BATON ROUGE — August is Children’s Eye Health and Safety Month.

If you haven't taken your child to the eye doctor in a while, the start of the school year is a good time to do it.

"It's important to make sure that your child can see when they're in school. And all the time it's important for them to be able to see, but especially when they're starting to learn. And as they're getting older and the font that they're reading gets smaller, they need to see the fine details,” Allison Babiuch, an ophthalmologist, said. “We need to make sure that they can see well enough to be able to learn and we don't want anything holding them back."

Your child may need glasses if they tend to squint, tilt their head or move closer to see something better like the TV.

Doctors say you would expect older kids to be more vocal about vision problems, but that is not always the case. Vision changes can happen slowly, so they may not even realize there is a problem.

Doctors say they have seen an increase in cases of near-sightedness, or 'myopia', and it appears to be getting worse.

"We are encouraging kids to take breaks from the screens as much as possible and trying to do a combination of, you know, the things that you have to do on the screen, do on the screen. But if you can do things on paper or an actual physical copy of a book to give the eyes a bit of a break from that screen light, that would be good,” Babiuch said.

Experts say it is never too early to take your child for an eye exam. Even if they don't know their letters yet, there are other ways to check their vision.