Today, I wanted to tell everyone about an awesome kickstarter project going on. As many of you know, Eye Power Kids Wear started as a kickstarter project! We love kickstarter and we love projects that help little ones in glasses. Ann Zawistoski the founder of Little Four Eyes (the awesome site and support group for little ones in glasses) has launched a kickstarter project to create a board book for little ones in glasses!
We asked Ann a couple questions about her project. Check them out! She is AMAZING!
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Ann: My 15 word answer: A board book for kids in glasses with photos of beautiful bespectacled toddlers and babies.
In a few more words, I want to create a board book that is specifically for young toddlers and babies in glasses. The book will feature photos of young kids in glasses playing and having fun and doing the things that young kids love to do. The text of the book is my “ode to glasses”, it’s simple, rhyming text that talks about the role of glasses in a child’s life. This is the book that I wish existed when my daughter started wearing glasses at a year old.
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Ann: As I said above, my daughter Zoe started wearing glasses at a year old. One of the first things I did was look for books for her to read about glasses. We found a bunch of books, but they’re almost all for older kids. They often have stories about the child being teased about their glasses or hating their glasses, and those weren’t the stories I wanted to share with her as a toddler. I wanted something positive and I wanted a book that showed her other kids her age in glasses.
Shortly after she started wearing her glasses, I started Little Four Eyes, a website for parents of young kids in glasses. I started a photo gallery so that parents could see the wide range of options for glasses for kids, and to help make the point that glasses do not detract from a child’s beauty. I was surprised to hear from a lot of parents that their child loved seeing the pictures in the photo gallery, and were much happier wearing their glasses after seeing other children their age in glasses. It seemed like there were other parents out there that would love a book like the one that I had been looking for.
A few years ago, on Valentine’s day, I jotted down a few lines about Zoe’s glasses:
Some glasses are red,
Some glasses are blue.
I think your glasses look great on you!
I hadn’t planned to do anything with the lines, but they stuck with me and eventually became a 4 verse poem. I thought that it would be a good poem to accompany the photos for the book.
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Ann: Zoe started wearing glasses for farsightedness. She has accommodative esotropia, which is where her eyes cross in order to compensate for her farsightedness. A few years after first wearing her glasses, she also developed astigmatism in one eye. That caused led to amblyopia, so she also had to wear a patch for a while to treat that. She’s now seven years old and totally rocks her glasses.
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Little Four Eyes (littlefoureyes.com) is a support site that I created in 2008 shortly after Zoe got her glasses. I really wanted to connect with other parents who had toddlers or babies in glasses. Her eye doctor and the optical shop were great for some of the technical questions we had, but they didn’t have a lot of suggestions for questions like what to do when she throws a tantrum, or how do we work with child care providers to make sure she wears her glasses all the time.So I started the site, and pretty quickly was connecting with other parents from all over the world who had young children in glasses. It has since expanded to include parents of children in contacts and eye patches.There is also an associated facebook group https://www.facebook.
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Ann: Oh, that’s a good question! For Little Four Eyes, I want to continue to provide a safe and supportive place for parents to share information and advice and photos and, of course, the occasional vent. I also want to help parents feel positive about their child’s glasses. It can be really hard when you first learn your child needs glasses, and I never want to minimize that, but I hope that parents that come to the site will find the support and information they need to move past that initial difficulty and get their child the vision correction they need. I’m a science librarian, so one of my other missions is to make the latest information about children’s vision available in an easy to understand way.More broadly, I want there to be a greater awareness of the importance of early detection and treatment of vision issues in children. According to some studies, as many as 1 in 20 preschoolers need vision correction, but only 1 in 100 have glasses or contacts.
I would also like to see glasses portrayed in a more positive way. I love what you do with Eye Power Kid’s Wear and your amazing t-shirts! They’re fun and they’re positive! Unfortunately, glasses still seem to be closely associated with being a nerd (and I say this as a self-described nerd). And while nerdiness isn’t as much of a negative as it used to be, people still think of nerds as being awkward and unathletic and bookish. But there’s nothing about glasses that make a person awkward or bad at athletics or even good at reading. Glasses simply mean that the person needs correction to see better. I want my daughter, and all kids in glasses, to be judged by who they are, not the fact that they happen to wear glasses. A lot of the work on awareness and celebrating glasses is done through the Great Glasses Play Day (GreatGlassesPlayDay.com), and we’ve been so lucky to have Eye Power Kid’s Wear work with us on that, too!
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Ann: We just passed 40% funded, so we only need a little more than $3,500 to be funded!
Please check out Ann’s kickstarter project! The book is going to be amazing! Help her fund. Every dollar helps! Lets help Ann create a wonderful book for our little ones!
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Here is cute Zoe who is not so little any more! Help her and her mom fund their project! Thanks to Ann for all the photos!
