THERE is one phrase that has echoed through living rooms for generations, delivered with a firm point of the finger by a parent who had clearly had enough: get away from the television or you will ruin your eyes.
Every child has heard it, most obeyed at least until the room was empty, and the warning has been passed down with the same unwavering conviction as "eating carrots improves your vision" and "going out with wet hair gives you a cold".
But does sitting too close to the television actually damage your eyesight?
Verdict:
FALSE
The American Academy of Ophthalmology, one of the world's leading authorities on eye health, states clearly that sitting close to a television does not damage eyesight. There is no scientific evidence that it ever has.
The myth has a surprisingly specific origin, and it starts with a genuine public health scare.
In the early 1960s, General Electric recalled a batch of colour television sets in the United States after it was discovered they were emitting X-ray radiation at levels far above what was considered safe.
The warning at the time was entirely justified, and parents across the world quite reasonably started shooing their children away from the screen.
The problem was that television technology moved on. Modern televisions emit no harmful radiation whatsoever, and the concern that made sense in 1967 had absolutely no basis by the time most Malaysians were sitting in front of their first colour sets in the 1980s.
The warning, however, had already been passed down through a generation of parents and was not going anywhere.
What sitting close to a screen can cause is something called digital eye strain, a collection of temporary symptoms including tired eyes, blurred vision, headaches and dry eyes that result from staring at screens at close range for long periods.
A comprehensive review published in the peer-reviewed journal Ophthalmology and Therapy found that digital eye strain affected anywhere from 5% to 65% of screen users before the Covid-19 pandemic, climbing as high as 80% to 94% during lockdown years when everyone was suddenly on screens all day, every day, for everything.
The critical word in all of this: "temporary".
Digital eye strain caused discomfort, not damage. The moment a person stepped away from the screen and rested their eyes, the symptoms resolved.
The reason sitting close caused more discomfort than sitting further away was straightforward. The eyes use a set of small internal muscles to focus on nearby objects, and the closer the object, the harder those muscles have to work.
Keeping that up for hours at a time tire out the muscles, producing the familiar end-of-day symptoms.
But tired muscles are not the same as damaged eyes, in the same way that tired legs after a long walk do not mean permanent leg damage.
The Academy of Ophthalmology also pointed out something worth knowing for Malaysian parents: children who habitually sat very close to the television were not damaging their eyes, but the habit could sometimes be an early sign of undiagnosed nearsightedness.
A child who could not see the screen clearly from a normal distance would naturally shuffle forward to compensate. In those cases, proximity was a symptom of a pre-existing vision issue, not the cause of one.
For anyone who spent long hours in front of screens and wanted to reduce eye strain, ophthalmologists recommended the 20-20-20 rule: every 20 minutes, look at something at least six metres away for 20 seconds, giving the focusing muscles a proper rest.
But permanent damage from sitting too close to the television? The science is unanimous. That particular parental warning, however well-intentioned, had absolutely nothing behind it.
Sorry, mum.
Sources:
1. https://www.aao.org/eye-
2. https://www.tandfonline.com/
3. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.
4. https://www.sciencedirect.com/
5. https://www.dovepress.com/
