Ok, A lot of drs won't do surgery on children under 10yrs for eye turns anymore. From what our dr has told us, if they do it too early, take too much of the muscle off then the eye can swing the opposite way and then it cannot be fixed. Also it is deemed to be primarily domestic surgery, in that fixing the turn will not fix the eyesight.

DD1 is 6yrs she has a turned left eye. Her eye sight in that eye has gone from been legally blind to driving eye sight level (which is what the drs aim for, I think its 6 lines down the eye sight chart). We have our next appt on monday and Im interested to see where her eye sight is at the moment. We currently patch her eye for 4hrs a day. The time we patch for daily changes as per her eye test results. We have also done behavioural therapy on her eye, and she wears glasses full time too.
I swear that her turn can disappear at times, in that when her brain recognises both eyes and processes what she is seeing, I think both eyes look normal. Her dr however tells me that the only way to fix the turn is surgery, and ideally he won't touch her until she is at least 7yrs. The resin for that is that children's eyesight conitues to change until they are around the 7 to 8yrs mark. Up until that point eyesight can be improved (or weakened) fairly rapidly. And thats how turns happen in that the eye sight generally lessens in one eye and the brain stops using that eye, so it weakens and turns.

At the moment dd1 has an appointment once every 3months, her eye sight is tested and we re-evaluate how long she needs to patch for. This next appointment though I am asking for the eye drops as well. They do not work as well as the patch, in that it only blurs her vision in her good eye compared to blocking the vision altogether. But the eyedrops mean I can put them in before she goes to school and no one will know the difference (well besides her teacher of course) as wearing a patch to school didn't go down last time very well, and dd is adamant that she never wants to do that one again.

fwiw, I have done the 'dr shopping' for dd in this instance. We have gone through 6 drs who I didn't have full trust in. Now we are under the care of the top dr in aus when it comes eye turns. I have gone to drs who wouldnt help us because we didn't have ph, I have gone to drs who wanted to do surgery immediately and no other therapy (which the studies have basically said is a really bad idea), I have gone to drs who told us there was no problem and dd would be fine. To get to the dr we have now, I begged and cried to get into the children's hospital program, then we were lucky enough to get the dr we have. Our current dr, does one day a week at the hospital and has his own private practice as well. I would be more than happy to go to him privately at the moment and we do wonder if it would make any difference, but we trust that he has her best interests at heart.