With sports starting up more and summer coming soon, we’ve had a lot of parents asking what age we recommend starting contact lens wear. The answer is, it depends. There are multiple factors we take into consideration before fitting contact lenses on anyone.

One very important consideration is your child’s desire to wear contacts. Often parents will want their kids to wear contacts for sports, etc. but the child doesn’t feel ready. We recommend holding off until they want to wear contacts. If they don’t feel ready, odds are, they won’t be motivated to do the training to properly insert and remove contacts.

Another factor is their maturity and responsibility. Contacts are a medical device. They are a piece of plastic placed on your eye that can decrease the amount of oxygen going to your cornea. If you don’t care for your contacts properly, you run the risk of causing sight threatening eye infections or causing damage to your corneas from contact lens overwear.

We almost always recommend daily contact lenses as these are the safest, healthiest, and easiest to care for lenses. With a daily lens, you put it in when you want to wear it and then dispose of it at the end of the day. Worried about contact lens waste? Vista is proud to offer contact lens recycling to our patients at no charge. Just collect the lenses and packaging in a bag and drop them off at the office when the bag is full.

If you or your child are considering contacts, talk to myself, Dr. Schamber, or Dr. Orr during your child’s eye exam. We will discuss the options and why we do or do not recommend contacts at that time. If we all decide that contacts are a good option, we will schedule an appointment with our wonderfully trained staff to teach your child how to put in, take them out, and care for their lenses properly and we will evaluate the contact lenses on the child’s eye to ensure that they fit properly and that they are the best lenses for their eyes.

I hope this answers most of your questions. If you have additional questions, just give us a call or book an appointment!