Color blindness is a condition in which a person is unable to differentiate between one or more colors. Symptoms of this disorder can be either hereditary or acquired. We will tell you in the article how to identify this deviation, understand why it occurs and whether it is possible to fight it.
In this article
- What is color blindness?
- Who was the first to identify color blindness?
- Signs of color blindness
- How to determine the form of color blindness in a child?
- Is it possible to detect color blindness in 3 year old children?
- How to determine color blindness in a 6 year old child?
- How to determine color blindness at home?
- How can color blindness be determined using a test?
- Genetic tests
- How should parents of a colorblind child behave?
What is color blindness?
Color blindness is a disease characterized by a decrease or complete loss of the ability to distinguish colors. Very often, people who suffer from this pathology cannot distinguish between red and blue colors. Each photoreceptor of the retina of the eye is “responsible” for a certain shade. There are three types of pigments:
- red;
- blue;
- yellow.
They are the basis of the spectrum. Only with their use can you get other shades, for example, orange, blue or burgundy. By the way, many artists also suffered from color blindness, including: Vincent Van Gogh, Mikhail Vrubel, Ilya Repin. Photoreceptors are located in the center of the retina, which is called the “macula.” Each of them contains a special pigment. The amount of pigment determines how the retina of the eye will distinguish colors. If the pigment content is disrupted or one of them is completely absent, then the perception of color also changes. Color blindness can develop to absolute color blindness, when a person loses the ability to perceive all shades and colors.
What to do if your baby gets confused?
Often, despite all the efforts of parents to develop color perception in their child, everything ends in vain. The baby continues to confuse colors or completely forgets their names. Then parents turn to specialists with the question of at what age the child distinguishes colors and how to solve the problem.
The reasons why this happens in children can be very different. Let's look at the most common of them:
- Every child develops differently. One child puts together sentences at one and a half years old, the other is silent at two and a half years old. You cannot compare all children, each is individual.
- Late training. The sooner you start the learning process with your baby, the faster he will master basic information.
- Colorblindness is a fairly rare disease that affects only boys. If neither parent has the disease, it is unlikely that the child will develop it.
Some children easily remember colors, others - shapes and sizes, therefore, when teaching a child, you should be patient, do not press or force, sooner or later he will master them anyway. In addition, with any interaction with the baby, not only the result is important, but also the time spent together.
Who was the first to identify color blindness?
John Dalton, an English physicist and chemist, was the first to become interested in anomalous color perception.
He himself was a protanope and could not distinguish the color red. The scientist did not know about his pathology until he was 26 years old. In the Dalton family, three brothers and a sister grew up at the same time, and only the boys suffered from visual impairment. After John was diagnosed with color blindness, he seriously began studying this disease. In 1794 he published a small book. In it, Dalton described his assumptions about the signs of color blindness.
Dalton was fond of botany and could not determine the shade of one flower. In the morning it seemed pink to him, in the evening it looked burgundy. This seriously puzzled the scientist and he began to ask others how they saw the flower. Of the total group of people who were interviewed by Dalton, only two of his brothers admitted that the flower was pink in the morning and burgundy in the evening. This helped the scientist to conclude that impaired color perception is not a feature of the visual organs, but an ophthalmological pathology.
Signs of color blindness
Color blindness is not an independent disease. This disease is either hereditary or a symptom of injury. Other ophthalmological diseases and damage to the central nervous system can also have a negative impact. In most cases, the causes of color blindness lie in heredity. Scientists blame the X chromosome for this. The carrier of the gene can only be a woman - the future mother of a child. There are two X chromosomes in the female body. If there is an anomaly in one, the other one compensates for its effect, and color blindness does not appear. Boys have only one X chromosome, so if it is damaged, it is not possible to replace the gene with a full-fledged one from the second chromosome.
Acquired color blindness usually develops as a result of damage to the eyes or optic nerve. This may result from:
- chemical burn;
- traumatic damage to the retina;
- age-related changes.
For example, symptoms of color blindness are often noted by ophthalmologists with cataracts. Doctors explain this feature by the fact that due to a change in the sensitivity of photoreceptors to light, the lens begins to interfere with its passage. The patient's color perception is impaired. A similar picture is observed in Parkinson's disease, cancer, and stroke. This occurs due to a disruption in the movement of nerve impulses to the photoreceptors.
