Obiaks Blog

Important Things you need to Know About Your Baby's Visual Abilities

It is no doubt that the arrival of a baby bring lots of excitements. The joy and a sense of fulfilment that these little ones bring to any home is nothing to be compared. Watching a child grow from tiny newborn to infants discovering the world around them in wonder, is something that continues to be fascinating. Their growth and development process is very amazing because they have to learn every bit of information around them and get use to it, including their vision. Speaking of babies vision, how much do you really know about your newbie's eyes? 

Below are a few fun facts about a baby's vision and how they learn to use those cute-little moons. 

The first color they learn is red
Babies don't develop color vision until when they are four months old. They are only able to see white, black and gray, in their first three months. The red color tend to be the first color a baby sees. This is because red color has the longest wavelength among all the colors of a spectrum.   

They lack Hand-Eye coordination. 
Hand-eye coordination is the corporation between the eye and the hands. This coordination is what makes us to be able to perform our daily tasks, like picking something from the ground, grabbing a key, feeding, collecting something e.t.c. Babies don't have this abilities unless they learn the behavior over time. However, they should probably be able to master this ability fully around 7 months. 

Baby’s eye color depends on the amount of melanin in their iris 
Their true eye color cannot be known until after few months. This is because there is not enough melanin produced in the eyes when babies are still in the womb. After birth, when white light continue to fall on babies' eyes, melanin starts building up and the eyes begin to darken. This one of the reasons why most babies don't retain their blue eyes when growing up, unless it is genetically controlled.  

They can't focus both eyes on an object
There is no coordination between a baby's both eyes until after few months. Unlike adults, babies find it difficult focusing both eyes on a particular object. That's why you see that baby's eyes constantly wander. 

3-4 months is a crucial stage in vision development. 
Your baby would spend at least 3-4 months trying to correct his visions. At this age, his vision will start to get sharper, and would have been learning how to focus both eyes on an object. They also learn how to see colors at this age...probably the best time to start buying them toys. 

6 month is the ideal time to check babies visual abilities 
At this stage, your baby's eyes would have been developed to a good extent. This is actually the right time to do vision checkups for them to test their visual abilities and to quickly correct any impairment. 

Their eyes are fully functional by 7 to 8 months 
By eight months, their eyes would have been fully developed. At this stage, they can recognize far distance objects, be able to grab things with their hands and even put in their mouth. They would have fully developed eye-hand coordination at this stage. 

You would know your baby's true eye color by 9 months
By nine month or 10, a baby's eye color would have been well defined. It would have contained enough melanin to determine it's true color.