Discovering Colors

When your baby is born, her sight is very weak, but it will develop over the next 6 to 8 months and will be a great aid in helping her physical, mental, and emotional development by allowing her to take in information about the world around her.

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3 min read

Physically, your baby’s eyes are capable of seeing everything just fine right from the moment she is born. Her brain, however, isn’t ready to process all that information, so things stay fuzzy for a while. As her brain develops, so does her vision, equipped with the tools to understand what she is seeing.

Your baby can see colors from birth, but she has difficulty distinguishing between similar tones, like red and orange. At birth, she’ll prefer black and white or patterns with high contrasts. Over the next few months, her brain learns to distinguish colors, and she’s soon start showing a preference for bright primary colors and more detailed designs.

This is a good time to start showing her pictures, books, and toys. Seeing colorful things will stimulate her and strengthen her development.

Soon, she will learn to develop depth perception, and the ability to recognize something after only seeing part of it. By the time she’s 5 months old, she can distinguish between similar bold colors and will start working on identifying more subtle differences in pastels.

By 8 months, your baby’s vision will have almost reached adult vision in its clarity and depth perception. Her eyes are also probably close to their final color, though subtle changes may still happen.