Common Eye Problems in Teens (13-18 Years)

The teenage years change what the eyes are asked to do. Homework loads climb, phones and laptops take over the evening, contact lenses replace glasses, and sports get faster. Most teen eye problems are ordinary and fixable, but a few start quietly in this age range and are far easier to manage when caught early. Here is what we watch for in our Coconut Creek, Boynton Beach and West Palm Beach offices, and what the research actually says.

For younger children, see our guide to eye problems in children 6 to 12; for screen limits by age, our complete screen-time guide.

Key takeaways

• Time outdoors lowers a teen’s risk of becoming nearsighted, and some treatments slow myopia once it has started (Xiong et al., 2017; Walline et al., 2020).
• Digital eye strain affects at least half of screen users, but the fix depends on whether the cause is dryness or focusing (Sheppard & Wolffsohn, 2018).
• 85% of US teen contact lens wearers report at least one behavior that raises their infection risk (Cope et al., 2017).
• Habitual eye rubbing is the most consistently reported modifiable risk factor for keratoconus, which is usually diagnosed between the teens and the late twenties and steepens fastest in the youngest patients (Sahebjada et al., 2021; Godefrooij et al., 2017; Ferdi et al., 2019).
• Properly fitted sports eye protection cuts the risk of a significant eye injury by at least 90% (AAP/AAO, 2013).

1. Myopia (nearsightedness)

Distance blurs while near stays clear: squinting at the whiteboard, sitting closer to the screen, a prescription that shifts with each growth spurt. The research on screens and myopia is genuinely mixed (Lanca & Saw, 2020; Foreman et al., 2021), while daylight is the better-supported lever: outdoor time lowers the risk of becoming nearsighted, though it does not slow myopia already underway (Xiong et al., 2017). We set that evidence out study by study in our guide to eye problems in children 6 to 12, and it applies just as much at 15.

What changes in the teenage years is what a teen does with a myopic prescription. Glasses often give way to contact lenses, which carry their own care routine (section 3). Some treatments slow progression while the eye is still growing: in a Cochrane review of 41 trials, atropine drops slowed progression by about 1.00 D over a year versus placebo and overnight orthokeratology lenses slowed eye growth by 0.28 mm, with no serious adverse events reported, though atropine caused more focusing difficulty than placebo (Walline et al., 2020). Those are exam-room decisions, not online purchases. A prescription that changes often and never quite sharpens deserves a look at the cornea rather than another lens swap — see keratoconus in section 7. And once a teen starts driving, clear distance vision at night matters in a way it never did in a classroom.

2. Digital eye strain

Sore, dry, tired eyes after a long screen session, often with headaches and neck ache. Reviews put this at half or more of screen users (Sheppard & Wolffsohn, 2018), and a teenage day stacks the exposure: screens at school, homework on a laptop, then a phone held close in a dark room at night.

Symptoms come from two places: focusing and eye-teaming effort, and a dried-out eye surface from blinking less often and less completely at a screen (Rosenfield, 2011). The distinction matters, because artificial tears will not fix a focusing problem and new glasses will not fix a dry eye — and a teen in contact lenses can arrive with both at once. Blue-light glasses are a popular purchase, but a 2023 Cochrane review of randomized trials found they may not reduce eye strain at all (Singh et al., 2023). Better bets: an accurate prescription, a screen about arm’s length away and slightly below eye level, glare control, deliberate blinking and real breaks. More on our computer vision syndrome page and in our digital eye strain guide.

3. Contact lens problems

Contacts are a milestone, and they carry real responsibility. In 2016 an estimated 3.6 million US adolescents aged 12 to 17 wore contact lenses, and 85% reported at least one behavior that raised their risk of a lens-related eye infection. The three most common in that age group: not seeing an eye doctor at least yearly, sleeping or napping in lenses, and swimming in lenses (Cope et al., 2017).

Redness, pain, light sensitivity, discharge or blur in a lens wearer is not a “wait and see” situation. Take the lenses out, keep them for the doctor, and be seen the same day. Corneal infections can scar and permanently reduce vision.

4. Astigmatism, farsightedness and amblyopia

Not every blurry teenager is nearsighted. Astigmatism (an unevenly curved cornea) and hyperopia (farsightedness) often show up as headaches, tired eyes and avoidance of reading rather than obvious blur. Refractive error is common in and just past this age band: 45% of randomly sampled Spanish university students aged 18 to 35 had one (Garcia-Munoz et al., 2016), which is a nearby population rather than a US teen rate. A dilated refraction finds the hidden farsighted prescription a quick screening misses.

Amblyopia (“lazy eye”) is usually treated in childhood, but 15 is not automatically too late: among 13- to 17-year-olds who had never been treated, 47% responded to patching plus glasses versus 20% with glasses alone, though most kept some residual deficit (Scheiman et al., 2005).

