If you are a parent looking for a suitable pair of glasses for your child, chances are you will be confused when entering an optical store.

There is no shortage in children’s frames. The problem is figuring out which glasses your child will be willing to wear and whether they will last longer than it takes to get home.

Find here 10 shopping tips to help you choose the glasses that your child will love, plus they will be stylish and durable.

1. How thick should the lenses be?

The prescription for glasses is the first thing to consider when choosing your glasses. Before you start shopping for frames, ask your ophthalmologist or eye care professional about the best lenses for your child.

If the prescription calls for strong lenses, which will likely be thick, avoid large frames that increase their thickness. Also, small lenses tend to have fewer high-order aberrations near the edge of the lenses than larger lenses made from the same material and prescription, so there is a lower risk of blurred or distorted peripheral vision.

2. Choose frames with a modern and attractive style

Most children who wear glasses for the first time are shy about it. Therefore, choose frames that are modern and attractive in style. Also, some features like photochromic lenses that automatically darken in sunlight outdoors can help make your child want to wear glasses.

3. Plastic or metal?

Children’s frames are made of plastic or metal, and many have styles that intentionally mimic unisex eyeglass frames designed for adults. Children are often drawn to these styles because it makes them look more grown-up. It is not unusual for them to choose frames that look like the ones their older siblings or parents wear.

In the past, plastic frames were a better option for children as they were considered more durable, less likely to bend or break, lighter, and less expensive. But now, manufacturers are making metal frames that incorporate these features. Metal composition varies, so ask your optician about the best option for your child, based on experience with different alloys.

If your child has shown sensitivity to certain substances, choose frames made of hypoallergenic materials.

4. Proper bridge fit

One of the hardest things about choosing frames suitable for young children is that their nose is not fully developed, so there is no bridge to prevent the plastic frames from sliding down. However, metal frames are usually made with adjustable nose pads, so they fit everyone’s bridge.

Most manufacturers recognize this drawback with plastic frames and make their glasses bridges fit small noses.

Each frame must be individually evaluated to make sure it fits the bridge. If there is a gap between the bridge of the frames and the bridge of the nose, the weight of the lenses will cause the glasses to slide, no matter how well the frames fit before the lenses are made.

It is important that the glasses stay in place; otherwise, children tend to look over them rather than repositioning them properly. An optometrist is usually the one who can decide whether a frame will fit properly.

5. The Right Sideburns Style

Temples that wrap around the back of the ear help prevent the glasses from slipping or completely falling off the child’s face.

These wraparound temples, called “cable temples,” are generally available in metal frames and are especially useful for keeping young children’s glasses in place. Another option is frames that include an elastic strap to hang the glasses around the head.

6. Spring hinges

A nice feature for your glasses temples are the spring hinges. These allow the temples to flex out or into the frames without causing any damage.

Children aren’t always careful when putting glasses on and taking off, and spring hinges can help prevent the need for frequent adjustments and costly repairs. They are also useful if the child falls asleep with the glasses on or uses them while playing.

Spring hinges are highly recommended for young children who sometimes get carried away when playing with their new glasses.

7. Materials for lenses

Once you and your child agree on the type of frames to choose, the next step to consider is glasses.

The lenses of children’s glasses must be made of polycarbonate or Trivex. These materials are much more resistant to impact than other lens materials and will give you greater safety.

8. Sports glasses

Polycarbonate is such a safe lens material that it may allow your child to play sports with their regular glasses.

Here’s the downside: Although polycarbonate is the lens material used in sports glasses, regular eyeglass frames don’t provide enough protection against large objects like balls or the bumps caused by other players’ elbows.

So if your child plays sports, a suitable pair of sports glasses with polycarbonate lenses will provide the best protection against eye injuries .

To provide optimal protection, sports glasses must be fitted correctly, so consult an eye care specialist before purchasing. The lens openings of sports glasses must be large enough so that if the glasses are pushed towards the face, the points of impact are above and below the eyes and eye injury can be avoided.

9. Guarantees

Many optical retailers offer a warranty plan that will replace the glasses at no charge or for a small fee in the event of damage to the frames or lenses. Consider opting for the warranty, especially if your child is a young child or is wearing glasses for the first time.

Check lens replacement costs with and without the warranty plan. Typically, if the warranty costs you less or about the same as the fee to replace a single lens, the price is well worth it.

Make sure the glasses warranty includes a replacement provision if the lenses get heavily scratched from normal use. In addition to causing glare and blurred vision , scratches on the lens surface can compromise their impact resistance, putting your child’s eyes at risk.

10. Buy a pair of “backup” glasses

Because children may not be as careful with their glasses, it is a good idea to buy them a second pair of backup glasses, especially if your child has a high prescription and cannot be without their glasses.

Ask your optical store specialist if special discounts apply for second pairs; they often do so if the backup pair is purchased at the same time as the initial pair.

In some cases, sports glasses can be used as a replacement pair of glasses. Or, if your child’s prescription hasn’t changed significantly, keep his old glasses in a safe place to use as a replacement.

From listening to podcasts and audiobooks by day, to quietening our thoughts with white noise at night, we’re constantly buffering ourselves from silence. But why?
Because I love being so late to a party that it’s practically over, I’ve got really into podcasts recently.

And when I say I’m into them, I mean into them. I carry my phone around my flat with me, blaring tinny voices as I go. I listen while I cook, while I shower, while I wee. I have fallen into people’s laps on the tube more than once while I scrabble to untangle my headphones and plug myself in for all of a two-stop journey. I’m not always paying attention to them — I get distracted, I check social media at the same time, or I fail to hear what’s going on over the clamour of the train and voices around me.

But that’s fine, that isn’t the point. The point is, it’s better than silence.

