I (40) year old man, have booked my son (let’s say less than 10) a meeting with an eye doctor to settle an argument.
Some context my mother in law was once an eye nurse, she worked in the industry for ages and I am sure for everyone else other than family her opinion would be valid….. however, she is also a boomer, a liar and one of those people who is never “wrong”. You can come at her with facts and she will just “oh well, If it was me… blah blah blah”
So fast forward to my son. The school did an eye exam and sent him home with a slip saying we should get his eyes checked. So off to the mall eye place I go and get his eyes tested, they come back with a -1.6. They did multiple tests, drops, scans etc and a few weeks later, boom. He has glasses.
Fast forward a few more weeks and almost everything the MIL takes the kids she sneakily ensures my son doesn’t have his glasses. She has even said on a few occasions “oh, you don’t need those”
What makes it worse is it bleeds over to my partner, she has started getting “relaxed” with my sons glasses and on occasions has taken him out some mornings without his glasses. I can’t help but shake the feeling that the MIL and on some level my partner are hurt that I just acted and got him glasses.
For some more context my other son also has had glasses and has worn them for ages so as soon as the other sons diagnosis came in I just acted as if no big deal.
So here I find myself at the position that I want to sit down with my partner and an independent eye doctor and get their view if all this glasses on glasses off things are hurting his eyes or not.
Thoughts?
Just some added context, -1.5 means he is short-sighted and therefore can see his writing but stuff on the board could be fuzzy
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I (40) year old man, have booked my son (let’s say less than 10) a meeting with an eye doctor to settle an argument.
Some context my mother in law was once an eye nurse, she worked in the industry for ages and I am sure for everyone else other than family her opinion would be valid….. however, she is also a boomer, a liar and one of those people who is never “wrong”. You can come at her with facts and she will just “oh well, If it was me… blah blah blah”
So fast forward to my son. The school did an eye exam and sent him home with a slip saying we should get his eyes checked. So off to the mall eye place I go and get his eyes tested, they come back with a -1.6. They did multiple tests, drops, scans etc and a few weeks later, boom. He has glasses.
Fast forward a few more weeks and almost everything the MIL takes the kids she sneakily ensures my son doesn’t have his glasses. She has even said on a few occasions “oh, you don’t need those”
What makes it worse is it bleeds over to my partner, she has started getting “relaxed” with my sons glasses and on occasions has taken him out some mornings without his glasses. I can’t help but shake the feeling that the MIL and on some level my partner are hurt that I just acted and got him glasses.
For some more context my other son also has had glasses and has worn them for ages so as soon as the other sons diagnosis came in I just acted as if no big deal.
So here I find myself at the position that I want to sit down with my partner and an independent eye doctor and get their view if all this glasses on glasses off things are hurting his eyes or not.
Thoughts?
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Contest mode is 1.5 hours long on this post.
NTA, your son was already tested and needs glasses, and your wife and MIL aren’t accepting that. You’re right to set up a new eye exam to settle the argument because the argument needs to be settled. Does your insurance cover it, and when was the last eye exam? You all should be getting examined yearly anyway if your insurance covers it.
Sorry to say but YTA for not standing up to your MIL and telling her to back off! You’re the parent, you’re in charge of your son and what you say goes.. you should be having a discussion with your wife as well.
NTA, if he needs them for medical reasons then he should wear them
NTA
I don’t think a visit to the optometrist is even necessary. He got a prescription. He needs glasses. He has glasses. The fact your partner, the mother of the kid, is ok with her son being unable to see clearly is wild to me. Like what kind of mom wants their kid to be unable to see clearly and vividly?
Ask her flat out why she would do this. Ask her if she needs an optometrist to speak with her. Ask her why she’d want her kid squinting or being unable to see.
NTA. She may not listen to the doctor though. Or may be mad that you are spending money to school her in this
But you do need to get on the same page as your wife. I take it that neither of you wear glasses. That prescription is small enough that he could get by without them BUT it will strain his eyes. They could get worse faster. He probably has a low grade headache if he leaves them off for more than a couple hours.
That’s a near-sighted prescription, so he probably doesn’t need them to read a book, but it would help him see the white board at the front of his classroom. It’ll help him track a baseball to catch.
On the other hand, the prescription is big enough that he’d be required to wear them to drive a car.
Hopefully your wife can understand the difference they’ll make. If she is hesitating because it’s an inconvenience to her or she thinks he’ll be teased, she needs to get over it.
Don’t let your wife and MIL ruin this for your son. I have the same prescription and I won’t leave the house without my glasses. They just make life so much easier.
