I have begun to think that my son might be color blind. He turned 3 in Sept. & still doesn't know any colors. He can count well & is starting to know his shapes but can't name 1 color yet. I stay at home with him & have worked on his colors for a while now with no success. Any suggestions on what else to try or info on when is too young to be tested for color blindness??
I have read that not knowing colors at 3 is totally ok. If he knows letters, shapes, or numbers, there are lots of color blindness tests you can find with different things for him to identify. Good Luck! :)
There are real easy special books that they use at the eye dr's office to test for color blindness. You may want to contact your dr and see if they can do it on a child as young as your son. If so, its not that big of a deal, my husband is color blind and he has lived a pretty normal life, other than I have to lay out his clothes for him and mate the socks..LOL
Good Luck
My son is now 5, and did the same thing. Both his older brother and sister knew most of them by 3, but he did not. He simply just wasn't interested at the time. He is in pre-school now, and is perfectly normal and fine. No need to worry!
S., do a search online and you will find great color blindness tests. There is one I recently recommended to another mom that I used on my own 3 year old grandson. Instead of numbers, it asks them to recognize shapes.
I have been wondering this about my daughter, so I made color flash cards for her. I made sure to use the same shape for all of them so there wouldn't be any confusion about the shapes and so she wouldn't memorize the colors by shape. Hopefully, this will help her learn or help us pinpoint whether or not she really is color blind.
Hello Stacie, I am an optician. Has he ever had his eyes tested? You would be surprised how many moms (including myself) that thought their childs eyes were fine and they needed some assistance. Good luck
Sounds like he's too young. Does he know any colors? A clue to color-blindness is when they know all the colors consistently but consistently mix up 2 colors. It sounds from your post that he just doesn't know any colors consistently. It's not a big deal... remember that when we were kids they didn't expect 5 year olds entering kindergarten to know colors yet! It's something they taught in kindergarten. If he's counting and knows shapes then he's probably fine. Kids work on one thing at a time... once he knows his shapes he might be more likely to start with colors.
A way to test instead of just asking is to pretend to be dumb. Kids love that, especially that age, because it makes them feel so smart. Point out the green dog or blue leaf and see what his reaction is. If he knows his colors, he'll smile or laugh. If he doesn't react, then laugh yourself and say it was joke and tell him it's actually a brown dog, etc.
i would give him a little more time, my friend has a 4 year old that just started to learn her colors, they were having the same concern, but with work and just patience she is now correctly identifying colors with no problem. If you are concerned i would suggest that you take him to a pediatric clinic associated with a good college of Optometry. I used to work at the OSU College of Optometry and they were amazing with kids, and it is amazing how young they can test for things! The american pediatric association actually recommends that all children see an optometrist before their first birthday, at preschool age (3) and again before they start kindergarten. The earlier you can detect problems in children, the more likely they are to be able to treat them!
My twins are going to be 4 in February, and I am suspecting the same thing. They have a colorblind uncle, so I have had the opportunity to ask him a lot of questions about it. Just because your are colorblind does not mean you see black and white. I did not realize this is the only reason I mention this, because I was unsure of it before talking to the uncle. There are just a few colors he mixes up, and it is mostly a hue thing. Like orange and red sometimes look alike, but if you have a bright orange and a dull red, he can see that. He mixes up browns and greens a lot. I told my boys teachers that I was getting suspicious of this and they had them sort different colored pipe cleaners at school, which would give you the first idea that your son is getting that their are different colors. He may just not care yet to know them if he is working on shapes and counting. However in the case of the pipe cleaners, the two colors I think they have trouble with are browns and greens. The pipe cleaners were a dark hunter green from what I could tell of the pictures, and almost a tan. Well, a dark color and a light color are not going to look the same to him so he is going to be able to sort them out. What clued me in to my sons was one day they got a dark green and dark brown article of clothing and got excited because they were the same color. Then I did find a toddler color blind test on the internet, if I find the website I will email it to you, it has shapes instead of numbers, and they could find all the shapes except the brown shapes in the green background. They couldn't even see it when I took my finger over the shape to tell them where it was. So, I called our eye doctor and they can do a test on them at age 3 1/2 so they can probably check your son as well. We have not had our appointment yet but I can let you know.