How to determine the form of color blindness in a child?
Ophthalmologists distinguish several types of color blindness. One form of the disease is deuteranopia. It lies in the fact that it is difficult for a child to distinguish between the color green and its shades. A characteristic manifestation of this condition is that it is difficult for a small child to separate, for example, yellow and green cubes. With deuteranopia, these shades merge into one color palette. Treatment of pathology has no special features. Therapy is aimed at relieving obvious symptoms. In such cases, ophthalmologists prescribe children to wear special glasses or contact lenses with a light filter.
The second type of disease is protanopia. With this pathology, a person is not able to distinguish between the color red and its shades. If it was detected at an early age, then ophthalmologists talk about heredity, that is, a violation of the X chromosome. The congenital form of protanopia is incurable. Only the acquired form can be treated. For example, if a child’s protanopia is caused by exposure to ultraviolet rays on the retina, then the baby will need to be protected from this factor. In some situations, ophthalmologists recommend using tinted glasses for children.
The final form of color blindness is tritanopia. People who have this pathology are unable to correctly perceive the colors of the blue-violet spectrum. This form of the disease in children is less common than the previous two. If a child has been diagnosed with tritanopia, then he sees objects colored blue and purple as gray. Ophthalmologists do not detect any other visual impairments. There are no changes in the fundus, and visual acuity remains the same.
Why do we teach colors to our children?
Color perception helps the child not only to distinguish the diversity of the objective world, but also contributes to the formation and formation of the baby’s emotional sphere.
Therefore, it is very important to teach a child to perceive and distinguish colors. Any teaching of the youngest children must be carried out in a playful way. A large number of didactic and other types of games have been developed to teach color.
A large number of didactic and other types of games have been developed to teach color.
Any teaching of the youngest children must be carried out in a playful way. A large number of didactic and other types of games have been developed to teach color.
Let's look at them in more detail.
Perhaps the most popular game for teaching colors is Find the Color. At first, the baby cannot determine the color even from the sample that you show him. Therefore, first you need to select cubes and other objects of the same shade. You can invite your child to put all objects of the same color and a certain shade into piles.
It is necessary to repeatedly say what color the toy is.
The next game moment is to arrange multi-colored objects that are deliberately mixed up. These could be pens that have had their caps removed. Sometimes it is useful to cap a pen in a different color and ask if the color is correct?
Another interesting method. The colored hoods are large enough to accommodate several toys under one hood.
The task can be such that the child places toys of a certain color under a cap. Then the caps are raised one by one, and the task is assessed for correct completion. The cap is blue, for example, and all the toys under it are also blue. And so on.
The game “Find the odd one out” is very popular for studying different qualities of a child’s personality. When we teach colors with a child, we can ask him to find an object that is an extra color in a pile of similar colors. Place one toy of a different color in a pile of, for example, red toys.
Game "Colorful balls". Place balls of different colors on the floor and place several boxes. In each box you need to put a certain color of toys or objects.
For training to be effective, each action must be commented on and each color must be named. By repeatedly asking the child questions, we encourage the child to think. This will be an incentive to remember the colors.
Is it possible to detect color blindness in 3 year old children?
The color scheme in children is formed at the age of 3 years. At this time, parents may notice the first signs of color blindness in their child. The disease can be detected even at the stage when the baby does not yet know the name of most flowers. Many ophthalmologists offer parents the following way to check for color blindness in a child. A simple method would be to simply color the picture. At this age, children enjoy this type of leisure time. If a child paints grass or tree foliage not green, but, for example, gray, then this indicates that he has a disease such as color blindness.
This experiment can be done differently. For example, invite your child to choose one of two candies in bright candy wrappers. It is desirable that one of them is red, and the other, for example, silver. Next, you should invite your child to choose which of the candies he would like to take for himself. Subconsciously, children under 6 years old choose bright objects. Therefore, if a child is attracted to the second option, silver, then this can be regarded as one of the initial stages of color blindness. Similar experiments should be carried out several times to firmly verify the result.
