What to do about dry eye?

From what age your child can wear contact lenses or color lenses? What are the precautions to be observed? Our professional optician Sarah Marlien answers your questions.

There is a priori no real minimum age to start wearing contact lenses; some children are even often forced to wear it very young for pathological reasons. This is the case when they suffer from strong anisotropy or keratocone for example.

Analyze the different reasons why your teenager want to wear color lenses 

First, you have to understand the reasons that encourage a child or adolescent to wear contact lenses or to wear color lenses. Is it the child's choice? It is very important to have the answer to this question because it will speak volumes about the child's motivation when learning to wear lenses, daily handling and respect for lens hygiene. Is it due to a pathology? The parent will then have a major role in supporting their child. Or is it more aesthetic?

Depending on the reason which pushes the child or the adolescent to wear contact lenses, the ophthalmologist or the adapter will direct your child towards a certain choice of lenses: daily color lenses, monthly color lenses, soft color lenses (all the color lenses on our website www.mycolorlenses.com are soft color lenses...).

It is important to know the level of autonomy of your child because he will be responsible for respecting certain essential rules when wearing contact lenses:

• daily change of the lens care solution in the case of monthly lenses,
• change of the case for contact lenses every month,
• systematic hand washing before handling contact lenses,
• do not sleep with your contact lenses,
• remove contact lenses during nautical activities,
• respect certain rules during sports activities.

In order to measure the child's autonomy, you can ask yourself the following questions:

• Can he remember that he has to feed our pet at a fixed time every day?
• Is he able to respect a schedule?

These questions can be good tests to validate with your child his ability to manage a daily wearing of contact lenses. However, for occasional use of color lenses, you can be less careful about its autonomy and ensure yourself the placement of the color lenses and the correct removal of the color lenses before going in bed.

For these reasons, wearing disposable lenses is more suitable for children because it causes less maintenance worries and does not ask to remember the date of the monthly change. Hygiene standards are also more easily applicable since contact lenses are easy to replace if lost.

Of course, before wearing contact lenses, it is very important that your child sees their ophthalmologist. The doctor will then check the quality of the tears and will ensure that there are no contraindicated pathologies when wearing lenses in your child.

Should we limit the number of hours the lenses are worn each day?

It will depend on the type of lenses prescribed. In the case of disposable daily lenses, the ideal wearing time is 8 hours per day. If you have silicone hydrogel contact lenses that allow better oxygenation of the eye, these lenses can be worn 12 hours a day. Know that it is recommended to let the eye breathe freely one day a week in glasses... For example on Sunday.

It is very important to respect these rules. In the event of non-compliance, your child or teenager may start to tolerate their lens tolerance. He may feel dryness and no longer tolerate the lenses in the near future, not to mention of course the immediate health risks to his eyes.

To conclude, your child must be old enough to understand and apply his rules. Why not start with disposable color lenses if the color lenses tempt you? Note that there are daily color lenses with correction: Bella One Day color lenses and Solotica Aquarella color lenses. Remember to have your eyes checked regularly to make sure all precautions are followed.