Eye Care for Children

Child Eye Care The majority of children are born without a serious eye condition. However, many develop refractive errors in their vision at a young age. If not properly dealt with, these conditions can adversely affect your child’s performance in school, athletics, and many other activities.

Types of Vision Problems Affecting Children

The most common vision problems affecting children are refractive errors in their vision. These include:

All of these conditions can be easily detected with an eye exam and corrected with glasses or contact lenses. Other conditions which can affect your child’s vision are more obvious even without an eye exam. These include:

Both of these are easily treated by an experienced ophthalmologist. The earlier these conditions are detected and treated, the greater the likelihood that your child’s vision will either partially or completely recover.

Symptoms of Vision Problems Affecting Children

There are a few warning signs to watch out for. Eyes that do not line up properly (crossed eyes or lazy eye) are indications that your child has an eye problem that must be treated. Otherwise, your child’s depth perception may be impaired, and eventually, the brain may disregard the image from one eye.

Children suffering from refractive errors in their vision may hold reading materials either very close or much farther away than normal. Children who struggle with distance vision may squint when viewing far away objects such as a television or the blackboard at school.

Finally, the following symptoms are clear signs that your child needs to see an eye doctor at once:

Red eyes
Scratchy eyes
Irritated eyes

LASIK and Children

Generally, your child’s vision will not stabilize until sometime after the age of 18. Therefore, it is not a good idea to seek LASIK surgery to correct your child’s refractive errors until his or her prescription has been constant for at least one year. Most ophthalmologists will not even consider performing laser eye surgery on someone under the age of 18. While glasses and contact lenses may be an inconvenience, your child will most likely have to put up with them until vision stabilizes in young adulthood.

Vision problems can occur at any time in your child’s development, so it is important to go for regular eye exams starting at an early age. Please contact an eye doctor in your area to schedule an appointment.