Colour recognition - what's normal?

[Kmg]

How old was your child when they understood colours? My youngest child is 25 months. He can colour match - i.e. add a red brick to a tower of red bricks - so he's not colour blind. But if I say pass me the red brick, or what colour is the post box, he hasn't a clue. My eldest child could do this sort of thing when he was 18 months. I have no idea which of them is more normal, and whether we should be worrying about the little one. (He also mixes up other words in categories - i.e. regularly confuses different animals, and calls members of one family by any of their names. He also took a long time even to work out mummy and daddy consistently correctly.)

Sorry if I sound paranoid. We spent 2 years being reassured that my eldest son's pronunciation problems would sort themselves out, in due course. This didn't happen, and he is now having intensive speech therapy - which is going very well.

Kmg - My son is exactly the same age and only knows a few colours and gets them muddled up sometimes. He is particularly keen on red and yellow. I've read somewhere that blue and green can be the most difficult to distinguish (don't know if this is true?). As for animals, my son is fairly good, but still gets confused occasionally. At times he also gets people's names muddled, so he has now started to recite them all, one after the other eg mummy/daddy/nanny/grandad, just to cover all possibilities!

Our son is 24 months old and also doesn't seem to understand the concept of colours. We went through a stage where everything was blue (as in "what colour is Daddy?" "Blue!" and now everything is yellow. I can see the beginning of a glimmer of suspicion on his part that there may be a bit more to the colour issue than he thinks but as yet, he shows no recognition.

I read somewhere that children understand nouns first "Mummy! bread!", then verbs "eat!drink!" then adjectives last. Can't remember how old my eldest were, but my youngest is currently 18 mths and he certainly doesn't know them yet, though I must admit I haven't spent a long time teaching him.

kmg, is your littler one ahead of his "normal" age in something else? like physical things? they can go 3 steps forward in one area and just mark time in another for ages; if he can match then he is not colourblind (which tends to affect boys more than girls apparently). mixing up labels for things can go on for ages - but if he knows that all animals are animals, and that all relations are people, for instance, then he understands categories...they have so much to learn in such a short time they do seem to overload sometimes!

i can understand why you are worried but it is maybe a little early for him to be getting all that stuff right - i think your older son might have been actually advanced in this area. when was his last assessment (the little one)? when is his next one? i bet he will have gone a lot further in another few months...good luck anyway - try not to worry! (easy to say i know.)

Thank you all for your reassurance

I had this very discussion with someone today as my son doesn't seem to know his colours or indeed be able to tell if two things are the same colour or not. He's 30 mths and I sat yesterday with him sorting bricks into their respective colours (only four groups) and I would say "what colour is it?" and he would guess wildly, usually getting it right on the third try. Even if I said "this is red. Put it with the other red ones" it was hit or miss whether he got it in the right pile and then I could say "what colour was it?" and he'd still get it wrong. He's very bright at other things and his speech is terrific so maybe I'll hold onto Janh's advice and hope that it's just something that he's at standstill over at present.