Why does my baby have sticky or itchy eyes?

Why we looked for drops

Her eyes looked a little itchy. Nothing dramatic — no redness, no swelling, she was perfectly happy. There are allergies in the family, so our assumption was allergic and our instinct was to find something gentle at the pharmacy.

A baby's eye is not the place to try something mild and see. Many pharmacy eye drops are not made for infants. We were told we could use sterile saline or cooled boiled water for gentle cleaning, but we asked before putting anything in her eye.

The blocked tear duct clue

This is the common one and it is reassuring once you know the picture. The tear duct that drains into the nose is very narrow in a baby and often not fully open. Tears pool, the eye waters, and overnight the discharge dries into a sticky lid.

The giveaway is that the white of the eye stays white. One eye, worse in the morning, clean and happy baby, white eye — that is usually a duct, and most clear up on their own somewhere in the first year.

Everything in this guide comes down to one distinction: is the white of the eye white?

A white eye with sticky discharge is the common, dull, self-resolving situation. A red eye, a swollen or hot lid, redness creeping onto the skin around the eye or towards the cheek, an eye she won't open, or real pain — that is a different thing entirely and it goes in the red column above. Infection around the eye in a small baby is taken seriously and quickly, and rightly so.

When the eye needs checking

Ari rubbed her face constantly for a stretch and we read it as irritation. Mostly it was tiredness, sometimes it was hunger, and quite a lot of it was simply having discovered that her hands reached her face.

What separated them was timing. Rubbing at the end of a wake window, with yawning, was sleep. Rubbing with a blocked nose during a cold was congestion.