Child's Vision Development

The moment your child is born, his vision development will start and rapid development will follow until the child reaches seven year old.

From Birth To Four Months Old

When the child is born, they don't see colors yet. All they see is black and white and shades of grey. At this moment, they are also unable to focus yet, hence most of the vision is blurred.

They will slowly learn to focus on big and closed objects such as faces and gradually moving to bright objects shown to them.

When they are 8 to 12 weeks old, they will start to focus on people and follow moving objects with their eyes. You will notice that they will start off with following the moving objects by turning the head but as time goes by, they will learn to track the objects by moving their eyes independently with lesser head movement.

Although at this stage the child is starting to learn to focus with their eyes, their eye co-ordination is not fully developed yet, hence may occasionally cross them. This cross eye should be resolves by about 4 to 5 months old. However, if it persist beyond 5 months old, there may be indication of a vision problem and parent should seek medical attention immediately.

By the time the child reaches four months old, he will start to reach out for objects and start to develop the "eye-hand" coordination. At this stage, their vision systems have developed the ability to see colors !

Four To Six Months Old

At this time, the child's eye-hand coordination should be quite well developed and they will start to reach out to anything that is of their interest. They will also learn to fuse the images coming from both their right and left eyes, merging them into one, giving them a full three dimensional vision.

This spatial and dimensional awareness will continue to develop and hence, the child will be able to aim more accurately when reaching out for an object. By the time they reach 6 months old, their vision sharpness should have developed to 20/20.

6 To 12 Months Old

At this stage, most babies will start crawling and this activity will further develop the eye-body coordination. The child will learn to estimate the distance, focus on targets and reaching out to get them. The child also start to distinguish the differences in colors, sizes, shapes and positions.

Toddlers

Throughout pre-school years, the child's vision will continue to develop with further maturation of the eyes and the brain. If there is disruption to the quality of vision at this age, children may develop lazy eye.

To help in the eye-hand-body coordination and brain development, parents can introduce vision and motor skills coordination activities to their toddlers such as playing building blocks, throwing a ball and doing art work.

Reading to a child is also important as this will help them to develop visualization skills as they "picture" the story in their minds.

School-Going Children

By the age of seven, the child's vision is almost fully developed. However, as the child continue to grow, he may develop refractive errors such as myopia or commonly known as short-sighted and astigmatism.

Unfortunately, children don't often realize that their vision is blur or having problem seeing clearly. Hence it is important to have their eyes checked before starting school.