Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Age or Ability Specific Forums Pre-school This is a really odd question...

Colour blind family here.

We have the odd situation that both my father and my husband are colour deficient, my father is protanope (completely red blind) and my husband protanomalous (red deficient, he needs good lighting to tell colours apart).
To clear up a popular misconception: there is no such thing as red green blind, but red blind and green blind have very similar results as the spectrum between the red and the green cones shifts only very slightly: they all see the world in blue and mustard ie yellow, orange, red, green, brown are all different shades of mustard to them, only for red blind people red looks darker, almost black. It's not like some colours are just gray, like black and white TV.

So both of our boys had 50 percent chance of red blindness (deficient X chromosome on my side of the family) and our daughter had a 50 percent chance of being red deficient (deficient X chromosome on my husbands side).

I knew early on what to look for: it's not about not knowing the names or mislabeling colours (apparently, it's normal to mislabel red and green up to four years) but about mismatching them, eg in board games with colour dice, and mismatching very specific combinations (green/orange, green/brown, blue/purple, and for red deficient kids red/black).

So when our oldest knew all the colours at two and matched almost all of them correctly, but consistently mixed up and mismatched these specific combinations, I decided to have him tested. (I test drove the bright green and bright orange snails from the snals pace race game which he kept mixing up by my colour blind father, asked him whether he cold tell a difference and he stared at them for the longest time and finally shook his head, so I knew those two were a good indicator!). Of course everyone kept telling me that it was all normal and you couldn't test kids this young blah blah blah.

Fast forward to vision testing at the university eye clinic where they insisted on doing a full vision work up before ever showing two year old DS the colour plates, with all the moving and asking and waiting around that entailed, and when DS was thoroughly exhausted and fed up they showed him the plates with the red bunnies or flowers or whatever it was dotted in red on green dotted backgrounds.

DS just stared at them and clammed up so they all whispered at me "can he even say these words?". I snapped back at them "he can say them all, he's just fed up now, he's two!". After which DS, still mute, correctly matched all the colour plates to their black and white equivalent by pointing.
So we came home with the result that DS had perfectly normal colour vision and I didn't believe a word of it.

Turned out that DS is very colour deficient, but not quite to the point my father is (phenotypes vary even though he's inherited his genetics) but extremely visually perceptive, and by taking his time (being a perfectionist HG+ kid he wanted to get this *right*) did manage to matche the tiny differences in brightness between the dots on the colour vision plates to the black and white equivalents provided.

But was by then too exhausted and fed up to explain.
So much for testing two year olds.

DD has normal colour vision.
With DS2, we have a hard time telling because he is so severely speech delayed, but he appears to know most names (grabs the right colour toy when told to) and to match colours correctly.