Does Small Text Actually Affect Eyesight?
When you closely focus on a particular text for a long time, your ciliary muscle contracts and spasms. Muscles around the eyes become congested and stiff, making the eyes unable to adjust properly. The ciliary muscle needs to exert effort for the eye to see words clearly, which slowly increases strain on the eyes. Once the eyes are fatigued, we unwittingly shorten the distance between the eyes and the book, causing a change in the reading position. The likelihood of myopia is thus increased. As previously explained, the degree of contractions of the ciliary muscle have much to do with distance, but not so much with text size. The farther the object is, the less tense the eyes are. This means that a larger text size cannot necessarily prevent myopia.
That is, myopia is not caused by small text sizes, but because of the shorter distance needed for children to see those tiny words clearly. Additionally, regardless of text size, as long as the eyes are closely focused for 20 minutes in activities such as reading, playing the piano, or watching TV, they need to relax properly. It’s best to take a break every half an hour when reading or doing homework for extended periods of time. Alternately, looking at objects near and far will relax the ciliary muscle. Blinking a few times helps relieve dry eyes.
Children nowadays have easy access to smartphones. When using a smartphone, the eyes are closer to the screen than when reading a book. Vision can also deteriorate in such cases as proper distance is not maintained. As stated in the previous paragraph, as long as you follow the principle of “5-minute breaks after every 30 minutes of reading/watching”, your eyesight will be easily protected!