FYI: Could I Have Prevented My Nearsightedness If I'd Just Spent More Time Outside As A Kid?
Eye Exam A child gets her eyeglass prescription checked. National Eye Institute, National Institutes of Health Yes, you could have, you little bookworm. My parents were right!! A spate of studies over the past decade has found that kids who spend more time outdoors are less likely to develop near-sightedness. Outdoor time seems to protect kids even if they do a lot of "near work" (e.g., reading Goosebumps and Animorphs nonstop) and if their parents are myopic. When I was a kid, my parents would always tell me to stop reading and go play outside. I would scoff: What kind of parents want their kid to stop reading? But maybe they had a point after all. A team of Australian researchers recently reviewed major studies since 1993 of kids, myopia and time spent outdoors. They found more than a dozen studies, examining more than 16,000 school-age kids in total, that found children...