Toys & Activities for Vision Development

When your young baby is first learning to play, you might not think that you have a way of training their vision, but you do! Just as babies need to learn how to do everything else in life, vision is something that can be aided along in its development. We want to share with you some toys and activities that can help your baby develop their vision.

In the first six months of your baby’s life, there are many blurry shapes, shadows, and light. At first, they can only focus on objects about 10 inches from their faces. As your baby’s vision grows more clear, you can do some things to help them!

• Move objects around in front of them. Let your child focus on an object and then move it from side to side. This will help your baby learn to track objects as they move around.
• Fill their surroundings with color. You want to encourage your baby to look around as much as possible. Bright colors, moving objects like a mobile, can help your baby look around the room, focusing on moving parts and farther away objects with more interest.
• Play peek-a-boo. Disappearing and reappearing like magic help your baby’s eyes learn to focus on you over and over again.

6-12 Months

At this age, your child learns hand-eye coordination. It would now be appropriate to give them things to hold, and maybe even use. Putting coins in a jar, or doing simple puzzles can help in this area.

1-3 Years

Visual skills are deeply linked to things such as throwing and catching balls. This would be good practice at this age for your child to learn how to track faster objects and move their hands to react to them.

If you follow all of these suggestions, then your baby may grow up with much more acute visual abilities than if you had not. We’d say that’s worth it!