Seeing the world through their eyes

What would you think if your 6 year old son waved a pencil in front of you, asked 'is this the green one?', and then produced a beautiful picture of a green lion?



Well, I thought 'Oh, Angus, why didn't you tell me it was a lion you were going to draw?' But said 'That's fantastic Angus, I love his claws'.

You see this sort of thing happens all the time with both Finn and Angus. I know that when Angus asks for the bowl the same colour as his hair he means the light green one (his hair is light red - strawberry blond. It isn't green, honestly). If Finn asks if something is grey it's because he's worried that I'm trying to make him wear pink.

With Finn, my eldest, I carefully tried teaching him colours. We often talked about the colours of his toy cars and soon he knew them all. But he couldn't apply that consistently to other objects. In fact, he'd just learnt which colour went with which car. He could get colours right sometimes - bright yellow was easy for instance and he got better at making an 'educated' guess. But we also understood what he meant when he talked about 'race you to that red tree' or 'our old cat was green wasn't she?'.

Finn sees the world very differently to most of us. His colour blindness is particularly wide ranging. When he first went to pre-school I mentioned that I though he was colour blind but was told he was too young to tell and I had the same story when he started school. I was pretty certain that he was so as soon as he knew all his numbers and letters accurately we had our optician test him and lo and behold he has a severe colour deficit.

It seems that there is a real range in the level of colour blindness and some people get through life without really being aware that they are. While with others, like my boys and my dad, it's very obvious. And that's who they have inherited it from - through me, of course. In fact one of my brothers is colour blind too but he has inherited it from my mum (it is passed down on the x chromosome which is why men are far more likely to be colour blind as they only have one rather than two x chromosomes) and isn't quite so bad. I'd always thought my dad didn't make much effort with colours and that was why he was so much worse than my brother - but having had Finn tested we now know that it's just that there are so many colours their eyes can't differentiate.

I probably didn't try nearly so hard to teach Angus about colours as I pretty soon guessed he was colour blind too. And this time I had no difficulty persuading the school about it - I guess they had had enough experience of Finn by then!



I think, from my observation, that they see far fewer colours than us and work mostly on shades to identify between colours. Finn was recently peering at our car and one of the same model parked next to it. After quite a lot of peering (I did wonder what he was doing but he is an 8 year old boy and they do strange things) he announced that this (the dark green one - which was correct) was our car and if you looked closely enough you could see it was different to the other one (which was a deep maroon). There wasn't not a lot to be said other than agreeing that it was our car.

If you're going to have some kind of impairment then there are far far worse but it does mean they can't join the police, fire brigade etc or the armed services or ever fly a plane (or rocket as Angus desperately wants to do). It also makes identifying blood from mud difficult (tricky when you enjoy playing rugby!) - I'm not sure how my dad has managed with this as he is a vet - especially since, to him, diarrhoea looks pretty similar to mud and blood too! And today, when John burnt his hand quite badly, the boys asked to see but then couldn't spot the redness or blisters - clearly daddy was making a fuss about nothing.

P.S. We do point out to them when they have made mistakes - mostly, and they are well aware that they see things differently. At school they are getting better at asking their friends or teacher for help but don't always remember or think about it(as evidenced by Finn's portrait of poor Sophie!). And we have had to explain to Angus that he won't be able to fly rockets, jets or even normal aeroplanes - it has always been something he has wanted to do but after a while we decided we'd tell him, just in case he really set his heart on it and it became a long-term career plan.