How Do You Tell If a Toddler Is Color Blind?

Blame Mayim Bialik. I read her blog faithfully, and last year she posted that her six-year-old boy is color blind and that she missed the signs. Ever since I've been On Alert for color blindness. I'm not pushing colors as a general rule, but I won't lie, I was happy to find that BabyCenter topic assuring me that any given kid without a family history of color blindness is in all likelihood not color-blind, he's just not developmentally there yet.

Anyway, I swear I'm more than happy to do colors by osmosis, but Mayim's cautionary tale has been Haunting Me. Happily, the Internet is prepared for this contingency!

I found a site offering a special (free, hallelujah) color blindness test for children and toddlers. Kids need different tests than adults, because the traditional Ishihara color perception tests for color blindness (plate one is pictured above) are based on identifying a number hidden a field of colored dots. Kids who don't know their numbers yet would be confounded by this, regardless of their color perception.

The kid's color blindness test (which apparently originally appeared in Field & Stream magazine) has a bunch of cute little animals, and Jackson found the bear, the deer-cow and the bunny with no problem, so we're almost certainly in the clear. Yay!