Teaching children to recognize colors
As early as two years of age, children can begin to learn the names of colors and effectively use the learning abilities of their brain. So how can you teach them to distinguish colors?
When teaching children such an abstract concept as color, it is very important to understand the essence of this process. For children to learn to distinguish colors, they must accumulate hundreds of pieces of information that will help them understand the concept of color.
At the same time, they are greatly helped by the analysis of what color is not, i.e., the so-called “negative examples.” When you show your child an apple and say that it is green, the child may remember its shape and decide that this is what is meant by the word “green.” Therefore, it is also necessary to show an apple of a different color, not green.
- Through examples, we must help our children learn that color has no shape. Green can be an apple, a cloth or a leaf.
- Through examples, we must help our children learn that color has no size. A green object can be small, large or even huge.
- Through examples, we must help our children learn that color can be seen both outside and inside. A green item can hang on a tree or stand in a closet.
- Through examples, we must help our children learn that color can have different textures. A green object can be smooth (apple) or uneven (grass).
Do you get the idea?
Every time you show your child something green, but with different qualities, you improve and expand his understanding of the concept of color. The more examples you show children, the better they will learn to distinguish colors.
Teaching children to recognize colors is a fairly simple task, and all it takes is persistence and repetition—two skills that will be sufficient for you.
How to teach children to distinguish colors
1. When you show something, say a red balloon, use the word "color" along with the name of the object. Instead of saying “This is red,” it is better to say “This is a red ball.”
2. Don't test children's knowledge of colors before you've finished learning them. This may discourage and discourage them from further learning.
3. When teaching children to recognize colors, remember that receptive language (understanding spoken or written language) must precede expressive language (utterance). That is, children learn to indicate the correct color long before they can name it out loud. (For example, when you are at the beginning of the learning process, ask your child to collect all the blue objects. If he is not sure, show him a few of them so that he understands what is going on.)
4. Stick to the primary colors - red, blue, yellow, black and white, and only then start adding other colors.
5. It is better to devote time to studying each color separately. Weeks dedicated to a specific color help greatly - “Green Week” or “Blue Week,” for example. The more you repeat learning one color, the better, and a week gives you the opportunity to introduce your child to a particular color a large number of times.
6. The concept of color is fixed in the child’s head better if he learns this color in different ways. When learning color, children can experience and identify colors using all of their senses - sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch - and the more learning experiences they have, the easier they remember colors. Be creative and come up with unusual teaching ideas.
Tips on how to teach children to recognize colors using color weeks
1. During “color week”, dress children in clothes of the appropriate color.
2. Prepare jelly in the color of the week.
3. Use plates in the color of the week.
4. Teach children to wrap gifts in that week's color of wrapping paper.
5. Use cups in the color of the week.
6. Dissolve a little food coloring in the water when your child takes a bath, or just buy colored bubble bath (which, by the way, also contains food coloring).
7. Let the children cut out paper shapes in the color of the week.
8. Drink the juices of the color of the week.
9. Bake cupcakes with food coloring in the color of the week. If your children do not have a serious allergy to food dyes, a small amount of them will not affect the health of the kids, but will be of great benefit for learning.
10. When teaching your child the color red, eat strawberries, raspberries, etc.
11. During Black Week, eat blueberries and make various sweets from them, and also eat black sesame seeds or choose small black seeds from bread.
12. Eat chocolate during brown week.
13. Ask the children to search your wardrobe for clothes that match the color you are learning this week.
14. During each color week, ask the children to cut out images of that color from magazines.
15. During Blue Week, play with water and talk about the creatures that live in the sea and ocean.
16. Make pom-poms or simple stuffed animals in the colors you are learning this week.
17. During Orange Week, eat tangerines, oranges and carrots.
18. When learning about the color blue, have children draw with blue pencils and pens.
19. When you study colors with children, name the following comparisons: “Yellow like the sun,” “Blue like the sky,” “Brown like the trunk of our apple tree.”
20. When learning about the color red, have children play with lipstick and leave kiss marks with their painted lips on the paper.
