how to diagnose colour blindness in toddler?

[nanana]

My 2.5yo is able to recognise purple, pink, orange, green, black. But she can't seems to differentiate red,yellow, blue. She will recognise these colours as GREEN. Is it too early to tell if she is colour blind? I would think that RED is a very strong colour that one would easily tell the difference among other colours. Your thought?

[ecureilx]

My 2.5yo is able to recognise purple, pink, orange, green, black. But she can't seems to differentiate red,yellow, blue. She will recognise these colours as GREEN. Is it too early to tell if she is colour blind? I would think that RED is a very strong colour that one would easily tell the difference among other colours. Your thought?

didn't you ask the pediatrician ?

they do tests ...

[JR8]

Go to your doctor ....

[BedokAmerican]

It doesn't mean she's color blind. She might not be as interested in learning some colors as you'd like her to be. My son is about the same age as your daughter and he only recognizes blue, red and green and could care less about the others or he'll just say something is one of those colors when it's not. At this age it's hard to get kids to focus. That's especially the case if you've recently moved, changed preschools, changed caregivers, etc. Give her some time. She'll eventually learn all the colors.

[nanana]

Thanks BedokAMerican for reassuring. Red, blue and green are common few colours that a kid first learn..but my child started to recognise those fancy colours first (purple, pink, orange...etc). so I started to worry if she is selective colour blind...but like you said, perhaps she is just not interested to learn her red, blue and yellow yet.

is your child attending any pre-school/playgroup program?

[BedokAmerican]

He was attending preschool/playgroup at one of the local playhouses but we recently moved back to the USA (hence the odd hour this message is being posted) and enrolled him in preschool/daycare here 3x per week.

Another thing about the focusing issue, before we moved, I was trying to teach him lowercase letters (because he knew the uppercase ones) and he was getting a few and seemed interested. But after moving, he had no interest in wanting to learn lowercase letters or learn anything because he was too busy exploring and intrigued about being in a new place. Sitting down with a book was out of the question, whereas he'd do this regularly in Singapore.

But in the past week, he's started counting lots of things and trying to recite numbers 11-20 so we're focusing on that. I tried a few days ago to get him to look at a letters book with me and he didn't want to do that, despite Sesame Street's Elmo (his favorite character) being in the book. He's going through a phase now where he'd rather sing nursery songs and count. I'm sure he'll come back to letters eventually.

I'm guessing it's same way your daughter will come back to learning the rest of the colors. I'm not a doctor, but if colorblindness doesn't run in your family and if she knows the difference between pink and purple, then she's probably not colorblind. She might say everything else is "green" because green is an easy word to say or maybe she likes the way it sounds. Maybe she learned pink, purple and orange first because lots of her clothes and toys are those colors? You could bring it up at her next doctors appointment/well visit/check up, but it probably doesn't make sense to schedule a special appointment for this issue.

Also, don't let anyone make you think there's something wrong. I felt like when I was in Singapore that there was sometimes this unspoken competition between some parents about how "advanced" their babies were and it was so sad. Every child develops at their own rate.

[taxico]

My 2.5yo is able to recognise purple, pink, orange, green, black. But she can't seems to differentiate red,yellow, blue. She will recognise these colours as GREEN. Is it too early to tell if she is colour blind? I would think that RED is a very strong colour that one would easily tell the difference among other colours. Your thought?

don't worry just yet. wait a while longer... another year or two (when she's much more communicative with her ped).

taxico, M.D.