Do you know anything about a "lazy eye"?

Yes, they correct them sometimes.

All I know is my 72 yr old MIL has has LE her whole life and is amazingly happy..

I have a lazy eye. I have never been prescribed anything like you said. All I got was a pair of glasses that are different in thickness for the lazy eye and the normal eye. The aim is to get the lazy eye to work as much as the normal eye. Recently I had to visit the doctor again as I suspected that my eyes had grown weaker. The result was that the normal eye has improved greatly while the lazy eye became weaker. My doctor let me keep the old pair of glasses because the lazy eye was beyong any glasses’ capacity. But that’s another story, at least my lazy eye gets its ass to work with the glasses.

I think the corrective glasses you said is actually the same one as mine. They do correct your eyesight, but only temporary (as in “when you put on glasses”). When you put the glasses off the lazy eye returns to its normal lazy state. You need the glasses for the eye to work.

The term used for it is Amblyopia and I think both kids should be seen by an eye specialist rather than just the family doctor so that the best course of treatment can be determined, especially for the 8yr old because the younger treatment begins, the better the outcome. From your description, his sounds more severe than hers.

The glasses are the first line of treatment typically tried. If there isn’t enough improvement then they go to patching the good eye for anywhere from 2–6 hours per day to really force the other one to work.

Years ago, I was a regular babysitter for a family with a four year old boy with a pretty severe case and they wanted to get this corrected before he started school so that it wouldn’t adversely effect his learning to read.

For about six months he was wearing the glasses with one side patched for several hours per day because just the glasses alone weren’t showing any more improvement.

(That’s the main reason I’m suggesting the kids be evaluated by an eye specialist because they can assess the initial severity and also do continual testing to keep track of progress.)

With this little boy, the eventual decision was to finally do corrective surgery because it apparently reached the point where even the patching no longer caused improvement.

But they were very calm and common sense type of parents so there wasn’t a whole lot of stress being communicated to the child. They prepared him well and made sure all of his questions got answered and he came through with flying colors.

I’m not saying surgery is what will necessarily happen to either of your grandkids but just letting you know what my previous experience with this has been.

With this child, the concern wasn’t really so much cosmetic (how he looked with the crossed eye) as it was functional and avoiding his developing reading/learning/eyesight problems in the future due to this.

But I also had a few kids in my classes over the years who had pretty mild cases of Amblyopia and it was just being treated with the specialized glasses and apparently that was all that was needed.

But I know that if I ever had a child with this problem, I’d definitely want evaluation and ongoing monitoring by an eye specialist rather than just a regular doc. I mean, I would be very grateful to the family doc for alerting us to the condition but would also be asking him for a referral to a specialist.

The vast majority of Amblyopia cases in kids tend to be of the milder variety but I would definitely want a very thorough evaluation by a specialist.

Just because it’s so common a problem in kids doesnt mean that the possibility of future problems it could cause should be taken lightly.

If a specialist told me it was pretty mild and not to worry overmuch, I’d be fine with that. But there’s no way that I would skip a thorough examination and testing by a specialist with the knowledge and experience to determine its possible severity. After all, ones eyesight is a critical issue for so many aspects of life. Better safe than sorry is my motto.