What is the reason for the child's squint?

There are actually reasons why children have strabismus. So as a parent, you should also pay attention to these factors. For example, imperfect development, especially in infants and young children, may cause strabismus in children due to incomplete binocular or monocular vision. There may also be congenital abnormalities or strabismus caused by small eyeballs and short eye axes.

1. Imperfect development :

Children, especially infants and young children, have incomplete binocular vision function and cannot coordinate the extraocular muscles well. Any unstable factors can lead to the occurrence of strabismus. Human's monocular vision function develops gradually after birth. Just like the visual function, this function is established by repeatedly receiving stimulation from clear external images, and gradually develops and matures. Infants only have gross fusion image 2 months after birth, and the establishment of precise fusion image function will continue until after 5 years old. Stereoscopic vision is established at the latest, and it is close to that of adults at 6 to 7 years old. Therefore, the period before the age of 5 when binocular single vision function is not yet perfect is a high incidence period of strabismus in children.

2. Congenital abnormalities :

This type of strabismus is mostly caused by congenital abnormal development of the position of the extraocular muscles, abnormal development of the extraocular muscles themselves, incomplete differentiation of the mesoderm, poor separation of the eye muscles, abnormal muscle sheaths and fibrosis, and other anatomical defects or paralysis of the nerves that control the muscles. Some cases are due to the use of forceps during delivery, which causes damage to the baby's head and face, or the mother's excessive force during delivery, which causes increased intracranial pressure on the fetus and produces punctate hemorrhages in the brain. The bleeding happens to be in the nerve nucleus that controls eye movement, causing paralysis of the extraocular muscles. In addition, there are also genetic factors. Strabismus is not inherited by all members of the family. This defect is often indirectly passed on to the next generation of children.

3. The characteristics of eyeball development make children susceptible to strabismus :

Because children have small eyeballs and short eye axes, most of them are farsighted. Also, because children's cornea and lens have strong refractive power and ciliary muscle contraction force, they have strong accommodation power. Such children need more accommodation power to see objects clearly. At the same time, their eyes turn inward forcefully, resulting in excessive convergence, which can easily cause esotropia, which is called accommodative esotropia.

4. Insufficient control ability of eye movement center :

If the convergence is too strong or the abduction is insufficient, or both exist at the same time, esotropia will occur; conversely, if the abduction is too strong and the convergence is insufficient, or both exist at the same time, exotropia will occur.