How To Tell If Your Child Needs Glasses

About a month ago, my husband and I learned that our 14 month old son, Eli, needed glasses. A few weeks after our ophthalmologist appointment, Eli started sporting a pair of rectangular dark grey frames, and hands down, the most common question we now get asked is, “How did you know he needed glasses?”

It’s a completely legitimate question, and we totally understand why people would wonder. Our son can only say a handful of words, none of which would have tipped us off to the fact that his vision wasn’t up to par. For us, I had noticed that Eli’s left eye wandered – just a bit – since he was about eight months old. It was slight enough that usually I just told myself I was seeing things, and when I did bring it up to my husband or another person, they brushed it off as well, saying it was a trick of the eye – my eyes, that is. At 14 months, we were at the pediatrician’s office because Eli was sick and the particular pediatrician we saw was the first doctor to notice Eli’s eye wandering. He brought it up to me and I confirmed that I’d seen it for a while, so he referred us to a pediatric ophthalmologist and suggested we had his vision checked, just in case.

At the appointment, we learned Eli has accommodative esotropia, which basically means he’s farsighted and his eyes were crossing due to the effort he was putting forth to see things. He now has glasses and wears a patch for an hour a day.

As you would assume, most babies, toddlers and even older children, don’t even know that they have blurry vision, because that’s the way their vision has always been. It’s usually not until you put a pair of glasses on a child that they realize what they’ve been missing. And since babies and toddlers can’t tell us verbally that their vision is less than stellar, here are a few things you can watch for, depending on their age:

• Frequent squinting
• Sitting close to the TV or iPad
• Pulling books or paper they are coloring on abnormally close
• A wandering eye (or both eyes), even a very slight misalignment*

Most pediatricians check for major signs at children’s well visits, but sometimes visual signs are not apparent, or they don’t reveal themselves during the short window of time a pediatrician spends looking for them. Many doctors have children complete full eye-exams just before a child starts school, but did you know that often vision problems can be corrected, and the earlier you catch them, the better chance you have? Plus, the American Association of Opthalmology and the American Academy of Pediatrics actually recommends that all children have their vision checked at three months, between six months to a year, and at the three and five year well visits, even if no vision problems are apparent.