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.

We only "knew" when we got the test results just before he turned 7. Like other posters, we had been impressed by how quickly he picked up concepts and how deeply he was into the "flavor of the day/month" (garbage trucks, dinosaurs, space aliens, myths, puzzles, etc.). He's quite verbally adept and was from a young age, but didn't take off with his reading until early K (our other child is doing exactly the same thing). Was doing multiplication and division at age 5. We chalked it up to an enriching environment (Montessori plus home resources). We are also from pretty "smart" families so some things that seem markers now didn't seem all that odd at the time.

Then we had a disastrous first grade year (think: no acceleration) and a dear teacher at the school took us aside and suggested that he might be highly gifted. Voila, PG.

Even now, we still wonder at times, because he can be so asynchronous...

As for sleep, we used the Baby Whisperer and later, Toddler Whisperer (Traci Hogg) approach. He really needs his sleep and once asleep, is hard to wake. However, getting him to sleep has been an on/off challenge over the years. After reading Tigerle's post, I realized I'm the same way as far as needing to calm my brain in order to fall asleep!

With ds8 at 5 years 9 months when I got the results. I noticed he was a bit different at about 4.5. Sure childcare people had been telling me how bright he was but he was no different than the rest of the kids in my family. He doesn't do anything amazing to prove he is PG really. With ds6 I knew earlier. He is more verbal and temperemental and had earlier milestones physically. He is EG.

We didn't for a long time I was bought into the myth that everyone has the same level of intelligence and achievement differences were merely a function of economics (opportunity) and motivation. Plus, doesn't everyone think their kid(s) are clever?

DD was bright but so was everyone, right? Wrong!

She picked up arithmetic rapidly and intuitively by 5 but We never thought of this as unusual. She developed OEs so we investigated 'giftedness' as a possible cause and we got her tested. Results came back but we still didn't get it. Only when she was accepted as a DYS did we really understand that she was objectively different.

We did a WPPSI-IV test when DS was in his mid 3s. We thought he was bright. There were a few earlier clues (many from the lists of "characteristics of gifted kids" you can find out on the web).

We tested more to rule giftedness out, but the results came back as gifted. It was pretty shocking because he seems pretty average in a lot of ways. It's still early days, and IQ can move around, but the gifted school he is in seems like a very good fit.

DD seemed very bright very, very early on, but so were other members of the family...we didn't think too much of it. By the age of 2 or 3 people started commenting...about her speech and vocabulary...the fact that she could read very, very well already (we actually used to sometimes hide reading material from her in public, because discussing it was just awkward). We were probably more concerned about her sensory sensitivities than thinking that they were related to her possibly being quite gifted (which in retrospect, may have been OEs). She seemed to also have unusual interests (astronomy, paleontology and history of the earth) and would find piles of books during her trips to the library to learn MORE. My mom and I would observe some moments of "what did she just say/do???" and would occasionally speculate about just how bright she might be (at times we were a bit shocked at how well she understood complex ideas). When she started school, we were amused that her homework seemed better suited for her baby brother, who was three years younger, but we figured it was probably somewhat easy for all of the students. Then came school testing for the gifted program and she scored VERY high on every required measure. We decided at that point to investigate further and we had her take the EXPLORE test as a very young 3rd grader. We were pretty blown away by the results.

I guess we were in denial at times.

Our experience with DD helped us pick up what was going on with DS sooner.

It's hard to say exactly. Given that DH is PG and I have an uncle who is PG as well, and my brother & I were considered gifted in math. It didn't seen entirely likely to look for giftedness in my children.

The movement I really KNEW DS was gifted was when he was a bit older than 2 years old. He loved floor puzzles at that age. I had purchased a Thomas the Tank puzzle for him online and it had just arrived & unwrapped when I received a phone call. Fifteen minutes later I finish my phone call to turn around and he had completed it himself.

That and when he started reading at 3 without much help from us except that we filled out house with books and that I was working hard with his older sister who has reading challenges and at 7 was still struggling to read.

I'm the jerk who kinda always assumed that my kids would be gifted. Its definitely a trait on both sides of the family and does seem to be inheritable somehow. But I didn't really start looking into the traits and research until kid #1 got kicked out of preschool at 2. Reading up on asynchrony really showed that there was something different about my kid.

