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Show Will Your Child Pass The 'Eve Test'? The classroom is often the first "eye test" a child receives in his or her initial exposure to the needs of good sight. Ophthalmologists physicians physi-cians specializing in medical eye care recommend children chil-dren be given eye examinations examina-tions when they're around three and a half. However, many children don't receive these examinations, and by the time they enter school, one child in four has some sort of eye disorder. Two problems that often go undetected until the first few weeks in school are amblyopia (also called "lazy eye"), in which one eye is favored over the other, and misaligned eyes (turning in or out), says David S. J - Friendly M.D., of the American Ameri-can Assn. of Ophthalmology. "Very often," he notes, "parents aren't aware of these problems because the child has no way of knowing know-ing he's not seeing what he should. He has no basis for comparison. And there may be nothing about the appearance ap-pearance of the child's eyes to suggest they aren't func tioning properly.". . Dr. Friendly, a pediatric ophthalmologist at Children's Hospital in Washington, Wash-ington, D.C., points out that "most of a young child's world is within arm's length. Most toys and games that occupy a preschooler require re-quire the child to concentrate concen-trate on relatively close objects." |