21. During Green Week, eat green apples and cucumbers.
22. Make oatmeal cookies with your kids during brown week.
23. When you are learning about the color green, go outside and collect green leaves.
24. During the “red week”, eat watermelons and tomatoes.
25. When learning about the color yellow, use yellow colored pencils and markers.
26. If you have a sheet in a color you're exploring with your child this week, use it to make a tent, fairy cape, or picnic tablecloth.
27. During White Week, make origami out of white paper and cook rice with your children.
28. Use baby nail polish in the color of the week. Girls love nail polish and you can get it in a variety of colors.
29. When you learn the color red, talk about love and cut out hearts from red paper.
30. During each color week, play the game "I noticed something... colors" and the rest of the players must guess the object.
31. Make brownies during brown week.
32. During brown week, paint designs using different shades of brown paint.
33. During the “yellow week”, buy and eat pineapple, make lemonade with your children.
34. During each color week, use self-adhesive labels in the appropriate color.
35. During Green Week, eat lettuce and green grapes.
36. During Red Week, eat red bell peppers.
37. During pink week, buy pink cotton candy.
38. When learning about colors, sit down with your children and look through magazines and discuss different colored objects.
39. During red week, eat cherry tomatoes.
40. During red week, ask your children to collect all the red building blocks (do the same with each color during each color week).
41. During each color week, have children spray paint outside (under your supervision).
42. When studying colors, bring books with rich illustrations or albums with reproductions of paintings by great artists from the library.
43. During Green Week, talk about nature and plants and plant them in your garden.
44. During “light brown week,” talk about sand and play in the sandbox.
45. When learning about colors, have children use brushes and fingers to paint using that week's color.
46. During brown week, put potatoes in water and watch them sprout.
47. When learning about colors, you can color the salt and pour it into a jar beautifully.
48. During Green Week, use a pen with a green light.
49. Bring home ice cream in the color you are learning this week.
50. During Green Week, eat avocados.
51. During Yellow Week, eat bananas and make various edible crafts out of them.
52. Make the dough the color of the corresponding week and let your little one play with it.
53. Show your child different shades of the same color and ask him to draw as many shades of red, green and other colors as possible.
54. After studying the colors black and white separately, organize a black and white day.
55. On a “black and white” day, talk about zebras, raccoons, and pandas.
56. On “black and white” day, bring black and white fabric and let your child play with pieces of it.
57. On a “black and white” day, cut out figures from black paper and glue them onto a white sheet.
58. During the “gray week”, talk about gray clouds, elephants and rhinoceroses, also watch the cartoon “Dumbo”.
59. When you have finished introducing your child to all the colors, teach him about the colors silver and gold and the corresponding types of metals.
60. Use coins when learning the colors silver and gold.
61. During Golden Week, eat coin-shaped chocolates.
62. When learning about the colors silver and gold, show children silver and gold jewelry.
63. When the child learns all the colors, conduct classes on the topic of the rainbow - use stories, drawings, educational information, experiments on “creating” a rainbow.
64. Once your child has learned all the colors, play the “I Noticed Something... Colors” game using a variety of colors (not just one).
65. When your child has learned all the colors, mix them - mix different colored dough (colored with food coloring) and see what color you end up with.
66. When your child has learned all the colors, mix juices of different colors and see what color you get.
67. When your child has learned all the colors, tell him about chameleons.
68. Once your child has learned all the colors, make delicious smoothies with syrups and fruit juices in clear glasses to enjoy the variety of different colors.
69. When your child has learned all the colors, play with different colored balls. When you throw or catch a ball, you must name its color.
70. When your child has learned all the colors, bake bread or pies with colorful sprinkles.
Remember: the more you talk about colors, the easier it will be for your child’s brain to remember and fix this information for itself and then, accordingly, use it more effectively.
Children cannot learn to recognize colors on their own. They observe colors and study them with their parents or caregivers. At the same time, home and family are a great place to introduce kids to a palette of all kinds of colors. The earlier your children learn colors, the stronger the corresponding neural connections will develop in their brains, and the more developed they will be overall.
