A controversy over health and homework is being given new life, sparked by a recent article in the NY Post. The discussions about how much homework is healthy for children has been in debate for generations, occasionally with the balance swinging wildly one way or another, but a newer debate is directly attaching health concerns to the issue. Is the rigorous amount of work assigned by your child’s Private School causing your child’s eye problems? One Doctor thinks so.
Too much homework may be causing young students to develop nearsightedness, requiring them to wear reading glasses prematurely, a prominent Upper East Side pediatric eye doctor claims.
Students in first to sixth grades who attend rigorous private elementary schools are more vulnerable than their public-school counterparts because they are saddled with heavy reading.
Even kids who don’t have a family history of poor vision are developing myopia, or near-sightedness, says pediatric ophthalmologist Mark Steele. When nearsighted kids shows up in his Upper West Side office, Steele said, he often diagnoses them as “private school” or “selective magnet school.”
Placing on the blame, even jokingly, on an entire educational environment seems a bit excessive, especially when high levels of reading and achievement are not indicative of just Private Schools, but all dedicated students in schools nationwide.
It is interesting to point out that there are many other ways in which even those not genetically predisposed to myopia can increase their chances of developing it, and it is a something that other professionals and experts are pointing out in response these claims.
“The incidence of myopia has been increasing . . . and the demands of reading may play a role,” said Dr. Kathy Lee, a spokeswoman for the American Association of Pediatric Ophthalmology and Strabismus. “But to say that reading load is the direct cause of increased myopia is a very large stretch.”
Victoria Goldman, author of “The Manhattan Guide to Private Schools,” holds the screen time, not the homework, responsible for blinding kids.
“These kids have BlackBerries and [iPods] and computer games and video games,” said Goldman. “The eye strain is from all of those things. It isn’t just the homework.”
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