To be worried she is colour blind.

[Musereader]

Dd is just over 3, (a september birthday) and she talks quite well and is counting to 10 and identifies animals and shapes knows what writing is but can't read.

She reverses blue and yellow. Has no problem with green but thinks purple is red orange, brown and pink are fine.

I know colour blindness in girls is rare 0.5% as compared to 8% in boys, and blue yellow (tritonomaly) is rarest. My sight is fine, as good as you can get. I did not know of any problems with her dad.

For parents of colourblind children, how soon did you notice?

Did anybody have a child that confused colours that is now fine?

How soon could she be tested and is there a way of figuring it out by looking at or counting the colour cones that a professional can do?

Perhaps she’s just getting her colours confused rather not seeing them. Does that make sense? She’s only 3 so bit early to tell

Would it help if she could match colours without naming them? So give her three yellow objects, three red and 3 blue. And make 3 circles. Ask her to put it on the right coloured circle. If she can do that then you know she can identify colours correctly without using any words to identify the colour. You can then make this game more complex. If she struggles with this then maybe go to the GP? Naming them correctly might be a second order worth after that.

She is 3! She is getting her words mixed up

My dd was pretty much non- verbal at 3. She did have speech therapy but fitted the cliche of she'll talk when she's ready. She did, and how!!!

Yes, match different shades of the same colours. There's a colourblind guy who does this on YouTube with m&ms. He groups the red and greens randomly together.

I didn't think females could be colour blind?

I get the words yellow and orange mixed up all the time. No idea why, I can recognise the colours I just call them the wrong name. She's only three - there's a lot of new words running round her head. I'm 51 so really no excuse.

@thatmustbenigelwiththebrie yes they can, my sister is. We noticed it when she was reasonably young. But her dad is also colour blind

I am colour blind and female. My dd at 3 would confuse colours I was worried she would be colour blind but she isn't. She was tested probably around the age of 6 or 7. They have to follow some lines or something at the Opticians. So need to be able to understand the instructions.
I also have 2 ds that are both extremely colour blind.
It's really interesting because all 3 of us that are colour blind have perfect vision. My dd who isn't colour blind can hardly see out of her right eye.
Just to reassure you colour blindness hasn't held me back in my life. It isn't holding my sons back so far. We have told school so they are aware. The only problem we did find was interactive whiteboards sometimes when a teacher uses a certain colour it makes the writing move around the whiteboard which then makes it very difficult to read. My son just puts his hand up and let's the teacher know.

Children can have free eye tests from 3 (they get them to point to which pictures they see, rather than reading letters). I know that my daughter did a colour-blindness test at the same time. Book an eye test for next time you're in town. I don't know if they're all equally good with littlies - we went to Boots back then.

There are colour blindness tests for toddlers online.

She may just be getting the colour names mixed up at that age though.

Dd mixed up red and yellow for years. Until she was about 7/8. She’d say the sun was red. She’s fine now.

Tbh it didn’t occur to me that it was anything other than a small child.

Colour is an abstract concept (what’s blue to you may be green to me...it’s difficult to quantify) so it’s not usually firmly fixed until a child is almost 4 in a lot of cases so I wouldn’t be worried yet. I’d be more worried if she thought everything looked the same...

A small child mistake

No point going to the GP. They won’t be able to diagnose it. Best to take her to an optician, though not all opticians will have the test that can differentiate tritanopia from red-green colour blindness (the City test). She also at this point may be a little bit young to get a reliable result on this test.