From the day your baby is born he begins to look around him for information about the world. He explores through his other senses too: he is soothed by touch; he enjoys the taste of milk, but might make a face at something salty; he listens and turns towards sounds; he soon recognises your smell.

Your Baby's Eyesight

Vision is the richest of all the senses for helping your baby to understand the world. The development of other skills, using his hands, moving around in a controlled way, understanding speech and learning to relate to people all depend very much on what your baby can see.

The eyes provide a direct pathway to the brain for information about the world. They are the first outpost of the brain to develop in a tiny inch-long embryo. The eyes of a newborn baby receive light rays from objects in the surroundings and build them into an image which is transmitted along the optic nerve to the brain. The brain `sees' the image, but although your very young baby can see roughly what you see - for example, a rattle - he does not yet know what this is. The message his eyes have received has passed to the brain, but it is not until he has more experience of the world that his brain will recognise the image as a rattle. The newborn baby can see, and it takes only a few months for him to recognise, to choose and to focus on details of all the many objects he sees. This process is known as perception and it begins to develop from the moment of birth.

Sight at Birth

It is one of the most common misconceptions that a new baby cannot see. He is really interested in objects near to him, but cannot yet adjust fully the focus of his eyes for different distances. For example, he sees his mother's face best when she is nursing him in her arms. This first eye-to-eye contact is one of the most important ways in which a relationship is built up between the baby and the person looking after him.

New babies react to very bright light by closing their eyes and turning towards other more diffuse sources of light. During the first weeks a baby begins to learn to use his eyes to follow moving objects, for example, a dangling mobile. He quickly develops preferences: human faces are more interesting to him than mere abstract shapes. Babies like to be held where they can see faces, and especially your face, clearly.

You may notice your new baby seems to be squinting - that is, one eye looks in a slightly different direction from the other. This may just be due to the baby experimenting with focusing and it may correct itself, but it is sensible to ask your doctor about it if it is always present or if it fails to improve after a week or two.

By around four months some important developments become noticeable. Your baby's sight and his ability to perceive and recognise different objects have been improving all the time. By now his eyes and the visual part of his brain have developed enough to see clearly and three-dimensionally. He can focus on near or distant objects and recognise them, and his interest and ability to see detail far away will continue to improve for some months. While he is immobile, learning will benefit if objects such as toys, spoons and human faces are brought nearer and people carry him around to broaden his horizon.

However, one important change happens at around four months which begins to give your baby more control over what happens to him and shows an important link between seeing/perceiving and other skills. At this age your baby has realised that what he can see is a tangible object he can reach out for, touch and grasp: At first he will notice his hands waving in front of his eyes and gradually he will deliberately bring them up to where he can see them and will start to play with them. Or he may catch sight of his foot without realising it belongs to him. If you hold a toy or a spoon or his bottle close to him, he will begin to reach out and try to get hold of it. At first he is not very good at this. His aim is not always accurate and he will not always be able to grasp the object because he has not yet got suffcient control of his fingers, but it is an important step because it shows the baby is making the link between himself and the outside world. He recognises there is an outside world and that the things he sees are not just pictures in his head. When he reaches out to touch and grasp he is saying to himself, `That's for me. The world is my oyster and I am going to explore it.'

Make sure your young baby has plenty of safe things to look at and which are within his reach from a few weeks old. A cradle gym suspended over his cot or pram is great fun: you can make your own and change the objects on it from time to time if you wish. Babies like variety, so give him a mixture of textures soft and furry, wood, plastic and rubber. Include a few things that make a noise so that he can make things happen. All these experiences will increase his sense of control over the world around him and make him eager to explore more. They will also help to keep him happy and amused. Make sure you carry him around too, so that he sometimes sees the world from an upright position. Some babies enjoy being carried in a sling, and most mothers get very good at doing a great many tasks with one hand!

Recognising and Remembering

When a baby realises that things and other people have a separate existence from himself, he then has to learn that they go on having a separate existence, even when he cannot see them. You will probably notice that when your young baby of four or five months drops a rattle, or when a person disappears from view, he seems to forget about their existence. At some time between six and nine months you will notice that the baby's memory for objects has improved. When he drops his rattle, he will look over the side of the pram to see where it has gone. If you hide a toy under a blanket he will pull the blanket away - and probably urge you to go on playing this game until you are exhausted! At this age peekaboo games in which you hide your face and then show it again are great fun for a baby who has just made the important discovery that people and things are still there - even when they cannot be seen.

From six months onwards babies are full of curiosity for the things they can see around them. They love to look at things and reach for them and, if they get hold of them, usually put them in their mouths. The link between sight and touch becomes closer and closer at this time. The baby's ability to grasp objects improves, although he will not be able to pick up very tiny things until he can co-ordinate his forefinger and thumb, which happens at around nine months. He likes new things and by about a year will point and babble when something catches his attention.

