As one meta-analysis put it:
It’s estimated that an increase of one hour per day of outdoor time could reduce the occurrence of myopia in children by 45%.
Make sure your kids spend time outside, folks!
As one meta-analysis put it:
It’s estimated that an increase of one hour per day of outdoor time could reduce the occurrence of myopia in children by 45%.
Make sure your kids spend time outside, folks!
I admit that I barely skimmed the article so I don’t know if/how they controlled for this
But this also kind of feels to me like something that could go the other way- myopic kids are less likely to go outside
Get hit in the head by a baseball you didn’t see coming or trip over a rock you didn’t see a handful of times and you might decide that the “outdoors” thing isn’t really for you.
Or of course a mix of both factors, kids who are already predisposed to short-sightedness go outside less, so the other factors at play make their eyes even worse and so they go outside even less and…
It’s not just individual kids they are measuring, but entire populations of children and at what age they start school. The younger kids are when they start school, the more likely they are to be myopic, and this contributes to significant differences in the prevalence in myopia across countries (Edit: I should have stated this explicitly, but this is because more time in school means less time outside, generally speaking)