Spotlight on a local Sunshine Coast business that is doing wonders for kids’ eye health, here is the story behind Kids Eye Gear.

Why protecting our son’s eyes is important to us:

Our story began when our son Dane was six months old. A routine trip to the GP resulted in a heart-wrenching discovery of ‘something’ in his eye. After an anxious 10 day wait before we could see an ophthalmologist, we received the news that Dane had a congenital cataract in one of his eyes. Faced with the options of letting him go blind or risking surgery followed by years of contact lenses and patching, we made the life-changing decision to go ahead with the operation to remove his clouded lens.  

Along with regular contact lens insertion and removal – no easy feat in a baby – Dane required many, many hours of patching. His ‘good’ eye was covered with a patch in order to make his ‘bad’ eye switch on and develop good vision. It was through this journey that we discovered how important it is to protect our kids’ eyes – not just kids with vision issues but ALL kids. From a few weeks after his surgery, Dane has worn sunglasses or safety glasses every time he goes outside or plays a sport. Our heightened awareness of potential eye injuries and sun damage has also meant that our older daughter has worn sunglasses from the age of two as well.

Fast forward nine years and Dane is now a sports-crazy little boy who excels at school and makes us laugh every day. There are certainly still challenges and managing little nuances with his eyesight but on the whole, Dane’s story is overwhelmingly positive. He has check-ups every six months but right now has 6/7.5 (20/25) vision in his ‘bad’ eye (on a good day he will sometimes get to 6/6) and no further complications. This was the absolute best-case scenario that we could have hoped for and we are grateful every day.  He still wears sunglasses outside or safety glasses when he plays sport because we need to protect the vision that we’ve worked so hard to achieve.

Our journey with Dane’s eye also led us to create Kids Eye Gear – a place where parents of kids with vision issues can find products, information, and support. We want to try to make patching and wearing glasses as fun as possible and to advocate and educate about early vision screening and protecting little eyes. It’s really important for us to help make parents aware of the importance of protecting their kids’ eyes and vision for now and the future.

Nicola has created a range of eye patches that are stylish and fun.  She also has many wonderful tools to make vision training simpler and more fun.  So visit www.kidseyegear.com.au for all of your kids’ eye patching and vision training requirements.