Most people who are color blind only have problems with a few of the colors/blends not all of them. My grandfather had problems with greens/blues and my brother has problems with anything in the red family save purples. Didn't stop my grandfather from being a landscape artist whose paintings sold very well or my brother from being a Lt. Col. in the military and an officer in the Sheriff's Dept. I would think, and I could be wrong, that he is too young to be tested and if he just turned 3 you are worrying too much at this point. He counts and is recognizing and identifying some shapes, might just be on overload since he is still learning the language we speak and the meaning of different words and how to use them as well. This might be an area he just doesn't want to handle at this point. So you show him and Orange, tell him it is round, let him taste the orange and now he knows what it tastes like and then you tell him it is orange and he settles on the shape instead of the color. Tangelos and Tangerines are also orange and tast similiar. Some grapefruit have a orangish cast as well. And sometimes fresh oranges are still greenish. This could be the problem and why he is settling more on shape than color at this point. Just an example. Michaelangelo (sp) was what we call color blind and did very well.
I also questioned around age 2 if my son was color blind. He would do his numbers, alphabet but when it came to colors he would get them wrong, almost guessingwas. I spoke with a teacher at his pre school and they said he was fine and it was ok at 2 not to know his colors. Well, today we signed him up for kindergarten he is now 5 1/2, and we were informed he is color blind. I have made an appointment with the optomitrist to get another opinion, but we have tried the tests online an he continues to fail certain colors. I remember being tough on him because I knew he could learn the colors and now I feel bad realizing what the issue is. I think he has learned to compensate, so if I ask what color something is he sees a color which is red to me but not to him, he thinks "mommy says this shade is RED" and will answer red. Good luck, I hope this helps. I am now trying to learn as much as I can, so I can better understand what things look like to him.
Jen
I don't know anything about color-blindness...
but maybe it's the way you're teaching about colors that your son finds uninteresting and he's just a little behind in picking up on color names?? I think it's a hard concept for some kids. You ask a question about an object, and they have to know if you're asking what it is, or what shape, or what texture, or what color, or what sound it makes, or what it is used for..... all pertaining to the same object. At a young age, I would think that it's hard to imagine that there are so many answers for one unchanging thing. Maybe your son justs needs another year before he has a grasp on all those types of things. ...Just an opinion :)
With my last 2 children, I teach them colors associated with familiar objects. When they would see a red firetruck, they would answer that it was 'red like an apple' , or a yellow cup would get the answer 'yellow like a banana.' I took 10 familiar object and worked on their colors, and then they were the reference for everything else. When I picked up their clean shirt for the day, I would say 'what color is this? and if they seemed stumped, I would say 'it looks just like the grass' and they would say with excitment 'green like the grass'. I think it helped them see the colors in their head to make an association. I noticed that my last 2 learned colors quicker than my others after using this kind of association.
All children are different, and learn at different paces, so give him some time and don't make him fit into a sterotype :)
I hope it isn't color-blindness - - please update if you find out anything! God bless!
Is color blindness in your family? Are your father or any of your uncles colorblind? I only ask because color blindness passes from the mother to her children, mostly to her sons. It has to do with the XY chromosomes. Women who carry the colorblindness gene have a 50/50 shot of giving it to their sons, I think. I think it's a 1 in 4 shot of passing it on to daughters, so it's very rare for women to be colorblind. My husband is red/green colorblind, I think. I'm not sure about that one. I just know that if two colors are very close in shade, he has a difficult time distinguishing them. His mother is not colorblind, and neither are his sisters, but one of his mother's brothers is colorblind, and they just found out that our nephew (hubby's sister's son) is colorblind. So, basically, if any of the men in your family are colorblind or if your mother carries the gene, it may have passed to you to carry on to your son. Don't hold me to that, but I think that's how it works. My nephew is 6, and I think they found out very recently when they did a standard colorblindness test where he couldn't see the number or the square in a particular circle of colored dots. Not sure if that would work for your 3 year old, but I'm sure there are tests for younger children.
Hey S.,
My husband is red green deficient, and sees some color, but not all of them so it is confusing for him to identify what color things are, so he avoids it altogether. It just drives him crazy to be wrong! There are simple tests for this. My kids have developmental eye issues, so we see a developmental optometrist (they test how your kids use their eyes, and not just how well you see) They can probably help you if you are really worried. Until he goes to school or drives, there really is not too much concern, unless you just want to know.
M.
I don't know anything about color blindness, but I can tell you that my son turned 3 in April and only now knows 1 or 2 colors. And only when he wants too - most of the time he just doesn't want to make the effort. Everything is red or green when he's not in the mood.
Also, my brother had to wait on going to kindergarten b/c he still didn't know his colors at 5. He didn't know and didn't care that he didn't know! I wouldn't worry yet - just give him time and see.
