My son needs glasses for reading, close work, etc

[NotABanana]

And my DH is gutted. He is so worried he will get picked on at school. DS1 is pleased as he has been wanting some like his friends and has been complaining of eye trouble for a bit. His eyes have changed since his last check so he is getting some glasses a week on Monday to see how he gets on.

He looked so cute in the pair he chose.

I feel a bit sad too for him, though it doesn't mean he will always need them and I have to wear them fro tv, close work, etc, so it wasn't a huge surprise.

I think she means that both eyes don't see the same image and confuse the brain therefor the brain shuts off one eye making it 'lazy'. It can be helped with patching off the 'good' eye to make it work again. But it is hard to rectify after the age of 7.

Sorry I missed the mention of 'lazy eye'.

Lazy eye does improve by patching up or glasses, but farsightedness doesn't.

One of my eyes is much stronger than the other so I can get by without wearing contacts. In university, I didn't wear them for quite a few months then realized (in a picture) that the weak eye was much smaller than the other - I had developed a 'lazy eye'. Started wearing contacts again and it was soon back to normal.

So I can safely say that it is not true that you can't fix a lazy eye after the age of 7-8.

my dd (7 yrs) has worn glasses since she was 2 .she is the only one in our immediate family that has to wear them so its been hard for her.even tho shes been wearing them every day for 5 years she's still not used to them,and if she can get away with it she would rather take them off.
she struggles to see without them and knows that she sees much better when there on.
she has never been picked on by other kids and is very opoular at school,and for that im glad

Q: I have poor vision in my lazy eye since I was a child. The eyes seem to work together and I do not have a visible squint like most of your patients. Is it possible to make the vision better?
A: I am afraid the answer is probably not. If one eye is more long sighted or short sighted in childhood or there is a very small squint which is not noticeable, sometimes the brain decides to ignore that eye (see information on amblyopia). If the vision is corrected early enough, the brain can be taught to start using the eye again (which may require patching treatment). However, this treatment needs to be done as early as possible and certainly before the age of 10. There are a very few cases reported where the vision has been improved in early teenagers but this is not common. Once you get to 10 or so, the vision is mature and there is no treatment that is likely to improve the vision.

Sorry Cote, am very unclear!!!!

What I meant was that at the moment the eyes have uneven vision, and the optometrist thought that the right eye may be lazy, so the glasses will hopefully correct that. That's what I meant about 'accepting the signals' - because the right eye is more long sighted than the left in dd, the brain is switching off the signals.

As far as the long sightedness goes, he also said that it is very common for children to be long sighted, and that as they grow, the shape of the eye/lens etc changes, and they will often grow out of it. Will see if I can find a link, but I haven't read that, it's just what the optometrist said.

Sorry for confusion!

A little bit here - halfway down - many children are born with ...naturally resolves....

I got confused a bit more upon reading the latest messages and then realized the root of the problem is that 'squint' has two meanings:

• cross-eye (each looking in different directions)
• small eye (one eye partly closed at all times)

Mine was the 'small eye'. This squint is also a symptom of lazy eye. Because the eye doesn't use the signals from the lazy eye, it partly closes and you don't even notice it. I put contacts back on and it was gone within a month or two. This was in my early 20s, so definitely not before age 7.

Furball's Q&A is from a website that talks only about the cross-eyed squint. Perhaps that is the lazy eye that can't be treated after age 7 or whatever.