For Newborn Eyes

I’m a big girl! At my age, I have fairly well-developed vision. I can see for some distance now, and I can see mommy all the way on the other side of the room. My eyes can focus very well and I even have some depth perception. This is very helpful for when I’m trying to grab something, which these days is just about all the time. These abilities took months to develop.

When I was born, my vision wasn’t anywhere near what it is now. I could only see about ten inches in front of myself. Everything else was a blur. I couldn’t even distinguish what was close and what was far. I wasn’t an unusual baby with worse eyesight than most. Not at all! Newborn babies just don’t see very well. Our eyes need further development at the time of birth.

Limited sight doesn’t mean newborn babies don’t enjoy looking at things. At that age, we enjoy looking at faces, but other things are interesting to us as well. My mommy engaged my eyes from the first week with simple high contrast images. It is easiest for newborn babies to see black, white, and red. Bold shapes in these colours are the most interesting to us at that stage of life and development.

Not only did I find these pictures interesting, they also helped me develop my eyesight by giving me something to practice focusing my eyes on. I’m very glad that mommy took the time to find those pictures for me. Mommy taped them up in places that I could see them. My favourite spot is above the changing table. To this day, there are some of those pictures up there, and I still like to look at them. Mommy says she will put new, more advanced pictures up there soon, but for now it’s still the original ones that I see.

I want to do my part for all the newborn babies out there. I used my personal experiences to come up with some designs of my own. I used high contrast patterns and bold colours to make it easy for new eyes to focus on them. Here are a few of my favourite ones.

The first two are basic images for beginners. The second two are slightly more complex for the second stage of development. Feel free to use these images. You can click on the gallery, scroll through them, save them, and print them for future use.