He is sensitive to faces and their expressions too. Watch when other adults hold your baby - they usually go to an enormous amount of trouble to get a response from him, by smiling, nodding, wrinkling their foreheads and talking. Watch how the baby follows, imitates the expressions and responds. You do this too, although you are probably not aware of it at the time. From a very early age babies become unhappy and distressed at a sad or angry looking face and respond happily to smiles and animated faces.

At about nine months, although it may be earlier or later, babies will stop responding happily to all friendly faces and may begin to show wariness of strangers' faces, no matter how friendly they appear. Although this may be inconvenient for you, it does show that your baby has made another important discovery - that the world can be a dangerous place and that caution and suspicion are sometimes needed when he is faced with new experience.

Naming and Playing

As your baby begins to notice and be interested in different objects around him, you will automatically begin to name them for him. Mothers do this even for newborn babies: they will say, `Here's Daddy', or `Look at that lovely tree', even though they know the baby cannot possibly understand. However, when your baby begins to point and reach and grasp and show likes and dislikes then you can start using his visual behaviour to build up his understanding and awareness of language.

Mothers have many ways of doing this: you may just point and say the single word very clearly, `spoon', or `teddy' or `biscuit'; or you may give the baby a running commentary on what he is doing, `Oh dear, you've dropped your spoon. Let's pick it up and try again'; or you may encourage his ability to learn that out of sight objects are still there by saying, `Where's the spoon? Is it on the floor?' and looking down yourself and picking it up with a triumphant cry, `Here's the spoon.' Never feel that this kind of behaviour is silly or that talking to a baby who cannot yet talk back is pointless. It is not. It is the most valuable learning experience you can give him - and mothers are very, very good at it. Click here for more about language

Babies begin to understand the names of things quite a long time before they can say them. If you say, `Where's the cat?' your year-old baby may look around and point or babble if the cat is there. Giving your baby plenty of experience of the `Where's the . . .' and `What's that?' variety, encourages him to learn and build up his store of words and names. Many babies between six months and a year begin to enjoy looking at pictures too. Simple board picture books can encourage his recognition of objects and their names. Generally young babies like pictures which are very realistic rather than those which are done in a stylised or cartoon design. Good sources for these kind of pictures are catalogues and magazines and babies enjoy turning (and tearing) the pages as well. Pictures help him to learn that objects not only exist outside him, they can also be represented. A picture may look very like the real thing, but it is not the real thing, it is just a representation of it.

Television pictures are too complicated for a young baby to understand - he cannot reach out to grasp and handle the objects represented there as he can with real things and, unlike a book, the image changes very quickly. Although older babies may like to look at television for short periods, they will learn very little it at this stage, so do not leave your baby in front of the set for long periods. Watching television does not do any harm to children's vision, but it is sensible to encourage older children to sit at least a metre away.

On the Move

Once your baby begins to crawl and then walk, he no longer relies on you to show him things or bring them to him. He can decide for himself what he wants to look at and then go and take a closer look, and if possible get hold of it. It is just before this stage that you need to take a look at your house in terms of safety. Babies will obviously be attracted to things at their own eye level, so you will have to move all dangerous and fragile things steadily upwards from the floor as your baby gets older.

The information he receives through his eyes is the foundation for all sorts of other learning, and the means of learning at this stage is play. From twelve months onwards, and certainly once he can walk and has his hands free, the co-ordination between your baby's eyes and hands become more and more skilled. He will play with things in a more purposeful way, pick up tiny objects and examine them, try to put one object on top of or inside another. He will throw, push and pull; he will turn things into tools - for instance, he will use a piece of string to pull a toy car towards him. He will observe and imitate. If you give him the chance, the young toddler will also show interest in holding a pencil or crayon and scribbling on paper. He will be able to use a paintbrush, but expect him to enjoy simply making a mess with the paint rather than actually painting! He can now recognise familiar things and people at a distance of twenty feet or so. The world of the toddler is full of colours, shapes and sights to be explored and learned about.

Visual Impairment

Very few babies are born completely blind or with severe visual problems. Some of those who are, often have other handicaps as well, because something that interferes with or damages the formation of the eyes or optic nerve may affect other parts of the baby's or embryo's nervous system, for example German measles (rubella) in pregnancy or breathing problems at birth. In some cases severe eye problems can be inherited.

