About this episode
In today’s Q&A episode, I answer a heartfelt question from a mom whose son is struggling to adjust to his reduced nearsighted prescription. We talk about why reduced lenses can initially feel uncomfortable, how the visual brain adapts, and what you can do to support a smoother transition. If you’ve wondered whether a weaker prescription is right for your child—or why adaptation sometimes takes longer—this episode will give you clarity and confidence.
Transcript:
Sam Berne (00:00.961)
Hey everybody, it’s Dr. Sam and I’d like to welcome you to the podcast. So I received a question from a mom who I’m working with her son who’s got nearsightedness. This is a very interesting question. So I gave him a prescription that reduces his myopia and she said that he’s having a hard time adjusting to the prescription that is creating eye strain and his eye muscles hurt and she wants to know
What she can do to tell him to get used to the prescription. Well, it’s interesting because when you’re presented with a reduced prescription, Your eyes should relax. Basically, any reduced prescription is saying, can I let go with my muscles and can I release and relax?
Now in this particular case, there’s two possible scenarios going on. The first is that and this is very common with people that start wearing reduced prescriptions. They start feeling their eye muscles more and they start feeling this area. Whereas before it was very a very unrealized area meaning they had no awareness of it. And so when you wear something that’s less tight,
Guess what happens all of that tightness that you’ve absorbed over years of the strong prescription. You feel that so it’s showing you what’s already there. It’s not causing it, but the relaxation potential is showing you the tension that you’ve been carrying for a long time. The second part of this is
It’s not the prescription that’s causing the eye tension. It’s the attitude and habits that we bring to the prescription that creates the eye tension. So this means that we’re so used to having it clear that when we’re given a softer prescription and it’s a little on the soft blurry side, we immediately want to get rid of it by squinting and straining.
Sam Berne (02:23.638)
So we’re back to our old habits again.
Yeah, exactly. So the reduced prescription is going to confront the habit of you wanting to squint and strain and muscle it. So what I told the mother is just invite the child to wear this reduced prescription at near at the 14 inches, maybe maybe 20 inches at the most. But don’t try to wear it in the distance for now.
I mean the prescription was prescribed for near vision to begin with and it can be a big jump and kind of disorienting. If you get this reduced prescription and you have the expectation that it should be clear in the distance. Now what will happen over time is that if you get used to the reduced prescription, you’ll notice that your dista