Related links:
- How to teach children to understand shapes and colors
- Practical task: Coloring book “Flowers”
- Practical task: Coloring book “Fruits and berries”
- Practical task: Coloring book “Animals”
- More articles on teaching children
How to determine color blindness in a 6 year old child?
By the age of 6, a child already has an idea of a color palette. Children of this age find it more difficult to clearly name the colors of surrounding objects. It often happens that a child’s color blindness comes as a big surprise to his parents. This usually happens because hearing from peers that the tree is green and the ball is red, it is difficult for a child under 6 years old to disagree with this. He doesn’t know any other color palette, and therefore completely trusts this one. In fact, both the tree and the ball are perceived by his eyes as gray. However, he can tell his parents the correct colors, since he hears them from others. This is the problem with diagnosing color blindness.
Children over 4 years old but under 6 who are color blind have a harder time recognizing the colors of objects around them. Many people start doing this later than their peers. Very often, parents try to independently teach their baby to distinguish colors. For this purpose, they repeatedly repeat the name of one of them. In cases of color blindness in a child, he perceives the color spectrum in a distorted version, but is not able to determine this on his own. It often happens that the patient is diagnosed with this disease already in adulthood, for example, when having an eye test at the military registration and enlistment office or obtaining a driver’s license.
Recommendations for getting to know color
To make color learning exercises more effective, several rules should be followed.
The figures that the child works with at first should be the same in shape and size, differing only in color. Other differences may confuse the child.
When talking to your child about color, you should formulate sentences correctly.
Phrases like “yellow ball” and “blue butterfly” can be perceived by the baby as the names of specific objects: “yellow ball” and “blue butterfly”.
It’s better to say this: “Here’s a ball. He is yellow". In this case, the word “yellow” will be perceived as a certain sign.
You can also give examples of other objects of this color: “The ball is yellow. Here's a chicken. It's yellow too." This will help the baby quickly identify the sign in question.
Acquaintance with new material should occur gradually. To consolidate the knowledge gained, you can spend days dedicated to one color. You can start such a day with sorting, selecting toys or objects of the desired color. Select suitable shades in clothing and creativity.
If possible, select products and prepare dishes of the same color. While walking, you can look for it in surrounding objects. Choose books in whose illustrations it appears. You can set aside a specific day of the week for this game and plan the theme of “colored days” for several weeks in advance. And so that the baby knows what day awaits him, circle the days on the calendar with the appropriate felt-tip pen.
How to determine color blindness at home?
Many parents strive to establish as early as possible whether their child has signs of color blindness or not. This can be done at home, but only if the child is over 4 years old. Before this age, it is difficult to determine color blindness, since the baby cannot yet distinguish all colors. In most cases, children only after 4-5 years begin to consciously distinguish between shades. However, it may be that the child, due to his small age, only remembered the names of the colors. But he cannot correlate red with red, and gray with gray.
In order to understand what colors he associates with the name, you can ask him to draw a picture, for example, a forest. The main thing is not to name the colors yourself. Instead of “draw green grass,” it is better to ask the child to draw the grass that he sees in the yard or in the park. Oculists believe that the definition of color blindness, therefore, cannot be objective. Some children specifically depict grass as yellow or red. This is nothing more than a manifestation of childhood fantasy.
Symptoms
Color blindness in children is a hereditary disease, in extremely rare cases it can be acquired, the essence of which is the inability to distinguish one color or several at once.
The disease is hereditary, the gender ratio is 99:1, mostly men are affected, and women are latent carriers of the gene. The disease is almost always congenital, but its detection often takes many years.
Problems of color blindness
As a result of color blindness, children do not receive the necessary information, which subsequently affects their development. But this is not the worst thing, because a child who suffers from a form of color blindness such as deuteranopia can simply confuse the color of a traffic light and get hit by a car.
Color blindness in children is quite difficult to diagnose, due to the fact that the age at which children begin to meaningfully name colors is approximately 3-4 years. And in order to consolidate color determination skills, it is necessary to diagnose diseases before this age.
This can only be done by observing the child. Colorblindness in children at an early age can be determined by such signs as: drawing grass, sky, water, sun with colors different from real colors. For example, if your child draws the sky green and the grass red, this is a reason to be wary.