It is very important that such problems are identified and treated early because, as we described above, so much of the baby's early development is linked to his ability to see and perceive. Some visual handicaps are detected immediately after birth, particularly if doctors have been alerted by problems occurring around the time of delivery, by the mother's illness in pregnancy or by a family eye problem. Sometimes the baby's visual behaviour is the only clue. If your baby's eyes roll a lot, if he is startled when he is touched or hears a voice because he has no visual clue that someone was approaching, if he does not meet your eyes after a month or so or begin to respond to your smiles and movements, then it could possibly be that he cannot see properly. These signs will become more and more noticeable during the first three or four weeks. If you are worried by your baby's lack of visual response, then do not hesitate to seek medical advice immediately.

Curable conditions Some eye problems can be cured and it is important that they are because after about eighteen months the brain's ability to learn to interpret messages from the eyes decreases sharply. The first six months of life are the most important time in this learning process.

Some conditions like cataracts and squints are treatable. Cataracts affect the lens of the eye and prevent the light rays falling on the retina. They can now be operated on successfully in very tiny babies: the baby is given a contact lens to help him focus. A squint means the eyes do not look in the same direction and therefore cannot operate together. With normal binocular (two-eyed) vision, the two independent images received by each eye are fused by the brain into one. The child with a squint cannot do this and therefore relies on the information coming through only one of his eyes and does not use the other one. Eventually the sight in the unused or `lazy' eye, as it is sometimes called, becomes very poor because the brain does not register the information coming from it. Squints can be treated by putting a patch over the good eye thereby encouraging the active use of the lazy one; by glasses; by an operation; or by a combination of these. If you think your baby squints, ask your doctor to advise whether you should take him to see an ophthalmologist for full diagnosis and treatment.

Eye Tests

Most babies and young children in developed countries are routinely tested for sight from six months onwards. First tests are designed to find out whether your child has a squint or a minor visual defect such as shortsightedness (myopia). Inmyopia the eyeballs are longer than average and the image is blurred because it falls in front of the eye's retina instead of on it; the child cannot see things that are far away from him, but can focus on things that are near. Long-sightedness (hypermetropia) creates the opposite problem. The image falls behind the retina. Severe long-sightedness causes great strain because the eyes have to work to focus on images, even when they are across the room. Normally we only need to make our eyes work to focus on near objects. Both conditions can be corrected by wearing glasses. Another problem is astigmatism in which the light rays entering the eye are bent because of an irregularity in the eyeball creating a distorted image. This too can be dealt with by glasses. Glasses early on can also prevent the development of squint and lazy eye, as well as helping your child to see clearly.

If any of your family have needed glasses in childhood, or if your baby or young child has not been routinely tested and you suspect there is something wrong with his sight, make sure you ask for a test. The sooner treatment is begun the better.

Glasses for Children

Parents, especially if they themselves have never worn glasses, may feel a pang of protective anxiety if their young child needs glasses. The common worry is that their child may feel self conscious or that other children may comment adversely. In fact these protective anxieties are nearly always entirely adult-based and usually a remnant from our own childhood memories of unattractive Hesh-coloured frames for children. It is very important that parents, and any grannies or other older relatives, keep any such feelings very strictly to themselves, as children, and especially pre-school children, will usually accept wearing glasses quite happily provided they are introduced to them in a positive fashion. There is now a wide range of bright, attractive frames for children. Find an optician rather than simply a glasses shop, who stocks a good selection. Those with bendy wire sides which curl behind the ears are usually best for under fives as they stay put during handstands, head rolls, and so on. An alternative is a style with sprung sides. Let your child feel he has chosen the style of frame, though obviously a little tactful manipulation may be needed to see that his choice comes within your budget! Make sure they are fitted correctly so that they are comfortable, with no red pressure points when they are taken off.

At first glasses will feel a little strange to the child, so it helps to plan some busy days with plenty of activities to help him to forget he is wearing them.Glasses may not necessarily need to be worn throughout the day; discuss this with the person who prescribes them. The mother of a three-year-old who wears glasses because long-sightedness made him squint recalled:

At first I did feel a bit choked about him wearing glasses even though it's a tiny thing compared with real disabilities. It was seeing him crying because he had fallen over, and trying to rub away the tears but finding the glasses got in the way that slightly got to me. But now they are so much part of his personality, to the extent that the other day he came and said, "Mum, I can't find my glasses anywhere, " and he was actually wearing them. He's not at all the sort of child I used to think of as "speccy" from my childhood days either - he's very sporty, chunkily built and really popular with other kids.'

The eyes are the most sensitive information receivers in the whole body and are able to deal with literally millions of bits of information every time they look at something. Most of this information is screened out and discarded because it is not needed. The process of becoming ever more selective and discriminating in the perception of all the many objects and people in the world around him is a vital part of your child's intellectual and social development. It is also a source of wonder and delight. Some of the happiest shared experiences between a baby and adult begin with the word, `Look'.