Colour Awareness

[Eve]

My DS is 3 1/2 and is learning really well, he can count to 20 in 2 languages, beginning to write, pretends to read his books etc. But he has absoultly no clue when it comes to colours.

I have been trying to teach him colours by all the usual play methods, looking at traffic lights etc but he is just not geting them at all.

I made a comment in his pre-school the other day about it and they said they had noticed as well as he struggles with some of the colour games they have.

I am wondering if it is colour blindness, red/green colour blindness runs in my family, but does anyone have experience of full colour blindness.

Can he read numbers? If so, there are some colour blindness tests here

If he's able to recognise written numbers, it may give you an indication of any problem as it tests for both red/green and total cloour blindness. You may be able to print them out and ask him to draw over the numbers he sees with a pen.

this one uses shapes.

These tests may give you an idea about whether you need to take him to an expert for proper testing.

Interestingly enough , one site says "The most common form of color vision deficiency results in the inability to perceive shades of red and green.
Color vision deficiency is transferred genetically, most often from mothers to their sons" So, as red/green colour deficiency runs in your family, there is a chance your son could have inherited it.

My husband is red/green color blind so I have researched it a little. It comes through the mother (it is attached to the Y gene so generally only males get it). One thing I've noticed with my husband is that he has trouble with colors that contain red and green. This is particularly noticeable with purple which he sees as blue (doesn't see the red component). This resulted in a rather funny incident when I first met him. His favorite shirt was this very pale purple which was very out of character for him (he's a tough guy builder). I eventually discovered that he thought the shirt was blue. When I told him what the real color was, he never wore it again.
I wouldn't worry too much about the color blindness. It certainly doesn't seem to hinder my husband in any way. And because he's in complete male denial of his color blindness, it doesn't even stop him from picking paint colors etc.

Eve - he should certainly be able to match colours at this age. So, if you, say build a yellow duplo tower, and a red one, and a blue one, then give him a brick he should be able to match it to the right tower. If he can't, I'd have a word with your health visitor or GP.

Can he look at pictures, and find small things, and discuss details about the pictures with you? A friend at school had full colour blindness, and basically only saw in shades of grey. This is actually a very serious visual impairment, and he struggled to read, draw graphs, etc.

eve, my nearly three and a half year old son can recognise most colours, I think, however I can never be sure because he often refuses to answer colour questions.

Engaging him in colour games or asking him direct questions about colours results in a blank look.

However if I ask him in passing to get my red book or take a purple sweet from the bag, he will usually do it. This might not apply in your case, but if you find your son won't give you direct answers, I'd try other ways of getting him to make a colour choice, just to be sure.

His father is colour blind (red/green) so I am still not entirely convinced he knows all his colours. Time will tell.

Tigermoth, mine is exactly the same. Refuses to answer any colour related questions or alternatively answers "blue" to everything. Yet will happily match colours and correctly identify pink taxi's and so on in the street.

I've just discovered that, not only is my father red/green colour blind but so are DHs brother and father. It never really occurred to me before that DS1 or 2 may inherit this. DS1 is clearly fine, DS2 is a complete mystery (in more ways than one).

DS knows all his colours really well (he's 4.5) apart from red and green - these two still get mixed up when it comes to naming them. I did worry a bit about CB but he can clearly distinguish them (sorting colours etc) so I've stopped worrying now. He is improving but I wonder if perhaps this is one of the harder colours to learn or something. If you son can distinguish the colours either via the tests mentioned below or from building lego towers etc then I don't think you've got anything to worry about. Its just a glitch in his "knowledge" at the moment

Maybe there are degrees of CBness. At the minor end, a child may have trouble learning red/green but eventually gets the hang of it and at the top end, they never learn to tell the difference.

It's a really bizarre thing to think about. As a non CB person red and green are so completely different.

soupdragon, colorblindness comes almost exclusively through the mother, so if there isn't colorblindness in your family, it is unlikely that your ds will have it. And yes there are degrees of colorblindness. Red and Green are opposites in the color spectrum (it's something to do with sin waves and cancelling each other out i think) which is why blindness happens to both at the same time.