2 year started confusing yellow and green

[Motherofone22]

My nearly 2.5 year old has recently (I’d say the past few weeks) started confusing yellow with green. Pretty much everytime.

He will ask for his ‘yellow cup’ even though it’s green, and this is when I noticed he has got it the wrong way round. Now whenever I ask him what colour this is (being yellow or green) most of the time he will say the opposite colour.

I’m concerned because he initially never used to get these mixed up. I’m pretty sure he knew his colours before he turned 2 so it is a bit of a shock to me how now he is struggling to identify between yellow and green. He knows all his other colours and can even distinguish between different shades so I.e. he will tell me ‘that grey is a darker shade than the other one.’ It’s just yellow and green he keeps getting muddled up.

I have his two year check coming up so will mention to them but in the mean time just wanted to pop on and ask if any other parents had similar experiences and what the outcome was? Also, is there anything I can do to help? X

Could he be colour blind?

Ditto on the colourblindness. Worth a trip to the opticians.

Definitely sounds like colour blindness. Those were the colours my ex bf who was colourblind got wrong ...
I am sure there's some easy tests you can try ?

I was absolutely convinced my DS was colourblind at age 2/3, he always got the same colours mixed up. He’s now 10 and definitely isn’t colourblind. My younger DC age 4 also gets two colours muddled, pink and yellow, but I’m pretty confident they will be fine too. I wouldn’t be too concerned.

I would suspect colourblindness -my son mixes up bright yellow and bright/lime green consistently. He is red/ green colourblind

I'd suggest you take him to the opticians rather than waiting for a two year check, particularly if it's a new thing? I agree with other posters that colour blindness is certainly a possibility.

Thanks guys for the comments & advice.

I will look into getting an eye test and see, but from what I’m aware colour blind diagnosis aren’t given until age 4/5 so maybe he’s too young for me to worry!

I have spoken to nursery who’ve said lots of 2 year old’s don’t know their colours yet so are not concerned at all, but as I mentioned it’s more the fact that he previously did consistently get them right rather than him not knowing them at all which is different thing.

My son had a problem with yellow, we realised it wasn’t his ability to recognise the colour but due to heating problems he couldn’t differentiate between y and l so would say mellow. At nursery they would always correct him so he got fed up of everyone trying to correct him ( my MIL was the worst). He didn’t understand why he was saying it wrong so would just say blue instead.
Once he had grommets fitted his speech problems disappeared overnight, we also found that he turned the volume down on the TV and started to respond when not facing us. I’m sure that mums on the school gate thought I was just very shouty.

Both of mine are colourblind - even though they call it red/green, on a day to day basis, bright orange/lime green are the same, some yellows and greens are the same, purple doesn’t really exist - it’s just blue.

They can both differentiate between primary colours (including red and green) just fine - secondary colours are harder.

Don’t worry too much if your DS is colourblind, it’s very common, and aside from some weird colouring in choices, really doesn’t make a massive difference. Except for yesterday, when DS1 realised he couldn’t tell the difference between different fruit pastille flavours and really hates the lime ones.