Study says kids wearing contact lenses are more confident of the way they look, their athletic abilities, and acceptance by their friends as compared to children who wear eyeglasses.

Thus, according to the researchers, nearsighted children as young as eight years old reap social benefits from wearing contact lenses instead of glasses.

While doctors generally wait to prescribe contact lenses until children are in their early teens, nearsighted children often are diagnosed with myopia and receive their first corrective lenses around age 8.

Researchers aimed their study to examine the effects of contact lenses vs. eyeglasses on a number of kids' perceptions about themselves, especially what is called their global self-worth, or how valuable they think they are to society.

The results indicated that children's global self-worth was not significantly affected by whether they wore contact lenses or eyeglasses.

Similarly, the type of vision correction had no effect on how they felt they performed in school or how they perceived their own behavior.

"The effects really seem to be in areas that we would think made sense, how they feel about their appearance, athletic abilities and what their friends think of them," said Jeffrey Walline, assistant professor of optometry at Ohio State University and lead author of the study.

The study was conducted at five clinical centers in the U.S. that enrolled a total of 484 nearsighted children between the ages of 8 and 11.