NTA. Your MIL and wife should be encouraging him to wear his glasses so his vision doesn’t deteriorate quicker. They are doing him a huge disservice by telling him he doesn’t need them.
I actually had my 8yo at the optometrist yesterday. She is getting glasses for the first time. Our dr said it’s really important to encourage kids to wear their glasses properly to keep their vision at the best it can be.
Nta. I needed glasses starting in 4th grade. I went from decent eyesight to “she shouldn’t be allowed on the street alone without glasses/contacts”. Mine are now in the -7 range. I once rode a bike towards a parked white car (no glasses. Was at my gma’s and my contacts had spots) just to find that when I got closer to it, that it was a fully marked MOVING police car. Eyes can go south quick. Make sure he wears his glasses.
NTA leaning NAH
That’s just about my prescription (-1.5) and I can’t fathom why someone under 10 would need glases 24-7 for that prescription. I don’t even need the glasses unless I need to read something. (However, as an adult who drives, this means I wear contacts almost every day because, well, driving).
If mom is taking them to the park to play soccer or swing on the monkey bars etc I don’t see why he’d need them for those activities and I can kind of understand not wanting him to wear them for activities during which he might break them.
YTA for not standing up to your MIL. You don’t need to be booking additional appointments to prove a point, she just needs to shut up, butt out of it and accept it is nothing to do with her and her opinion does not matter one jot. The real problem is your wife not backing you up. Ask her why she is dismissing the medical needs of her child; that is irresponsible and mean. NTA for making sure your son has his glasses.
NTA
I have a similar prescription for my glasses, I can see ok without them but it causes a lot of eye strain and headaches. I imagine your son will cope a lot better at school with them. Getting a second opinion is a good idea especially to see if it will cause long term issues not wearing them.
Anytime someone says “Boomer” as an explanation, you lose the moral high ground – reductio ad Boomerum – but there’s a grain of truth in this case:
Until the 1980s, undercorrection for children was the norm.
The thinking was that the child’s eyes would get “lazy” – not like amblyopia, but wouldn’t work as hard to focus, the muscles would not be strong, and their vision would get even worse. Kids were encouraged not to wear glasses all the time, etc.
By the 1980s, rational thought returned and kids got glasses that correct their vision.
Your MIL isn’t wrong in the sense of crazy thought, she’s only wrong in that she hasn’t kept up with current practices.
NTA, but get over that Boomer shit. It’s never helpful.
I’ve had glasses since I was 12 but probably started needing them about 9 ISH. My sister had glasses temporarily when she was about 6, what our optician told us was that if you’re not seeing perfectly around the age of 7/8 and you’re not wearing glasses to correct it, your brain will be unlikely to recognise 20/20 vision which means later in life your glasses will never be quite perfect (something along these lines it was a long time ago). On top of that straining your eyes by not wearing your glasses will deteriorate your eye sight much quicker
https://www.myopiaprofile.com/articles/myopia-correction-children
Please read this with your wife.
Not giving your son full correction (ie, wearing glasses) is more likely to make his eyes worse.
There are other things you can do to increase the likelihood that his eyes can stabilise.
What on earth is an eye nurse? Also, it’s unclear what you’re trying to prove to her by booking your son an eye appointment. He already had one, right? And got the prescription for the lenses?
You have test results. They are the facts. Tell the mil she is wrong. Tell partner the glasses go in because if he can’t see, he can’t learn, he can’t walk around safely
My daughter’s prescription is less than that -.75, but she definitely is noticeably short sighted. She was complaining about her eyes shaking and I noticed she couldn’t read shop signs. The opticians gave her glasses that apparently need to be worn 12 hrs per day and have special lenses that can help the eyes from getting any worse. As someone with -6.5 eyes I’m definitely in favour of her wearing them so they don’t get worse!! Wish they had existed when I was a kid.
NTA. I’d put my foot down and make sure your mother-in-law no longer gets alone time with your kids if she keeps interfering with your parenting.
NTA. ask her when she completed her training to actually test someone’s eye sight. She might have been an eye nurse, but that is treatment, medication etc which is not the same as the testing eyesight.
That’s like saying I’m a cardiac nurse but you aren’t the person doing the heart surgery.
I remember the day when my mom took me to get glasses as a child, and I realized that trees really did have leaves. I was (and am) -4.75 in one eye and -5.0 in the other.
Absolutely NTA for making sure your son can flippin’ see. Eyesight impacts everything from social interaction to schoolwork to his safety.
