After your sight test, you may have been told that you are long sighted (or hyperopic/hypermetropic in optician speak) – this basically means that you have difficulty focusing on things close up but can usually see far away quite well. The degree of difficulty you have in seeing things close up depends on the strength of the lens you need to correct it.
In glasses, we correct long sightedness/hypermetropia with positive powered (+), convex (thicker in the middle than on the edge) spherical lenses.
It is caused either because the eyeball is too short or the strength of the eye is too weak. Long-sightedness can be tricky for parents to see in their children because younger people with a low amount of hypermetropia can increase the power of their eyes to see clearly in both the far distance and close up (we call this accommodating) often the child’s eyes try to accommodate so much that it causes eye strain and headaches and this is usually when Mum or Dad will look to get their child’s eyes tested. If your child is long sighted, we can alleviate their symptoms with spectacles and make their vision more clear, and more comfortable for them.
Adults who are very long-sighted may not be able to see either close up or far away.