Children are the future. This statement has been nothing short of cliche for as long as we can all remember. Yet, it never stops being true. One of our missions in life is to protect and groom our children to take over the world from us someday. With all the dangers in the current world to educate them and protect them from, don’t you think vision loss shouldn’t be one of them? With more exposure to back-lit, harsh light digital screens than ever before in history, this generation of iPad wielding grade-schoolers is going down a blinding path.

Recently at Adobe’s 280,000 sq. foot campus in Lehi, Utah, Adobe was celebrating bring your kids to work day with caricature artists, games and a focus on their vision. GUNNAR Optiks (next to the caricature artists and the photo booth) were invited back to an Adobe campus (after recently visiting the San Jose campus and the San Francisco campus) to speak about visual ergonomics to the Adobe team, and their children.

There has been an exponential increase in the use of digital screens among children, at home and in the classroom. While the focus of ergonomics has been on business environments, we are overlooking the screens we are handing our children to stare at, not to mention things like active boards in school environments. What this is leading to is children needing vision correction earlier in life thanks to the influx of technology in their lives and in front of their still developing brains. This use of technology will of course only benefit children, especially with the obsoletion of printed textbooks on the horizon.

The Lehi Adobe campus is very unique. As the over 600 kids attending can attest, there is a an always present glare coming from the windows. The campus lets in all the sunshine available, which can create major problems when working. The ergonomics team bought screen protectors, but those proved ineffective. Several teams are already wearing GUNNAR glasses in order to protect their eyes from the glare. The employees understand how important eye protection is, which is a lesson they are passing directly on to their children.

Each child was given a pair of GUNNAR Optiks MLG Phantoms to try and they engaged in a game of Charades on the app Heads Up using an iPad Mini. The kids and their parents could see the change in how their eyes reacted to the digital screen firsthand. The parents and children learned about eye health and visual ergonomics, all the while forgetting about the harsh glare coming off the screens because they were wearing protective eyewear. The moral of the story is that any time you are using a digital screen, you should be wearing digital eyewear, even if it’s only for a game of charades.