NTA, as somebody who was the kid in a similar situation, they usually will start being catty to the child as well about “believing” in whatever and it just sucks, my dad still gets pissed at me for continuing to “lie to him” when me being colorblind comes up, even though he is also blatantly colorblind
NTA
From a person whose sight is so short that I fully expect to be declared blind one day. Glasses are a pain in the arse but they’re vital. Eye health is so important and if he needs glasses, he needs glasses. That’s all there is to it. How long ago was his grandma an eye nurse? Also, not to dump over nurses, but there’s a difference between a nurse and a doctor. Do everything you can to impart to his mother that she can’t neglect his sight like this and crack down on your MIL’s nonsense. Your little boy needs to see!!
NTA, but Y T A if you don’t put your foot down about this.
I was about 11 years old when I got my glasses. My prescription was -1 and 1.25. The first time I put on my glasses the world changed for me. I could see the leaves in trees! I could see the tiles on the roofs! I no longer had to strain to see the blackboard in school, and I could read subtitles from the couch again. No more headaches from straining my eyes so much! I did get worse eye sight with each passing year, eventually settling on -5.5, but that just gave me the opportunity to try out different styles of glasses. I loved my glasses, they made the world a much more clear and beautiful place.
A few years later my sister also needed glasses. My sister hated her glasses, because all of our lives, our mother had talked about how much she hated her own glasses. My sister only wore her glasses when she absolutely needed to, and took them off the second she ‘didn’t’ need. She switched to contacts as soon as she could and like my mom, I never saw her in glasses again. Both of them were so convinced their glasses made them ugly that they would literally wear contacts from the moment they got up to the moment they went to bed. Even if they fall asleep in their contact and really should not wear them the next day, they do because they’d rather mess up their eyes than wear glasses for a single day.
In the lead up to me getting my glasses, I was super nervous because of the above. I knew how much my mother hated wearing glasses, how she said they made her ugly, how I knew she had bad eyesight but in all the years I’d known her I’d never once seen her wear glasses. And that of course made me worries about needing them. I was lucky that I likes the glasses I picked, that the awe of the world-in-HD was enough for me to stop thinking about being pretty for a minute. That when I looked at myself wearing my glasses I thought I looked fine.
The second I turned 16 my mother started pressuring me to get contacts. After a lot of rebuking I tried them, couldn’t get them out at the end of the day, and didn’t touch contacts again until I was 25. My mother couldn’t imagine that I didn’t hate my glasses, and that I wouldn’t move heaven and earth to wear contacts instead, even when I told her I had no desire for them.
Please don’t let your MIL and partner make it so that your son feels the same about his glasses as my mom and sister did. If you can, have a conversation with your partner about why she is so lax with this. Does she genuinely not think of it as such a big deal? Does she hate the look of glasses? The glasses are there to help him and he’ll probably need some form of vision correction for the rest of his life, so getting your son not to hate them would be a good thing.
Maybe you can ask one of the optometrists at a glasses store to let her “see” how your son sees by letting her see through the machine but at a +1.6. The last time I bought glasses they even had this set of glasses they could pop the machine glasses into so you could walk around a bit to see if they were correct. Making her see how your son sees the world without his glasses may help to open her eyes to the issue more.
nta you did what the doctor said. They gave your son prescription, he should be wearing his glasses. You beg to get your wife on the same page.
If that’s all it is, he should have them in a hard case (for protection) in his school bag so he can pull them out if he feels he needs them. He should be encouraged to use them whenever he needs to squint to see. They’re assholes for intentionally leaving his glasses behind, he needs to at least have them with him to be able to choose whether to use them. I think your reaction is extreme, but I don’t know the behind the scenes of everything. Maybe this truly is the only way to get through to her. If nothing else, maybe you can get him a second pair that stays in his bag just for these situations.
I was around your son’s age when I got my glasses. I actually had to take my glasses off for reading anything closer to me, so I wouldnt insist he wears them constantly. It’s been a long time since I was that age (it’s been 20+ years and my eyes are currently at -7.50…i tripped on my stairs last week cuz I wasn’t wearing my glasses and I can’t see them and thought I did them all) and I’m not going to insist it’s the same for him. I just don’t know if you wear glasses yourself and have personal experience, so I wanted to offer some.
NTA I have a similar prescription strength and got glasses cuz I couldn’t read the whiteboard when I started secondary school. I don’t need them all the time, I take em off for using my laptop, embroidery, reading, but all those things are right up close to me. It’s uncomfortable to leave the house to do things like grocery shopping without them, I wear them to parties so Im not squinting at blurry faces across a room. It’s also illegal for me to drive without my glasses.
