Peers Reject Kids with 'Wandering Eye'

According to a new scientific study, it would appear that children with a wandering eye are less likely to be invited to birthday parties than their peers who have no such problems.

The researchers who conducted this work say that social acceptance for these children is very low among colleagues and kids their own age.

They say that it's critical for kids suffering from this condition to feel accepted and part of a group as a small age, when they are critically vulnerable to the opinion of others.

If they do not find acceptance at this time, then they run the risk of developing mental predispositions towards feeling left out when they grow up.

The new document also seems to indicate the best age to perform corrective surgeries to repair a wandering eye is before the kids turn 6. The researchers say that that is the time when discrimination seems to appear between peers.

The medical term describing this condition is strabismus, and the disorder is different than the one known as lazy eyes.

It basically means that one of the eyes lags behind the others when receiving commands from the brain, which translates into the two eyes being unable to focus on a single objective.

“Visible differences in general have a negative impact on how children are perceived by peers,” the experts behind the new stud write in a paper published in the latest online issue of the highly-regarded British Journal of Ophthalmology.

In a series of experiments, scientists asked a number of 118 kids, all of them aged between 3 and 12, to look at a number of photos. The images represented other children, LiveScience reports.

The pictures were digitally modified to seem as if the children they depicted had either inward or outward strabismus.

The test subjects were then asked to say who of the children in four such images they would invite to their birthday. Those who were younger than 6 made no discernible difference in their choice.

Participants aged 6 to 12 were pickier, the researchers say. They were a lot less likely to invited children with strabismus, mentioning the eye disorder specifically as the reason why.