I managed to ignore all symptoms until DS was tested at age 4 and I had to acknowledge the giftedness because of the numbers in the testing report staring me in the face. But, my husband is not convinced even now and he thinks that the testing numbers could have been an anomaly - because my son has asynchronous development, has a very atypical way of reasoning, has a slower processing speed than his parents, has poor motor coordination compared to his parents and is very different from the stereotypical gifted child. So, his giftedness is obvious only to his tester, his math mentor, his music teacher and his mother while even his father dismisses it because superficially it is not obvious.
But, the extreme giftedness rears its head occasionally in social and academic situations much to the shock and amazement of the disbelievers in my family.
As for the pediatrician, ours always ignored my queries about giftedness and I stopped asking! She did say that in order to help the sleep problems, my DS could either be medicated (melatonin or benadryl to make him drowsy before bed every night) or that he could be tired out to such an extent that he fell asleep. We chose the tiring out option and involve DS in very rigorous exercise everyday (sports, play, biking, running etc) and we get close to 7-8 hours of sleep from him.

1.) DS was at 10 months when we joined an infant cognition research study (just for fun/extra cash). They explained that he was WAY ahead of normal milestones of his age-peers and I should be highly attuned to his needs and enrich his environment. This was after a fMRI, PET, and cognitive assessment. Later, at 14 months he followed up with an EEG and another cognitive test. He had another MRI and EEG at 16 months due to concern for regression. Come to find out, it was a pseudoregression because he was putting all of his efforts into learning cool new tricks like side-stepping, hopping, running, and going up and down stairs in different ways. He was assessed as somewhere in the range of MG-PG, but being 1.5 he's still too young to get an accurate assessment. He ticks off a lot of the typical boxes for gifted characteristics. He has always been a pretty stellar sleeper though. Always takes at least one nap per day and sleeps 12-14 hours at night (unless he's sick or in a growth spurt) - so I can't really help you with your #2 concern.

As a Pediatric nurse, I can tell you that having a routine that starts about 30 minutes prior to the target. Figure out if your kiddo prefers a nightlight or dark, white noise, music, or silence. Do they like sleeping alone or not? Do they need a comfort object? I still have my DS 1.5y in a sleep sack, which seems to keep him from crawling out of his crib and seems to be a consistent comfort object. He knows how to unzip it, but only does it when I enter his room in the morning or after a nap. I still put him to bed with a bottle. He doesn't take a pacifier anymore and he throws the sippy cup, he just prefers to sip on a bottle to go to sleep so we let him. That's all I have to help you, which you've probably heard before.

It's really hard to tell with the very young ones. With ODS, I wasn't sure until age 3.5 or 4, because I assumed other kids could learn the same if given the same opportunities. His rate of learning is what made it so clear he was advanced.

With YDS, I had the advantage of experience, but until he started memorizing words before age 3, I couldn't say for sure.



I have a great sleeper (ODS) who often complains about being woken up by our bad sleeper (YDS). With the first, I thought I totally knew what I was doing and could solve anyone's sleep problems. I realized how wrong I was with YDS. Where ODS needs more sleep on average, YDS needs less. No advice just sympathy.

Well, I'd say I KNEW about DD (10) when I got her test results! I'm not totally kidding, here, because it's so easy to doubt yourself, especially if your child is really asynchronous. But I would say the first good hint was that she knew about 300 words at 15 months--maybe 250 verbal, and 50 signs. That was the last time we counted because it quickly became impossible.

My younger child (DS6) fwiw has rarely done anything as strikingly obvious. He's stealthy. Most adults find him charming and charismatic and only slowly, much later, do they realize he's full of interesting thoughts.


Well, the older child napped like clockwork, woke up precisely every 3 hours at night, and slept through the night at 22 months. The younger one could go 2 weeks without napping when he was a baby, woke every every 45-90 minutes for two years, and then merely twice a night at completely random times of until after he turned 4. I went back to rocking him to sleep in the dark when he was 3, which went on for a year until we moved. He's 6 now and I merely lay on the edge of his bed for 5-10 minutes nowadays. I mean, not to suck the hope out of you, but he's a dreadful sleeper--he has a hard time falling asleep and a hard time waking up--and recently he started sleepwalking. He almost walked right out of the house at 10pm a couple months ago. I suspect I'll next be getting some good sleep around the time he goes to college.

