 August is Children's Eye Health and Safety Month which aims to raise awareness about the importance of routine eye screenings and educate parents that eye health should be a priority throughout childhood. Maintaining eye health in children is very important and it's crucial not only to their development overall as they get older it's also crucial to things like employment opportunities and their social interactions and their education levels and I feel like those are factors that we don't think about when they're small children we think about the kind of the immediate concerns now. When my baby was born it was magical and as she grew having a hospital close to home with advanced healthcare and specialized physicians being there along the journey was important and along that journey many special doctors touched our lives and then one day my baby became a woman and a mother herself. Pikeville Medical Center caring for every moment in life. According to the American Optometric Association one in five school-aged children have a vision problem and one in four need corrective lenses. Additionally the American Optometric Association and I feel like optometry across the board we recommend an eye exam actually between six months to one year of age so that just looks for anything grossly abnormal because things can be abnormal in babies, eye turns, a droopy eyelid, maybe even a cataract, glaucoma things like that and then we're lucky in Kentucky we have the kindergarten eye exam form that has to be filled out from when they're age three to age five and that catches a lot the visual problems that might otherwise go missed and then every year that a child is in school their visual demands change as they get in third, fourth, fifth grade and they start doing more prolonged near work their visual demand increased so I recommend annually after age five for an eye exam. For more information go to AOA.org. Reporting for Mountain Top News, I'm Brianna Robinson.