Why do children look at things with their heads tilted? What are the symptoms of strabismus in children?

Sometimes children will subconsciously tilt their heads when looking at things. If this happens frequently, parents need to pay more attention, as it may be strabismus. Because children's vision is constantly developing, strabismus is prone to occur during the development process. How to judge it specifically?

Why do children tilt their heads when looking at things?

If this happens, parents need to pay attention, as it may be myopia or strabismus.

Myopia: When children first develop myopia, they may not know it. However, in order to reduce the impact of light on their vision and to obtain clearer vision at a certain angle, they may unconsciously tilt their heads or squint their eyes to read.

Strabismus: It is generally divided into esotropia and exotropia. Esotropia, commonly known as crossed eyes, refers to the pupils of one or both eyes moving closer to the middle. If the pupils of the eyes deviate to the outside, it is exotropia.

When a normal adult sees the same object with both eyes, the center of the human brain can combine the two images seen by the two eyes into a complete three-dimensional object, which is also called binocular single vision. Children's vision develops gradually. In the process of binocular single vision, it is easily affected by external factors, causing the destruction of binocular and monocular functions. When one eye sees an object, the other eye cannot see the object, so strabismus occurs.

What are the symptoms of strabismus in children?

Some strabismus may be difficult to detect in the early stages. Parents can observe whether their children have the following manifestations:

Have a habit of tilting the head or looking at things sideways;

When looking at something close up, you tend to squint or are afraid of light;

When you are not concentrating, you may squint.

If your child likes to look sideways when reading, it is recommended to go to the hospital for examination as soon as possible. If the examination shows that it is neither myopia nor strabismus, but just a bad habit, it is recommended that parents intervene and correct it in time to avoid anisometropia, that is, the refractive power of the two eyes is very different.

What are the dangers of strabismus in children?

First, it directly affects vision.

First of all, most strabismus patients have strabismic amblyopia, which leads to decreased vision in the affected eye. Moreover, this amblyopia will affect the child's future vision, and even if glasses are worn for correction, the effect will not be ideal. Secondly, even if the strabismus patient has normal vision, when looking at things, because one eye is deviated, he can only use the other eye to focus on the target, and his field of vision is far less than that of normal people, which can easily cause diplopia; thirdly, strabismus patients do not have the ability of image fusion and stereoscopic vision, and the child's future academic and professional choices will be limited, and the stereoscopic sense is relatively poor, making it difficult for them to do drawing, architectural design and other work.

Second, it affects the development of extraocular muscles, head and neck muscles, and bones.

Strabismus is divided into two categories: common strabismus and paralytic strabismus. Due to paralysis of the eye muscles, patients with paralytic strabismus often use special head positions such as tilting the head and turning the face to the side to overcome discomfort when seeing. Over time, patients may develop a "compensatory head position" posture habit, which affects the development of the head and neck bones and is prone to scoliosis, torticollis and other problems.

Third, strabismus seriously affects appearance.

Especially those who have had strabismus since elementary school are often given nicknames. Strabismus patients have a specific movement and look when looking at people and objects, which can easily cause misunderstandings on the other side, so it is often not conducive to their interpersonal communication and can easily cause patients to be withdrawn, inferior and have abnormal psychology.