Children must learn to see, or better yet, their brain must learn how to interpret the signals that are sent from the eyes via the optical pathways. It takes about 3-5 years before children can see how adults are and up to 7 years before the visual system develops completely.
If any deficiency affects one of the eyes during growth, the quality of the signals is disrupted and this, in turn, influences the interpretation of the images. This means that if a child sees less clearly in one eye, he tends to entrust his vision to the other. As a result, the brain tends to exclude the signals received from the weaker eye and increasingly relies on the dominant one (suppression mechanism). As a result, the eye becomes lazy and, being no longer used, becomes cross-eyed. On the other hand, if the brain has no way of learning to use the excluded eye in the first years of life, it is not possible to recover the ability to use both eyes.
