YSK: The word is 'spent' not 'spend'.
this post was submitted on 25 Apr 2026
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Yeah that was a typo. Edited the title to fix it, should be correct now
I'm farsighted, so I can only conclude that I spent too much time outdoors as a kid. See Mom!?
Is this really causation though? Could it not just be that kids that spend less time looking at screens are less likely to be short-sighted AND more likely to spend time outside?
If this is just a correlation this would have to be a correlation at the population level. Countries where kids start school later on (e.g. 7 years old) have significantly lower rates of myopia than countries that start school early on in a child's development (e.g. 3 years old). It's still possible that this is a correlation, but the correlation would have to be capturing something deeper than just an individual kids screen time. Granted, this correlation would still need to account for differences between individual kids, but it would also need to account for differences between kids at a population level. It's hard to see what could be causing this correlation though. So maybe there's something there we're just not seeing, but at a certain point though the idea that there is a causal relationship starts to seem like the most plausible explanation for explaining this data
It wasn't mentioned in this article, but I remember reading somewhere that it might be because exposure to sunlight affects vitamin D production, which affects the length/shape of our eyeballs as we're growing up.
Another idea is that when you're outside, you spend more time focusing on objects further away, which helps develop those eye muscles
A third idea is that sunlight is much, much brighter than most indoor artificial light, and the lack of this very bright light causes some sort of problem for the developing eye. Maybe the brightness of the sun is a sort of "calibration" method for the eye and when it doesn't get that really bright sunlight, the development of the eye goes out of whack.
So is it vitamin D, or far-away views or bright sunlight? I've heard all these theories before but I'm not sure which is it. Does the meta analysis say anything about which effect is most likely the cause? I mean could we "fix" this by going outside to view things far away, or should we just take vitamin D supplements, or should we have much brighter indoor lighting? I'd love to know.
A third idea is that sunlight is much, much brighter than most indoor artificial light
Would this mean it’s a bad idea to give kids sunglasses?
Does the meta analysis say anything about which effect is most likely the cause?
Not that I saw though I admit I didn’t read the whole thing
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There have been RCTs conducted for this. For example
Myopia Prevention and Outdoor Light Intensity in a School-Based Cluster Randomized Trial
Pei-Chang Wu et al. Ophthalmology. 2018 Aug.
In this study, schools were selected and promoted either outdoor or indoor recess
did not seem to help me. I guess I got the bad side of the coin flip.
LMFAO
My mom blamed us (me and my older brother) for "sitting too close to the TV"
She kept us mostly locked indoors in an apartment (besides going to school) from the beginning of my memory up till 8 years old.
Then we moved to the US and from 8 to 12 I was in school from morning (like 7 AM maybe? forgot the exact time) till like 6PM cuz she signed me up afterschool programs cuz she wanted to use it as free babysitting essentially so she can work longer...
And we cant go outside alone without adults.
In China it was "a lot of kidnappers on the street thay will traffic you and sell your organs"
In the US it was "if you go outside without an adult, CPS will take you away and you can't see mama again" (idk why mom spoke in 3rd person sometimes lol)
Yay! so... from birth to 12 I was indoors, either in school or at home, most of the time...
outdoor time was rare and only when parents have a day off or like the 15 minutes of recess in school...
that's basically our outside time...
In China we had maternal grandma that sometimes took us outside...
In the US, it was just mom, dad, older brother, and me (cuz grandma can't come yet, no visa yet)... So we had even less outside time... like parenrs had to work all the time...
But of course its always "too much screens!" to be blamed lmao
From 8 to 12 was when my nearsightedness really developed a lot.
I didn't understand why I had nearsigntedness at the time, but now looking back and analyzing my life, now it's so obvious why lol..
My older brother has like -9.00 or -10.00 in the nearsightedness thing. Its funny my parents called it like 900 or 1000 "degrees".... like it sounds so much scarier when they drop the decimal point and literally say: "you're about to have ONE THOUSAND DEGREES IN NEARSIGHTEDNESS! You're gonna GO BLIND!"
I admit that I barely skimmed the article so I don't know if/how they controlled for this
But this also kind of feels to me like something that could go the other way- myopic kids are less likely to go outside
Get hit in the head by a baseball you didn't see coming or trip over a rock you didn't see a handful of times and you might decide that the "outdoors" thing isn't really for you.
Or of course a mix of both factors, kids who are already predisposed to short-sightedness go outside less, so the other factors at play make their eyes even worse and so they go outside even less and....
But this also kind of feels to me like something that could go the other way- myopic kids are less likely to go outside
It's not just individual kids they are measuring, but entire populations of children and at what age they start school. The younger kids are when they start school, the more likely they are to be myopic, and this contributes to significant differences in the prevalence in myopia across countries (Edit: I should have stated this explicitly, but this is because more time in school means less time outside, generally speaking)
Ysk 0*infinity = 0
If you spend no time doing anything that you ought to do (exercise, go outside, eat healthy) the immediately observable effects from any amount of sustained practice is measurable.