'There's Something in My Eye!'

Parenting brings all sorts of unanticipated and quite a few unwelcome problems your way, one example is dealing with foreign objects that get into your children's eyes!  Summer raises the frequency with which that rallying cry goes up: 'There's something in my eye!'.  The warm weather makes for more dust blowing around, and the chance of playing outside more brings higher risk of mucky hands getting dirt into the eyes, or perhaps rubbing eyes whilst in the sand pit will introduce unwanted grit.  Here is some advice to help you deal with the problem:-

• First of all, you must not let your child rub their eye - hard grit rubbed in the eye can cause greater discomfort and there's a high risk that they'll scratch their cornea
• Before taking action, wash your hands to make sure there's no risk of introducing further dirt into the eye
• The eye has a pretty effective flushing mechanism - the first thing to try is to cuddle your child and have them close their eye gently, not tightly, to see whether the eye will flush out any grit with its own lubrication
• If that doesn't work, try flushing the eye yourself: lie your child down with their head tilted towards the affected eye and pour cold water into it - this is uncomfortable but likely to yield a positive result
• If you can see the grit, or perhaps it's an eyelash, then you can try dabbing it very gently with a cotton bud or with the very corner of a tissue, with luck the foreign object will attach itself to the tissue and be extracted - take care only to touch the white of the eye, never the pupil or iris
• Never touch or poke the eye with anything hard, you could cause irreparable damage to the eye

If your attempts don't work, or for anything more serious than a bit of grit or eyelash, then seek medical advice at once.  Your child will be in considerable discomfort and will need constant reassurance that you are with them.  They could be suffering panic and confusion so you must comfort them throughout their ordeal. Hopefully they will recover as soon as the object is remove and continue playing as they were before as if nothing had ever happened!