Japan Data
Health Daily life
06/18/2024
About 70% of Japanese schoolchildren who need glasses already wear them by second grade. Many parents also blame smartphones and video games, believing that they cause children’s eyesight to deteriorate.
The study carried out in March 2024 by Eye Japan (a chain of opticians in the city of Saitama) shows that children often start wearing glasses when they enter elementary school.
Eye Japan surveyed 750 families to determine at what age children wear their first pair of glasses. Their survey shows that 19.7% of them had started wearing them at CP, a record figure compared to previous years. Next come CE2 (17.3%), then CE1 (17.1%). If we consider that 15.6% of children already had glasses before entering primary school, a total of 69.7% of schoolchildren wear them in CE2.
For 40% of parents, smartphones and video game consoles directly contribute to young people’s poor eyesight and 37.9% think that these screens are undoubtedly to blame. In total, they are incriminated by 77.9% of parents.
Most often, parents realize that their child’s eyesight has deteriorated during the medical examination organized by the school (44.1%). They also say they noticed that they were “starting to have difficulty reading on the board” (24.3%) and 23.7% saw them “squinting their eyes more often”.
Eye Japan emphasizes through its representative that “poor eyesight often prevents one from concentrating or progressing in sport”.
(Title photo: Pixta)
child health school
