I am walking down a street in Europe and come across this advertisement on a ‘bill board’.

It is a ‘sharpness special’ for children’s glasses with 0 payment. The pictorial part of the add suggest “clearer eyesight and better learning”, if you look through this lens! 

On the surface the intention of the advertisement is sound. It is the beginning of the school year. It is prudent to get your child glasses so that they can look clearly in the distance and be to learn more efficiently.  (Remember, an advertisement agency designed this add. There business is to provide their customer with a product that produces results. The optical business’s primary interest is to get a return on their investment. The clients visual well-being is secondary or even tertiary or probably not at all.) 

What it DOES NOT SAY is the following:

1. It is a good idea to get your child’s vision examined by a professional to determine if their is a vision problem that would need either a treatment with glasses, or possibly a vision problem, like a lack of two eyed viewing, that would need a vision therapy or exercise approach. Which professional provides this kind of vision care. Optician, Optometrist or Ophthalmologist.  Just ask the professional if they provide binocular testing and vision therapy?

1. That the increase in eyesight in the distance may have minimal affect on learning. Yes, the child will be able to see the details on the board more clearly, but really learning occurs when the child reads and looks at the close distance. There are more tests than need to be run, in order to examine the relationship between learning and vision. 

1. What happens when the child wears the glasses for increasing the eyesight sharpness in the distance and they read with these glasses.  Two things happen. One there is more stress on the nervous system looking through minus lenses in reading, because of sympathetic nervous system stimulation. Secondly, this can result in over focusing and later needing stronger minus lenses for far looking. Find the professional who takes  an active preventive approach to vision. 

1. No where is it stated that a preventive process can be started for children that minimises the likelihood of needing glasses in the first place. 

1. The advertisement indirectly is misleading information for the consumer. They are led to believe that if they were good parents, then getting glasses for their children is helping them to learn better.  (And made to feel guilty if they ignore this message). The research and statistics say the opposite. The wearing of minus lenses does not correct the problem. It is only a form of compensation.  The Optical company who puts this add out is interested in selling glasses because they know that their profit comes from this. They are not yet geared up for providing vision care that is preventive so that their profit could come from really helping the parent and child avoiding glasses in the first place.  They are selling a product not a vision care program.

1. Consumer be aware before being seduced by false promises and misleading advertising. Use the internet to become informed of your choices that include preventive approaches for children’s vision problems.