Your kid needs his glasses!
Hey, glasses wearer since I was 9, and I have major issues with this. Not only does not wearing your glasses lead to poorer eyesight, but it’s just wrong not to encourage a kid to wear their glasses. There are still kids and people who make it a social stigma and treat kids differently despite it being such a small thing, and it seems like such an old 80s bully trope. Every kid needs to be made to feel confident in their glasses by every adult around them! I remember the first time I put on a pair, I walked outside and for the first time saw the individual leaves on a tree. I cried, at 9 years old, seeing trees for the first time I cried! If she can’t respect your child’s needs she doesn’t need to take them anywhere. If she doesn’t care if they can see, which IS a major safety issue. Whose to say she wouldn’t care about something else and put your child’s health in grave danger. Another thing, you’re the parent. Period. End of story. You and your wife are the head honchos when it comes to raising your kids so stand your ground and do what you think is right. Also anytime you see cool glasses accessories you think he might like just go ahead and get them, cause they’ll make him feel special and enthusiastic about his glasses. More like a fun accessory than just necessary tool for seeing.
NTA! My first prescription was only -0.50 in both eyes, and have now progressed to -2.75/-3.00 so even with constant use, they can get worse. They’re doing your son a huge disservice to him in not encouraging his use of glasses. This could just make him feel ashamed, or embarassed that he even has them.
-1.5 is very annoying to have to deal with without glasses, so it’s just mean to encourage this. Your partner should want your son to have correct vision, not for their mother to be ‘right’.
So two medical professionals (school nurse and optician) have tested his eye sight and noticed there’s a problem. Optician has done in depth testing to identify the problem and issue prescription glasses. By all means get a third opinion but I would be concerned that your wife is taking your MIL’s side rather than listening to a trained professional. If your son doesn’t wear his glasses his eye sight will deteriorate faster. He will struggle at school if he can’t see the board and probably get headaches from eye strain. He also is getting the message loud and clear from mum and grandma that he doesn’t need to wear them, so he’s likely to be more lax in taking them out with him. MIL needs to keep her nose out and wife needs to listen to reason and act in her son’s best interest.
NTA unless you don’t tell your MIL to mind her own business.
I needed glasses in public school. Never got them till I was 26. I suffered major migraines, eye strain ect I also suffered in school because I couldn’t read the board, pick up anything done on the other side of the classroom.
I was also a “klutz” because I couldn’t see properly and got multiple injuries because of that.
My eyes are also so much worse now then what they would have been because the problem was ignored.
NTA. take MIL with you!! she won’t believe what you say, so you better take her with you so she can talk to the doctor. tell the nurses before hand that the doctor can be as rude as they feel necessary when speaking to MIL.
and ask questions like “what will happen if my son isn’t able to wear his glasses, will that improve his eyesight?” (since she keeps taking his glasses).
NTA. -1.6 is quite a significant prescription for such a young child. Your partner and MIL are doing him a disservice by “forgetting” his glasses.
I was prescribed glasses at 7 – I hated them. I didn’t wear them for the entire 6 weeks of the summer holiday. When I went back to school in September, I had to wear them; THE HEADACHES WERE EXCRUCIATING! I had to go back to the optometrist to get re-tested, and the glasses I’d had issued less than 6 months previously were no longer suitable – I had to have a whole new prescription, because I had strained my eyes so much by refusing to wear my glasses. Now, as an adult, I can better judge when I can do without my glasses, but as a kid I didn’t care that stuff in the distance was fuzzy (I thought it was normal), and I just sat closer to the TV or held my book closer. Your MIL is an idiot, and so is your wife, to a degree. Neither are doing your son any favours. Did you get the same sort of nonsense when the other child was prescribed glasses? If not, why not? And if not, why is it an issue for this child to wear glasses but not the other one? None of this makes any sense.
NTA for looking after your son’s eye health!
It’s your prerogative as a Dad to be an asshole when it comes to sticking up for your children.
My mother was/is like that – denial queen and made my sisters who needed glasses suffer so much.
Massive trigger this is. It amounts to abuse and my sisters struggle to have a relationship with them (of course 100s of other issues – but this is on the list too and they haven’t forgotten). Let your wife know even when your son is 50 plus he will remember that mom was not responsible and tried to gaslight him. My sister is 52 – she remembers it all and it all hurts.
NTA – if he can’t see the board, he’s missing out on necessary instruction in class.