Before podcasts there was Netflix. An episode of Friends I’d seen 11,000 times, chirruping away in the background. And before Netflix, it was YouTube and DVD boxsets. Before that, kids, I had to make do with whatever was on TV.

Now, when I’m working and really need to focus, the podcasts go off but noise app Noisli goes on, to synthetically generate the rustle of a forest, the lapping of waves on a beach or the clink and chatter of a coffee shop. I have even listened to the coffee shop setting in a coffee shop, when it didn’t sound ‘coffee shoppy’ enough. I know. I know.

It’s hard to pinpoint exactly when I became silence-intolerant. Probably around the same time you did. But as with so many of modern life’s more ominous habits, it’s only after sliding well and truly past the point of moderation that I’m finally getting around to wondering: why? Why do I think my brain needs to be stimulated at all times, like a petulant toddler? How did we get to a point where walking down the street without entertainment is just too boring?

“I avoid silence in the day like the plague,” admits my friend Ben, who always has TV, audiobooks or podcasts playing in the background. “That’s related to mental health issues, I think. I really don’t like to sit with my own thoughts.”

In the midst of an ongoing loneliness epidemic, where more 18-34 year olds report feeling isolated than our counterparts over the age of 55, you can see how ‘comfort listening’ could act both as surrogate company and as a kind of cognitive buffer, protecting us from unpleasant thoughts or surroundings.

“I usually listen to podcasts or music, mostly because I love consuming things that are interesting and informative or entertaining,” says Becky Brynolf, co-host of storytelling podcast And Then What. “And to be honest the real world sounds grim by comparison, especially the city — it just makes me feel sad and angry. I think the only time I’ve given my ears a break when outdoors and on my own was doing the West Highland Way.”

Even bedtime these days comes with a soundtrack. After asking around, I’m surprised by how many of my friends habitually fall asleep listening to podcasts, audiobooks or Radio 4 (five-hour compilations of the shipping forecast on YouTube are beloved by insomniacs). One who “can’t physically sleep without background noise” watches old episodes of QI — which, oddly, was my lullaby of choice too, all the way through uni. Other people use white noise tools like the Sleep Sounds app or Sleep by Headspace, or “slow lit” — purposely boring, monotone storytelling podcasts — like Drew Ackerman’s Sleep Like Me, which attracts more than 2.3 million monthly downloads.

Noise machines for troubled sleepers are nothing new (we all remember Berger’s croaking frogs in that Sex and the City episode), but it seems the listening revolution is making us more choosy even when unconscious. Although, that said, a friend of a friend’s cousin reportedly sleeps with the hoover on.

Dr Joan Harvey, a chartered psychologist, tells me that comfort-listening can be about control and cushioning ourselves against intrusion. “Noise that is predictable is much less stressful,” she says. And preference for background noise vs quiet varies hugely from person to person. “Living in a noisy environment may mean total silence is not something you are used to, and therefore may struggle with.”

In the introduction to his 2017 book Silence: In The Age of Noise, the Norwegian explorer Erling Kagge talks about trying to convince his teenage daughters of the power of silence. “The girls looked at me sceptically. Surely silence is… nothing? Even before I was able to explain the way in which silence can be a friend, and a luxury more valuable than any of the Louis Vuitton bags they so covet, their minds had been made up: silence is fine to have on hand when you’re feeling sad. Beyond that, it’s useless.” Hard relate.

Sometimes, I think silence isn’t so much an enemy as a boring, bog-standard default. It’s vanilla — and who wants vanilla when you could have the aural equivalent of triple chocolate fudge brownie with marshmallow swirls? In our privileged, hyper-stimulated, multiple choice world, we’re so used to upgrading life with bonus extras that settling for silence has begun to feel more unnatural than wearing earbuds in the swimming pool.

But what’s the damage? A whole cacophony of studies from the past few decades have damned noise pollution — from Dr Arline Bronzaft’s 1970s research showing that urban noise stunted children’s educational development, to a 2013 study on mice that found silence helps create new cells in the hippocampus, a region of the brain associated with learning, remembering, and emotions. Yet other research has found that white noise can have a positive effect, improving focus for people with ADHD or other types of neurodiversity. And when we’re constantly told that our failure to get a full eight hours’ sleep is giving us everything from bad skin to cancer, surely anything that helps us nod off at night is beneficial?

Notwithstanding the risk we’ll accidentally walk into traffic, perhaps this isn’t so much a question of health as it is happiness. Because while silence tends to form double acts with many of life’s more unpleasant aspects — awkward silence, loaded silence, “Hello darkness, my old friend” silence — it can also be golden. Blissful. And it’s long been practiced as a way of reaching a higher spiritual plain.

Trappist monks live largely in silence to focus more fully on serving God. Meanwhile, modern meditation still values silence as a way of checking in with yourself.

“I liken it to turning up the volume on our internal world, rather than the external world,” says mindfulness teacher Elizabeth Keates, who runs a variety of courses and retreats in London. “When we are in silence generally, and more specifically in meditation, this allows us the space to experience what is present for us in terms of bodily sensations, negative rumination, pleasant feelings, the full and varied range of our experiences — which are of course in constant flux.

“Silence provides an environment for us to connect with our inner self and inner peace, which often reside below all the chaos.”

And while cramming podcasts and TV into any available gap in our day (I think of it as ‘brain Tetris’) might feel like a good way to maximise our potential, it turns out we could be better off letting our minds wander freely. Last month a new study by researchers at Georgia Institute of Technology found that daydreaming at work can actually help boost productivity and make us more creative.

Because of course, walking down the street sans podcast isn’t walking down the street in a void. You’re still listening, still stimulated by the million tiny, shifting details that add up to make the world around you. And while other people’s thoughts and feelings can be a fascinating diversion, it’s probably worth leaving time to tune in to your own.