Excessive Screen Time Risks Triggering Squint in Children
Excessive use of gadgets can increase the risk of squint, or strabismus. This was conveyed by paediatric ophthalmology and strabismus consultant Dr Lely Retno Wulandari.
Dr Lely explained that when a child stares at a gadget screen for too long, the eyes are continuously forced to see at close range. This condition makes the accommodation system, the eye’s mechanism for maintaining focus, work continuously.
This condition can worsen refractive errors, which are vision disorders such as farsightedness and nearsightedness. Refractive errors that are uncorrected or become more severe then risk triggering squint in children.
“Gadgets will trigger squint in children who have a tendency towards myopia or nearsightedness. So excessive gadget exposure can worsen myopia. Why? Because the child only focuses on seeing at close range continuously, so the eyeball can become longer. So squint is the complication,” said Dr Lely during an interview after the launch of the JEC Strabismus Surgery Centre in Jakarta on Monday (10/8/2026).
According to Dr Lely, in children with hypermetropia, a condition where the eyeball is shorter than normal, excessive accommodation work can trigger inward squint, or esotropia. Meanwhile, in children with myopia, especially if the minus prescription increases excessively, it can trigger outward squint, or exotropia.
“So I ask for parents’ attention to limit children’s gadget use time to help prevent squint,” said Dr Lely.
To reduce the risk of squint in children, Dr Lely advised parents to apply the 20-20 rule. This means that every 20 minutes of using a gadget, the child is advised to rest for 20 seconds.
“During that rest, the child should look at distant objects, about 20 feet away, or look towards the sky,” said Dr Lely.
In addition to providing breaks during gadget use, parents also need to pay attention to the duration of a child’s gadget use in one day. Children under two years of age are not advised to be exposed to gadgets, except when making video calls with family, and even then only for a short time.
For children aged two years and above, gadget use should be limited to around one to two hours a day. As the child grows older, this duration can be adjusted and may reach around three hours.
“So parents must not be careless when making rules. For example, many parents nowadays do not allow their children to use gadgets on ordinary days, but on weekends the children may use gadgets continuously. That should not be allowed, because it needs to be limited according to the child’s age,” she said.
Besides gadget use, there are several other factors that also increase the risk of strabismus or squint in children. The first factor is genetics. A child may have a risk of developing squint if there is a family history of squint, whether in the parents or grandparents.