Our lad has a slight misalignment of his eyes, at 8 months old. I don’t know the correct terminology - his eyes are coherent, they’re working together, but one is slightly out of synch with the other. Possibly some variant of strabismus? If you saw him you wouldn’t immediately notice it, but if it’s pointed it out it becomes clear; his eyes are consistently a wee bit out of alignment
We’ve got an appointment with an eye specialist in a couple of weeks, so medical advice is impending. I wanted to hear if other parents had similar experiences, and whether they cleared up on their own. Reading online it sounds like baby eye squints etc are quite common but should have cleared up by about 6 months.
Our daughter was born with perfectly aligned eyes, but they gradually went out of alignment and eventually got quite bad by the time she was 8 months or so. Patching didn’t help, and she eventually had to have surgery to shorten some of the muscles controlling one of her eyes. (Her vision is perfectly normal for her age now.) But her eye was severely misaligned; it doesn’t sound like that is the case with yours. (In fact, I get the impression from your OP that it is barely noticeable; our daughter would look at you with one eye and the other would be pointed at her nose.) The wiki site on strabismusmakes it sound like patching and glasses can work with milder cases. Of course, IANAD, so my 2cents worth are going for pennies on the dollar.
Ivygirl had amblyopia, but not so you would notice. I knew she needed glasses, and bless the optometrist at Sears…she examined my daughter, sat back, and quietly said, “You need to take her to a pediatric opthamologist.” Another form of lazy eye is when one eye is more far-sighted than the other, which is what my daughter had.
She wore patches over her good eye for a few hours every day for about a year or two, until her bad eye more or less caught up. She was actually diagnosed rather late…the doctor told me if it’s not caught and treated by age nine, it’s too late to do much about it.
She wears glasses now, and her vision has been stable for about five years. This condition is very treatable, and the sooner it’s diagnosed the better. Don’t fret.
The picture on the wiki strabismus page is not too dissimilar to our kid. I think because baby’s eyes are big and more circular it’s not as noticeable as it would be for an adult.
Just to put you at ease a bit… everything said so far is correct. Congratulations on catching on to it so early. Lots of parents think the baby will “outgrow” it.
One of the doctors I work for is a pediatric ophthalmologist. Patching sometimes fixes it, sometimes corrective lenses (yes, baby eyeglasses) will do the trick. Some cases require surgery. Youngest child I’ve fitted for glasses was 4 mos old, and huge credit to his mom (who was just a kid herself) for noticing it.
Good luck. I hope your doctor is as nice as the ones I’ve had the good fortune to have met.
When my youngest son was about 2, he had to start seeing an eye specialist, who did surgery to correct his strabismus. Just keep your appointment and everything will be okay. One helpful piece of advice- don’t see a doctor who used to be in practice with a murderous piece of shit eye specialist, who you saw first, who will then kill the eye specialist your child is currently seeing, like what happened to us.
I have both amblyopia and strabismus. They’re different – amblyopia is a not a condition of the eye, but rather of visual processing in the brain, and means that the brain ignores the input from one eye. So it’s not a condition that you can see by looking at the person.
However, it can be caused by strabismus, and by anisometropia (eyes with different focal strengths, like Ivylass’s daughter), both of which I have. Since the eyes operate out of concert with one another, the brain ignores the input from one of them, which can result in a perfectly healthy eye going effectively blind.
Since strabismus can cause amblyopia, “lazy eye” is used imprecisely to refer to both amblyopia and strabismus.
Amblyopia also leads to a lack of binocular (3D) vision, since the eyes have to work in concert for that.
I had a surgical correction for the strabismus (partially successful) at the age of 18 months. As I understand it, it is better to correct it as early as possible, but some new research suggests that even adults can recover some binocular vision after surgical correction of strabismus.
As for the amblyopia, that was treated with patching, which does need to be done as soon as possible – the patch over the eye with normal vision forces the brain to use the other eye. Again, this was partially successful; I see out of my right eye, but I can see with my left eye when my right eye is closed, and my left eye sees the far leftward crescent of my field of vision and objects concealed by an object close to my right eye.
Hey, I had that as a kid! I never knew that it had an actual name, though of course it’s obvious in retrospect that it would. No patching needed for me, just a really strong prescription for my right eye and some basic exercises. It’s really, really freaky the first time you see in 3D.
Our boy had a slighty wonky eye when he was born – a slight misalignment that meant one eye was a few degrees off. It lasted about a year, then self-corrected.
Obviously I would still recommend seeing a doctor, but I also know from personal experience that these things can just sort themselves out.
Definitely see a doctor, and keep seeing that doctor after it resolves itself or is otherwise fixed. Strabismus can come back even after it seems to be gone, so it’s not something you want to just ignore even if it goes away.
From what I’ve read about it, it may be best to fix it as early as possible. On the other hand, it may resolve itself. Or you may get what happened to me, which is you go ahead and fix it, but then the problem recurred as I grew, and I needed surgery to correct it again.
My parents thought my brother’s eyes weren’t lining up and they had him thoroughly checked out. Turns out his eyelids and face are just formed so that it seems like his eye is a little “off”. :smack:
My pediatrician noticed that my daughter seemed to be a little bit far-sighted, so she sent us to a pediatric opthamalogist. I couldn’t see any problems myself, but of course we went and the eye doctor confirmed that she was far-sighted in both eyes, one much more so than the other, but not so bad that immediate action needed to be taken. Right now we’re just taking the “wait and see” approach. She’s 14 months old, and we’ve been in twice so far. She has another appointment in a month or so. Basically, I’m just supposed to watch in the meantime and make sure one of the eyes isn’t going “lazy.”
Doc said it might get better on its own, and there’s no immediate need for glasses or a patch, although she probably will need glasses eventually. Just so you know…you might not need to do anything right away.
I figure if this is the worst health problem she ever has, we will be very lucky.