Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion When did you know...

Hello! I am brand new here and thought that I would introduce myself. I am a first time Mom to a very sweet little girl who is 21 months old. Giftedness runs in the family and I'm beginning to suspect that my little one may have joined the ranks...

I really have two burning questions:

1. When did you know (or suspect) that your child was, shall we say, different? What alerted you?

2. My pediatrician has been rather unhelpful in regards to sleep... Please tell me that you went through this too! Basically, my little one is an awful sleeper. Short of cry it out, we have done everything I can think to try. I would love to hear that I'm not alone/crazy/a terrible mother.

Any input would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you!

DD was different from birth. The only reason that it took us a while to figure this out is that:

1. My DH and I neither one are "kid" people-- and we didn't spend much time around other babies or toddlers, and when we did--

2. Family and colleagues were mostly at least MG, so this also wasn't necessarily a good measuring stick, either-- but DD was still different-enough-even-from-that-cohort that people other than us were noticing pretty early on.

We didn't think all that much of it until she was more like 2yo, though, and was doing things that NO 2yo should/could do. Not even "very bright" ones. She was a little bit alien-- it was very disconcerting, but one only saw what she wanted to show, too, so it was also quite uneven and generally ocurred in flashes.

I do recall being somewhat bemused by friends who were, say, horrified that we never needed childproof anything in our house, though-- but by the time DD was mobile at 6-10mo, she was rational enough that all we ever had to do was explain why things were a bad idea. It took me a long time to realize that other children were irrationally impulsive as toddlers and preschoolers. DD wasn't.

There isn't much you can do about sleep. People claim there is but i think it is like taking antibiotics for a cold. You can work on teaching her to play quietly in bed during nap times and between bed time and going to sleep time.

Eta In NZ you can't get melatonin. I would use phenergen sometimes but unfortunately it makes ds6 hyper. Ds8 sleeps - always has.

My DS was obsessed with alphabets since he was a one year old. By a year and a half he already knew all 26 letters, and he knew the phonics by 2. His best Xmas gift was a bag of alphabet magnets which only cost us $2 :-). He was everything alphabet. He would watch videos and play games related to alphabet on iPad for a long time on his own.

He also liked to spend time with the adults more than other kids especially kids his own age or younger. As he grew older, he showed more and more giftedness: very good memory, reading at a very young age, learning piano in a faster pace, etc. My DH thought he was bright but not gifted. But I read articles on the traits of giftedness. He's got so many of them. We finally got him tested and his FSIQ qualifies him for DYS.

For us his sleeping was never a problem. He loves his sleep. That is one thing he doesn't have as many GT kids have: don't need much sleep.

We suspected around 20 months that something was up (that's when he began recounting stories to us). He was not a particularly early talker, but once he started it was like he'd been practicing since birth. By two years old, while most of his peers were getting out 2- or 3-word phrases, he was talking in complete paragraphs and could recite from memory stories that we had read to him. So we noticed that he was advanced, but we thought perhaps he might have been because we talked to him a lot as if he were an adult. (Many of our friends were trying to tell us that he was way more intelligent than we realized.)

At 6, in response to some problems at school, we had him take the WISC. That's when we found out he was HG+ and our jaws hit the floor.

Out of curiosity, what is your DD doing that makes you think she might be gifted?

We didn't have this problem as acutely as others have, but he would routinely come in an hour or two less than the typical range of sleep required by kids his age. (If, for instance, the range was 14-16 hours, he'd get 12.) He didn't want to be left alone to fall asleep in his room until he was much older (like, 6). Even this can be very frustrating, so I can't even imagine what you are going through.

It was around fourteen/fifteen months old that I began to wonder because the pediatrician seemed stunned that he would look at flash cards of shapes and tell me what shape and color they were, especially when I said he had been doing it for a while. The look she gave me was truly stunned. (We weren't training him on flash cards- I had them because he loved his shape sorter and he loved to talk about shapes and colors and I thought he would enjoy looking at the cards and telling me the colors and shapes when we had to wait somewhere. He knew them before we bought the cards.

DS8 was/is a verbal superstar. It was noticeable very early (before 12 months) and friends were shocked. Our family was not as shocked. Most people in our families on both sides were identified as gifted as kids. We all meet our spouses in grad school. Gifted is normal in our family.

I have to say, I'm kind of dense and didn't realize anything until my DS's teacher in 3rd grade suggested he be tested. But then again, my kids haven't done anything consistently that shocks and amazes.. however looking back he came home from preschool around age 4 and told me that "plants are green because of chlorophyll." Prior to that he was a late talker, but was pretty amazing at puzzles (around age 2-3). I can also remember that he read a book in 1st grade (the Fantastic Mr. Fox) and he had to summarize the story in front of the class. It was a little weird when he summarized by telling the story exactly as it had been read to him (word for word, exact dialogue from book, he'd memorized it after one reading). So there were flashes of "hmm that's odd/cute/etc." I still keep thinking he's not gifted but he was paired up with this other kid at school for Science Olympiad who really could be his clone in interests, quirky mannerisms, etc., and surprise! the other kid is highly gifted.

Sleep, I'm sorry to say, is still an ongoing problem with my DS. My DD is a lot better though.

Between 14 and 18 months, his DCP began to comment on DS9's vocabulary. DS9 was a preemie and had been borderline developmentally delayed with milestones in his first year (which are mostly physical until then I grant you, but he wouldn't imitate or speak either, just WATCH, all caps, iykwim). We were bemused, toddler saying two word sentences, normal, right? Apparently a "kid person" could tell even then those were unusual. When he suddenly started speaking in full, grammatically correct sentences at 22 months, including first person, subjunctives, tenses, modal verbs etc, we knew.

About the sleep thing.
I think it's important to keep two things apart: it is very typical for gifted kids to have difficulties falling and staying asleep. That it is typical for them to need less sleep than typically developing kids is a myth, true for some like PPs have described, but not true for the majority who need either as much or (a smaller subset) even more.
It has been our experience with an HG+ kid that you need to chart a very careful course between the just right amounts of intellectual stimulation (a lot), physical stimulation (tiring them out in stuff like organized kiddie sports seems to help some, made things worse for ours, who did best with playing outside in the air and light, but not in ways that tired him out) and social stimulation (in our experience, you rather need to keep that one down).
Also, careful orchestration of winding down time (no screen time after dinner, but rather bath time and cuddling, turning lights off, no looking at books together and discussing, but rather parent reads bedtime story from kindle and kid lies down in the dark, some parents have good results with soothing music. In short, turn down intellectual stimulation in time, too). Then, ours needed to be HELD. Confined, actually, against his will, smothered by motherly love, and he'd protest for about 30 seconds then was out like a light, something that might take two hours otherwise.
For us, fish oil, zinc and magnesium citrate supplements (200 mg in apple sauce, when they get diarrhea you know it's too much and can lower the dose) have worked very well, but YMMV. We also live Ina country where melatonin is not available over the counter or even by prescription for children, so never tried that one ourselves, but some swear by it.