Help Your Baby Develop Their Vision With These 5 Activities

I often hear parents talk about how vision is natural, and although this is true to a point, you can also help strengthen your child's eyesight to reach their full potential.

Here are five ways you can help boost your baby’s visual skills:

1. Make Them Look Around

Encourage your baby to look at different objects by moving common items. For example, if you have pictures around the crib on short ribbons, move them every couple of days to encourage your baby to search and find them. 

You can also do this by using mobiles — try hanging a few around the room. Again, move these around every couple of days. By introducing subtle change, you will make your little one curious enough to look and work their eyes.

2. Encourage Visual Processing

Visual processing is how the brain uses and interprets what we see, so help your baby learn to translate what they’re seeing. You can promote early stages by hanging two similar pictures side-by-side so your baby can study and discern the differences. For example, one picture could show Big Bird with a mustache and the other without. 

3. Give Them A New Perspective

This can be done through simple changes. Try mixing things up by switching sides during feeding or changing the direction they lay in their crib. Giving your baby a new perspective on your face or of their room will encourage them to look around, strengthening their vision.

4. Work Together

Believe it or not, your baby’s eyes don’t automatically work together in unison. Practice eye teaming by moving an item toward and away from your baby’s face 3 or 4 times in a row — the younger the baby, the slower the movement. This encourages your child’s eyes to work together to focus and eventually notice depth. 

5. Use Black And White Contrast

Your little one can see a very limited range of colours initially. Their vision starts out with black, white and grey, and slowly grows to see more colour, starting with red. According to Professor Usha Goswami, Director of Centre of Neuroscience in Education at Cambridge University, “Anything with very obvious contrast, such as black and white edges and lines, is an optimal stimulant for the visual system. This type of stimulation basically gets the system up and running.”

And lucky for you, I have some adorable black and white books just like this, which you can find right here