The second sign by which a disease can be suspected: place 2 identical candies in front of the child, but one should be a black or gray repulsive color, and the second should be a bright, beautiful color. A healthy child almost always chooses the second one. And the patient, not feeling the difference, chooses at random.
Colorblindness in children is not a reason to be upset or overly concerned about it. If your child is diagnosed with dichromia - distinguishing between two primary colors out of three, he will still be able to subsequently obtain a driver's license, and will also not experience restrictions when choosing a job.
Currently, there is no effective treatment for color blindness in children. A certain compensatory reaction can be developed on the basis of logical conclusions and the thinking characteristics of memory, such as remembering the order of colors in a traffic light: red, yellow, green.
Experimental methods for treating color blindness in children are being developed, such as the introduction of missing genes into the retina using genetic engineering methods, but so far this method is undergoing laboratory testing.
How can color blindness be determined using a test?
A diagnosis such as color blindness is confirmed using polychromatic tables or special tests. The most popular is the method of Efim Rabkin. It includes several tables. The patient is shown one by one about three dozen color tables. The drawings on them are made in the form of dots and circles of different colors. This method allows us to identify color blindness in children and adults. That's why it is considered universal.
The second test was invented by Japanese ophthalmologist Shinobu Ishihara. The patient is asked to read the text, which consists of colorful spots. Based on the test results, ophthalmologists determine the presence of color blindness in children and adults. Both methods are used only for diagnosing mentally healthy patients. Conducting tests on people with mental disorders will show incorrect results.
Adaptation of the child to ordinary life
It turns out that identifying color blindness in a child is not enough. The most important thing is to teach him to live with this feature of a small organism. The more successfully his parents cope with this task, the more successfully he will adapt to the world around him in the future. In the meantime, we can only give a few tips.
- Colorblindness should not be considered a disease. It will be easier for the child to come to terms with this diagnosis if he perceives it as his own uniqueness, and not a deviation.
- It is useless to correct him when naming colors. This will only ruin his nervous system.
- Help him choose clothes, as he may choose colors that are too contrasting. Do this unobtrusively and gently. Better yet, initially buy him things in shades that can be easily combined with each other.
- When describing objects, there is no need to focus his attention on colors. A colorblind person should focus on other characteristics: size, texture, volume, additional details. For example, a shirt is not red, but checkered, soft, warm, with pockets and a belt.
- It is very important to immediately notify kindergarten teachers and school teachers about your child’s color blindness. This will reduce his level of anxiety and will greatly facilitate the work of adults.
If parents understand all the responsibility that lies with them when raising a child suffering from color blindness, as practice shows, nothing will prevent him from more or less adapting to the world around him and even achieving certain successes.
At the same time, you need to understand that many professions will simply be unacceptable for him due to the peculiarities of his vision. And this is not the only problem they will have to face in adulthood.
Genetic tests
The disease often does not make itself felt throughout her life. But to a little person this pathology is transmitted at the genetic level. This happens even during pregnancy. Since women are carriers of the color blindness gene, preparation for the birth of a baby plays a very important role. Before planning a conception, the expectant mother is recommended to undergo a comprehensive examination. It will help identify the presence of the X chromosome in her body - the “culprit” of color blindness. The most effective examination method is a genetic test. Its uniqueness is that it allows you to clearly identify the mutated gene.
However, there is one “but”. Unfortunately, modern medicine is not well developed enough to eliminate a gene change if necessary. It turns out that the method, which is very expensive, does not have much practical significance. Its results only make it possible to “confirm” to future parents the risk of having a baby with color blindness. The child may not suffer from this pathology throughout his life. The test still does not provide a 100% guarantee of inheritance of the disease.
How should parents of a colorblind child behave?
Parents whose child has been diagnosed with color blindness should explain to the child that this is not a serious disease, but only a feature of color perception. Understanding this will allow the child to successfully adapt to the team. It is best to have a conversation with your baby as early as possible. The child's lack of understanding of the characteristics of the pathology often leads to the fact that such children are often considered mentally retarded. This can lead to the child withdrawing into himself. He may develop an inferiority complex. Parents should talk to caregivers or teachers about whether their child perceives colors in a special way.
