Baby Development - Vision

Baby's vision is not fully developed at birth. Baby can see but not as clearly as an adult. His range of vision is only 8 to 12 inches. He cannot clearly identify colour and light. A newborn baby sees only in black and white. The retina which distinguishes colour and light is not well developed in newborns. Brain connections for visual perception are not well developed at birth as well. Only on stimulation, i.e visual input through the eyes to the brain, brain cells form numerous connections among them and cause vision to develop.

Milestones in Vision Development

Focusing

At birth, the baby is far-sighted. He is not able to focus on near objects. A few days after birth, he begins to focus on mother's face at a close range of 8 to 12 inches. The mother should make herself available to the baby as much as possible because baby is very excited on seeing mother's face. He is able to recognise mother's face by the large, high contrast stimuli of the boundary of mother's hairline to her face. Keep your hairstyle and appearance unchanged to enable this distinction and to stimulate his vision. Make faces to the baby like smile, frown, sticking out tongue and opening mouth wide. As baby tries to imitate these actions visual stimulation takes place.

Next to focusing on a face, he is able to focus on bright coloured objects. He is particularly attracted to high contrast bright coloured stripes. To facilitate this kind of focusing, provide the surrounding of your baby with high contrast coloured stripes.for e.g let the bed cover, blankets, pillow cover, toys, books,pictures on walls, car seat cover etc be of contrasting colour stripes.Higher the contrast, the more visually stimulating is the object to the baby.Allow baby to focus on baby-safe mirrors within 8 to 12 inches.

Eye Teaming or Eye Co-ordination and Tracking

By three months, baby will begin to follow your movements and movement of objects as they move from side to side. Stimulation at this stage can be done as follows:

  • Jingle a bright coloured rattle in front of your baby and move it from side to side. Let your baby follow it as he listens to the sound.
  • Hang a brightly coloured mobile over his crib.

  • Video on Choosing a Crib Mobile

  • Change the location of his crib and other items found in the room.
  • Talk to your baby while you keep moving around the room.
  • Switch on nightlamp when the baby is awake.

Depth Perception or Recognising Depth

This represents the ability to judge distances. Vision development goes along with development of motor skills. By 4 or 5 months reaching skill develops and eye-hand co-ordination begins. Your baby can locate objects clearly and pick them up and direct them to the mouth accurately. By 6 to 12 months, once the baby starts crawling, he covers more distances. He is able to judge distances and learns to co-ordinate vision with body movements.At this stage, to develop eye-hand-body co-ordination, keep things out of reach and encourage him to crawl to reach for the objects.

Colour Recognition

Can distinguish two highly contrasted colours in about one to two months. In 4 or 5 months,baby is able to see all primary colours.

Toys to Stimulate Vision

  • The best source of stimulation for baby is people. Having you and your spouse, grandparents or the neighbours kids around him will provide rich stimulation to the baby. So make yourself and other people available to the baby as much as possible. Baby learns a lot from these interactions.
  • Babies find toys with lights and sounds very stimulating. A mobile with bright colour or flashing lights hanging over his crib enhances visual development.
  • Baby rattles and electronic toys that sing and dance and musical instruments that baby can play himself are best to stimulate the baby visually.
Not finding what you want ?
Custom Search

Commission me: I can consider that the husband concentrates. So all of us were spared this mosaic exhibition, and also I envisage I constantly feel relieved when 12000 btu air conditioner such an occurrence happens. The mundane Bible of the Jews, along the lines of everything else esteemed sacred, finds its innovative plus ideal expression in the marvelous Astral Bible of the heavens. It isn't only their grace. Willingly should this fellow obey her behests, resignedly languish, were it not for this boy's mother's desire to perceive the future female of Patterne established there before the maid passed. Her front was troubled, tentative, the brows clouded, the mouth compressed. All of us turned just about all our drive on this first chunk of fence, plus had so greatly of it conducted that, by calling off the troops before sundown, I was adequate to put up all of the wet blocks, each with 1 LG Portable Air Conditioner LP0910WNR end resting on the fence plus the other on the terrain, so that they took the wind on both parts, plus should dry very much more promptly.

Anonymous on Jan 01, 2012.

Post new comment

  • Web page addresses and e-mail addresses turn into links automatically.
  • Allowed HTML tags: <a> <em> <strong> <cite> <code> <ul> <ol> <li> <dl> <dt> <dd> <br>
  • Lines and paragraphs break automatically.

More information about formatting options

Image CAPTCHA
Enter the characters shown in the image.
An online guide for Indian parents to raise their children from birth to pre-teens.
Content is provided for informational purposes only.
KidandParent thanks Mrs. Manjula Katragadda(Sri) for allowing us to use photos of her paintings.
Copyright © Oonjal Technologies 2010-2011. All rights reserved.