What should I do if I find out that my child has strabismus?

  Strabismus affects aesthetics, pediatric strabismus is often nicknamed, which casts a shadow on children’s psychology and causes isolation and perverse psychology, affecting children’s physical and mental health, and because of strabismus, children often do not have stereo vision because both eyes cannot work in harmony, stereo vision is a visual function that only humans and senior animals have, and is one of the important conditions for people to engage in fine work. People who do not have good stereoscopic vision are greatly restricted in learning and employment, and because of long-term use of one eye gaze, inevitably cause vision loss or developmental arrest of the wasted eye. In the future, even with proper glasses, it is impossible to achieve normal vision. This condition is medically called “amblyopia”. Some children with paralytic strabismus use special head positions such as deviated head, sideways face, raised or closed jaws to compensate for the paralysis of the eye muscles and to overcome the double vision. In children, this leads to skeletal deformities throughout the body. In addition, strabismus can lead to abnormal retinal correspondence and changes in the nature of gaze in the strabismic eye, resulting in severe amblyopia, which can be very difficult to treat. Therefore, in order to reduce and avoid the above-mentioned serious consequences, children with strabismus must be taken seriously and treated early. The view that “strabismus in children is not strange, it will get better when they grow up” is very wrong and harmful.  Most strabismus is combined with amblyopia, and for such children, amblyopia should be treated first and binocular vision function training should be carried out, and surgery is best carried out after treating amblyopia and having certain binocular vision function. As with amblyopia, the younger the child is, the better the outcome, and it is difficult to cure after visual development is complete. It is now mostly believed that the period of visual development mostly ends around the age of 10. If strabismus is detected, it should be treated as early as possible, not only to correct the strabismus, but also to restore the lost or stunted visual function, thus achieving a functional cure. If treatment is delayed and the developmental period of visual function is missed, visual function decline, skeletal deformity, and compensatory head position cannot be restored. Even if the strabismus is corrected by surgery in the future, it is only cosmetic, and there is no “glue” for binocular vision, and there is a risk of strabismus again.