5. Eye allergies, and the rubbing habit

Itchy, red, watery eyes with swollen lids and stringy clear discharge point to allergic conjunctivitis. Allergen avoidance, cool compresses and over-the-counter antihistamine drops are the first steps we usually suggest; persistent or severe symptoms need an exam and a prescription.

Treating allergy properly matters for a second reason: it breaks the rubbing habit. Allergy is itself an independent risk factor for keratoconus (odds ratio 1.42), as are asthma and eczema (Hashemi et al., 2020).

6. Sports and recreational eye injuries

More than 42,000 sports and recreation-related eye injuries were reported in the US in 2000, 43% of them in people under 15; baseball and basketball account for the most injuries in athletes aged 5 to 24. The AAP and AAO jointly recommend protective eyewear for every participant in a sport with eye-injury risk, and note that appropriately fitted protectors reduce the risk of a significant eye injury by at least 90% (AAP/AAO, 2013).

What counts: eyewear meeting ASTM F803, with polycarbonate lenses, for racket sports, basketball, baseball fielders, women’s lacrosse and field hockey. Everyday glasses and standard safety glasses do not qualify. Protection is mandatory, not optional, for a functionally one-eyed athlete, meaning best-corrected acuity worse than 20/40 in the weaker eye. For any serious injury, chemical splash, embedded object or sudden vision change, cover the eye without pressure and get emergency care.

Protecting the eyes is one half of sports vision; the other is performance — tracking a moving ball, reaction time, depth judgement. Our sports vision page explains what we measure and train for athletes once the eyes are safe.

7. Keratoconus

Keratoconus thins the cornea and lets it bulge into a cone, distorting vision in a way glasses stop correcting well. It is usually picked up between the teens and the late twenties — in a Dutch nationwide insurance database of 4.4 million people, the mean age at diagnosis among patients aged 10 to 40 was 28.3 years (Godefrooij et al., 2017) — and the tell-tale pattern is a prescription that changes often and never quite works, plus glare, halos and poor night vision. Pooled prevalence is about 1.38 per 1000 people (Hashemi et al., 2020).

Eye rubbing is the risk factor a family can act on: a meta-analysis of six case-control studies found an odds ratio of 6.46, though the studies were heterogeneous (Sahebjada et al., 2021), and a broader review put it at 3.09 alongside family history at 6.42 (Hashemi et al., 2020). There is no home remedy. What changes the outcome is early detection with corneal topography, because age drives how fast the cornea steepens: a meta-analysis of 11,529 untreated eyes found roughly 0.8 D less steepening over a year for every 10 years of age, and its authors advised closer follow-up and a lower threshold for cross-linking in patients under 17 (Ferdi et al., 2019). Cross-linking itself is a corneal-specialist procedure aimed at stopping progression rather than restoring vision: in a randomized trial of 100 eyes, treated corneas flattened slightly over three years while untreated eyes kept steepening (Wittig-Silva et al., 2014).

8. Study strain and eye-teaming problems

Some teens do everything right and still get sore eyes, swimming print and a headache 20 minutes into homework. That pattern often reflects how the two eyes work together. In 920 schoolchildren aged 7 to 17, non-strabismic binocular vision problems were more common at 13 to 17 (36.2%) than at 7 to 12 (25.1%), with convergence insufficiency the most frequent; this was an Indian school population, so read it as a signal rather than a US rate (Hussaindeen et al., 2017).

We want to be precise here. For symptomatic convergence insufficiency, office-based vergence and accommodative therapy is well supported: 73% of children in the Convergence Insufficiency Treatment Trial were successful or improved after 12 weeks versus 35% with placebo therapy (CITT Study Group, 2008). But the largest trial designed to test whether that therapy improves reading found it did not, 3.7 points versus 3.8 with placebo (CITT-ART, 2019). Our clinical perspective at Vision & Learning Center: treating a convergence or focusing problem is about making near work comfortable and sustainable, not about raising a reading score.

When a teen should be seen

The AOA recommends a comprehensive eye examination every year through age 17 for teens with no symptoms and no added risk (AOA). A school or sports-physical screening is a useful net, but a coarse one — we put numbers on how much a letter chart alone leaves behind in our guide for 6- to 12-year-olds and in what school vision screenings miss.

Come in sooner for pain, sudden or fluctuating blur, double vision, light sensitivity, a red eye in contact lenses, a prescription that keeps changing, or headaches tied to reading and screens.

Vision does a lot of quiet work through high school, and most of what goes wrong in these years responds well to timely care. If anything here sounds familiar, a comprehensive vision evaluation is the right next step. Schedule an evaluation at our Boynton Beach or Boca Raton office.