caused by more concentration, and more concentration is caused by lack of interest or enthusiasm in a particular subject.

The Bates Method was the creation of Dr. William Bates, a famous ophthalmologist from New York. With this method, Dr. Bates created a poster which consisted of common geometrical shapes and letters, all of which are easily recognizable by school-aged children. Dr. Bates put this poster up near the front of the classroom, in order to give the children something to glance at when ever they had feelings of being overworked or had feelings of fatigue. Dr. Bates created this poster because the shapes and letters on it would reduce eye strain and give the eyes a break – this would ultimately reduce vision damage. Seeing something unfamiliar naturally puts more strain on your eyes, but every day things that we see cause your eyes to rest at ease.

By training children to abstain from putting excessive strain on their eyes, their vision will undoubtedly not have half of the problems that doctors currently see and encounter on a daily basis.