Are you born with colour blindness, or does it develop?

[fisilhohoho]

I thought ds was colour blind when he was very tiny, just learning to grab. He has a fabric chart with 7 different coloured balloons on it and he always grabbed 5 but left the purple and dark blue ones behind (on a blue background). He is now nearly 2 and talks and understands a lot. He knows all the names of the colours and clearly understands the concept. But he will pick up crayon after crayon or sock after sock saying completely the wrong colour and repeating very seriously the correct colour when I tell him, only to get it wrong again a minute later. This is totally different to his memory and abilities with anything else (he can say the name of every book in a 8 book boxed set just by the picture on the cover).

And if it is possible that he's colour blind, does it matter? I have colour blind friends who are very successful, so I know it's not a big problem, but is there anything I should/could do about it, or do I wait until he is 7 or 9 and has the tests at school?

Colour blindness is something you're born with, it's carried on the X gene. Boys are much more likely to have it, and they get it from their Mums.

I know each of my DS's has a 50% chance of being colour blind (red-green), as my dad is. I'm pretty sure DS1 is.

It's not a very big deal, and I don't think there's anything you can do about it.

That being said, I know DS1 can tell the rest of his colours apart, but it took a while, I think it often does. I don't think your son's behaviour indicates colour blindess. (And, as an aside, colour-blind people don't generally see the whole world in black and white, they just get a couple of colours muddled, most commonly red and green.)

Does colour blindness run in your family?

no, I'm not sure I know of any colour blind people in the family. Thanks for that info.

my brother swears that he is now colourblind and developed it in the past few years, he is 28.
We all think he's a bit mad - I did think it was something you were born with

I've never heard of it developing in later life either. It doesn't actually have to be X linked, it can be recessive, in which case you wouldn't necessarily have any family members with it. However, nearly 2 is still quite young to remember colours, so I really wouldn't worry yet. My ds was very good with letters and numbers early on, so perfectly bright, but colour recognition lagged behind. I would just wait and see- as NotQuiteCockney says, though it's not impossible it would be unusual not to be able to distinguish any colours.

I seem to remember reading something about tiny babies only seeing in black and white, then black,white and red. Their vision generally isn't so good when they're tiny (I read it in relation to historical linguistics. Some languages only have words for black and white, some only for black white and red, but never black, white and some other colour only - fascinating.)

But anyway - colours are a hard concept to grasp i think. Dd gets hers wrong a lot. For some reason she always seems to get orange right though.

The only cases of coulour blinness that I have heared of developing later in life were cause by brain damage. I have read of patients who have lost the ability to 'decode' colour information when the bit of the brain that does this job is starved of oxygen, ie if someone has had serious carbon monoxide poisoning.

Your 'bread and butter' colourblindness is genetic and is present I think as soom as colour vision occurs.

to be pedantic - its actuall 'colour defective' true colour blindness (blacks, greys) is quite rare.

My dad is cd and I passed it ds1 but ds2 is ok.
he has trouble with blues, greens, and reds. Primary colours are fine - its the mixes they get muddled with like maroon (red mix). Unlike Christie's dh he has no trouble with grass

The case that I mentioed was a full colour blindness, and as I said very rare and not the 'normal' cause

I actually had a boyfriend with genuine colour blindness. When he went to school his mother had to put stickers on all his crayons with the name of the colour for him so that he could do grass green and so on :(

Ive been colour blind as long as I can remember. It was picked up through painting green hair at 6!
I have a job separating green/brown and blue/purple. Often I can identify the colours but cant name them.
This leads to a very lazy attidude towards colour, all walls in my house are white!
Took a degree in electrical engineering, which was interesting at times!

With regard to jobs, there are certain ones you can't do if you are colour blind/defective - like police force or RAF. My brother is colour defective and is a graphic designer so it can't be too much of a hinderance!

Have you taken him to have his eyes tested yet? Ask around to find an optometrist who is good with tinies. It is free for children and they may be able to check his colour vision at that age if he understands a lot.

In any case if he can't complete the colour vision test it will be a good practice run for a follow up test (usually children are seen yearly)and all young children do better second time around as they are more familiar with the surroundings.

It certainly would be useful to have a definitive answer when he starts school so that the teachers are aware. Colour coding is used a lot in schools (reading levels etc ) but the colours used are usually the ones least likely to cause a mix-up with colour deficient. All the same it's best they know when he starts. He won't be the only one in the class as 8-10 percent of boys have some level of colour deficiency (but only one in 230 girls)

The real relevence is with career choice later in life as some carrers totally rule out people with colour deficiency - eg firefighters, pilots, train drivers etc.

P.S. Some eye diseses can cause colour blindness, but they are exceeedingly rare and usually found in the elderly!!

Fisil - my ds2 is 2.2 and is only just starting to get colours right. He will happily hand me a blue car and tell me its yellow. So I say, "yes, blue car", and he'll repeat "blue car", then give it back to me saying "yellow car". I'm 99% sure he's not colourblind, I think its just a development stage that takes time - there are a lot of colours and lots of different shades of colours to distinguish, iykwim.

I was convinced ds1 was colourblind as he was fine with all colours apart from green and red - just couldn't tell them apart. Doctor said they don't even bother to test until they're around 3 as nothing can be done about it. Ds1 can now distinguish red and green, and although I've not had him formally tested I'm happy that he's not colourblind.

Perhaps its just one of those things.

my fil and two of his brothers are colour blind and if you can get him talking about it , it's hilarious.His problems are with red and green.As far as I can tell he sees them as a sort of sludgy,khaki colour.He thought the rug he had had in living room for years was pink until I told him it was pale green.And when my mil was moaning about some hrrible khaki greeny brown curtains, he commented that they were the same colour as her hair!!!!!

my fil and two of his brothers are colour blind and if you can get him talking about it , it's hilarious.His problems are with red and green.As far as I can tell he sees them as a sort of sludgy,khaki colour.He thought the rug he had had in living room for years was pink until I told him it was pale green.And when my mil was moaning about some hrrible khaki greeny brown curtains, he commented that they were the same colour as her hair!!!!!

There's more than one kind of colour deficinecy. I knew sombody who was green-blue deficient instead of green-red. I once knew a red-green colourblind neurologist. Medical school was apparently a challenge for him; he was unusually completely red-green colourblind. He drove a beige car because he said beige was the only colour that looked like a colour to him.

Thank you for all of these. I used to teach geography, so I've met the fun of colour blindness - try map reading/colour coding diagrams!

I find ds' development fascinating, which is why I've noticed this. How can his memory be so amazing at some things, and so terrible at others? I guess what a lot of people have said is correct - that colour is a very difficult concept and it will take time for him to figure it out.

Meanwhile I will keep chosing his clothes for his to wear (the one time he chose he mixed russet with bright red - yuck!)

My ds2 has some developmental delay and has taken quite a while to learn his colours. He still gets green and blue muddled up and pink and purple. When I mentioned this to the clinical pyschologist she said that some children just don't see a lot of point in naming colours so it they don't try that hard to learn them. Perhaps this is the case with your son and he is ahead with the things he finds more interesting and useful to him.

Is your son able to name e.g. the Thomas the Tank engine engines or the teletubbies or the Fimbles etc. If he can tell them apart, I guess he is able to distinguish his colours just not name them yet. Another way you could test it is to get him to colour match - e.g. put the lids back on felt tip pens that sort of thing (although he may be young to do this anyway).