If your child has been squinting at the TV, sliding their books closer to their face, or coming home from school with new “I can’t see the board” complaints, you are not alone — and you have more options today than parents did even five years ago. A new generation of specialty spectacle lenses, designed specifically to slow the progression of childhood nearsightedness, is now available in Canada. Two of the most talked-about are Essilor’s Stellest and CooperVision’s MiSight Spectacle (DOT technology) lenses.

How Myopia Control Spectacle Lenses Actually Work

To understand these lenses, it helps to know what is really happening when a child becomes nearsighted. Myopia develops when the eyeball grows slightly too long from front to back, causing distance vision to blur. Standard glasses correct that blur on the central part of the retina, but they don’t change the underlying signal telling the eye to keep elongating. In fact, research over the last two decades suggests that conventional lenses may unintentionally encourage that growth.

Myopia control spectacle lenses are different. They still give your child sharp central vision for school, sports, and screens, but they also gently change how light lands on the rest of the retina — in a way that appears to tell the eye, “you’ve grown enough.” The two leading technologies in Canada accomplish this in very different ways: Stellest uses a precise pattern of tiny lens shapes called lenslets, while the MiSight Spectacle lens uses a field of microscopic dots that reduce contrast in the peripheral vision.