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I've Got an Eye on You
Keeping Check on Your Preschooler's Peepers
By Jenn Director Knudsen
Once back in Portland, Luthi took Mia into a pediatric ophthalmologist who, after performing a comprehensive eye exam, found the toddler to be four times more farsighted than the average child her age. Children up until the age of 7 or 8 are naturally somewhat farsighted, meaning they have a hard time seeing close up.
Mia got fitted for wrap-around glasses, and today she sometimes wears a patch over her good eye. Doing so forces her brain to train her weaker eye to see better. "She's always going to be farsighted," Luthi says, but is happy knowing Mia avoided not only further damaging sight in her poor eye, but also problems once she hit school age. In fact, Moore says some children are in special-education classes due not to any learning problem, but to vision problems that manifest as cognitive delays.
Luthi urges parents always to go with their instinct. "If you have any, any feeling that maybe there's a problem, get it checked," she says.
Stacey Cummings has a history of lazy eye and strabismus, which was surgically corrected when she was 5. Worried that strabismus may be passed from a parent to a child and that her then 1-year-old son's eyes crossed occasionally, she raised her concerns to her son's pediatrician, who suggested she make an appointment with an opthalmologist.
Cummings took her son in at ages 1 and 3 and learned he does not have obvious strabismus; he'll be checked again at 5. "Given the family history of strabismus, I would not have felt comfortable with screening being done only by the public schools," Cummings says. "I was glad that we had an opportunity to have our children screened by an experienced ophthalmologist in addition to our very experienced pediatrician."