Making Glasses Fun for Kids

Looking around for some fun optometry stories, as I like to do, I came across this page – Fun Books About Glasses That Make Them Cool for Kids – on the website of the Pasadena eye care center, Looking Glass Optical. It’s always been tricky to make glasses cool for kids, it tells us, but that’s “not about the glasses themselves, it’s about sticking out and looking different.” Wise words. Fortunately, there are books out there to help “change the narrative on glasses for kids.” 

The books featured – Douglas, You Need Glasses! by Ged Adamson, Arthur’s Eyes by Marc Brown, Princess Peepers by Pam Calvert, and Specs for Rex by Yasmeen Ismail – all sound great for young children, but I wondered if I might find a more extensive list. Sure enough, a quick search in Amazon (and, no, I’m not on commission) brought up 30 or 40 more titles, among which are a couple of familiar names and faces. I didn’t know when introducing these characters to my own kids a few years ago, for example, that Topsy and Tim went to have their eyes tested or that Peppa Pig already had her first pair of glasses. But if you want to veer away from the mainstream, there’s a whole range of short-sighted and glasses-wearing characters for kids to cheer about, including dinosaurs, princesses, fairies, dogs, giraffes, and – perhaps least surprisingly – bats.

And if you’re feeling left out as an adult, you might be comforted by this insightful volume, in which Daddy Pig falls prey to a scenario that most of us have experienced.