Preparing a 3-year-old for spectacles.....

Stroke Politics

We had our little girl in to an optoptrist and an optometrist in the past few weeks, and today the recommendation was that she should wear spectacles as she has vision problems in one eye. I am just a bit concerned about how she will adapt to them, as I do not want her to be self-conscious about herself at such an early age. Has anyone out there crossed this particular bridge before? Any recommendations re. frames that might appeal to her...?

deisemum

My son got glasses when he was 3 years old. He was seen as a public patient, believe it or not but he got seen much quicker going public than going private.

He started off just wearing them for short periods. Also there is such a great range of glasses available now unlike the John Lennon style that I got when I was 11 months old, the ones that had a loop in the arms of them so a ribbon could be put through them and tied in a bow on top so I could keep them on :eek: .

I found the free glasses were far more appealing than the plain private ones, more importantly my son did as well. When we went to get the glasses it was just the private ones on display and the staff were trying the hard sell to get one of the private pairs, even tried to get me to get a spare pair. Fortunately my son pulled out a drawer and found lovely glasses which came in all sorts of colours, characters etc and we later found out that they were the public ones.

He wore glasses/patches, bi-focals etc until he was 11 and no longer needs to wear them.

When both my sons were in preschool/montessori and school there were always children in their classes that had glasses and the other pupils don't take any notice of them

IsThatSo?

I wouldn't have thought that a 3 year old would be self conscious about much really and that this was a better age to start wearing them rather than say 7 or 8? 3 year olds don't have inhibitions and I would expect that she will only have a problem with them if you make a big deal of it. Tell her she looks great in them, and leave it at that, would be my advice.
She might not keep them on initially, so will need watching, but once she is used to them that will pass

Spootie

My daughter is four now and has been wearing glasses for over a year. She took to them very quickly and I had some simple rules to encourage her- no Glasses no TV for example. It did mean a bit more television than i would have liked initally but it worked. I would also say focus on the positives, that they are special, get a nice pink pair etc. My DD wears hers all the time and takes great care of them. Of course the fact that she sees 2 of everything sometimes when she takes them off helps:)

Best of luck

Spootie

Oops forgot to say. Make sure they are a good fit. The glasses i got initially in opticians for DD were lovely to look at but were a terrible fit(always falling down her nose). When I complained optician didn't seem to agree with me so i took her to high street optician to see if there was anything they could do. They agreed with me about glasses so they fitted her with a great pair (little miss naughty on them appropriately enough). They were probably the cheapest there and in fairness they wouldn't let me put anything on her that they felt were not right for her head size/shape etc.