A friend has a HG+ kid who was a terrible sleeper until he was accelerated from preschool right into first grade. Grade school hasn't been a bed of roses for them by any means, but the kid started falling and staying asleep properly the very FIRST day of school. She says it was a miracle that told that them whatever was going to happen, they must have done something right.
magnesium had also helped somewhat already but nothing worked as well as finally getting the kind of structure and intellectual stimulation into his schoolday that entering 1st shortly after turning five provided.
With ours, things clicked somewhere between five and six as well iirc, I can't point to a specific life change. However, I think being able to read fluently and silently to himself (mine was a "late" reader according to the standards on this forum), ie being able to find intellectual stimulation quietly and on his own, without intense social interaction involved, helped.
So, there's hope ahead!

Hey, my daughter is 2 and I started suspecting around her 2nd birthday. I always believed her to be bright-i.e. her attention span even as a young baby wold amaze people. But we moved and switched doctors around age 2 and she amazed the Dr with her number of words, that she knew how to sign, that she could count to 10 and that she put her socks ON in front of him.

There seems to be more and more of these moments where she just seems ahead. I'm not overly concerned with her label though.

Sleep wise, my daughter is a sleeper, but I mean that in the sense that once she falls asleep-she SLEEPS. but she gave up naps at 18 months and she seems to REALLY struggle to fall asleep. But last night I managed to get her to start crying without tears. I've never done cry it out, but she throws a fit for more books, but last night I let her bring one of her favorites to bed with her. No tears, probably just an hour of restlessness and trying to turn off her brain.

Same here - very disgusted and disappointed with the steadfastness and absoluteness of DD's pediatric group's willful ignorance and lack of ability in this area.

I suppose that they were brainwashed into egalitarianism too either during medical school(s) or earlier in their 'educations'.

Sleep problems are one of those things that either people have experienced and they understand, or they haven't been there and they're convinced all would be fine if you just stopped doing it wrong. (Actually, that goes for a lot of gifted parenting.)

DS slept 4 hours in 24 for his first 10 months. In 1 hour intervals between 1 and 5 am. I tried EVERYTHING. All the experts say a baby can't keep themselves awake if they're tired, right? Baby DS, nursing, would stick an arm straight up in the air, so that if he inadvertently started to drift off, it would whack him in the head and wake him up...

(when did we know he was gifted? when the principal told us to test him at 7. But in retrospect, from the day he was born - really! - he was a giant checklist of crazy intense weird behaviours it never occurred to me had anything to do with giftedness).

As a toddler, I held him in my arms and danced with him - often for hours - to get him to sleep, and as a preschooler I'd lay with him - again for hours - to get him to sleep. Eventually, I could come in and out of his room and leave him on his own for increasing intervals - but he'd still take hours to go to sleep. Not enough exercise and tired in the world to have any effect. As he got to school age, he started sleeping on his own, but I still find that when his anxiety gets high, it really helps him if I stay with him until he finally falls asleep. I've finally learned to accept that this is a real need brought on by anxiety, and not manipulation to satisfy a "want".

DD (a radically less intense and extreme child in every way) actually napped (until almost 2, yeah!), and her nights were a little longer, though sleep only occurred in 20 minute intervals. At about 18 months, all the things all the experts told you to do suddenly worked. Nothing I started doing right, is just that she was always a kid with far more resemblance to the babies in the books and around the block. (We always joked that in the womb, DS read all the baby books, chortled evilly, and tossed them off a cliff.)

Hi Gingerbaby-- welcome. I didn't read all the answers here but I'm sorry your pediatrician is so dismissive. I have twins and another child, and based on my experience, I think the sleep issue is an inborn trait, not necessarily anything you're doing.

My PG twin slept through the night at three months. He was then and remains now a huge sleeper. He can still sleep 15 hours at a stretch if he has time. (He's 13.) As an infant and toddler he would take five-hour afternoon naps, and still go to bed for the night at seven. We always had to wake him up from naps because otherwise he would just keep sleeping.

His HG twin, on the other hand, hardly ever slept. He didn't sleep through the night until he was two. (Sorry to tell you.) We briefly tried cry-it-out when he was about 18 months old, but I couldn't take his crying out, "Mama! Mama!" Poor guy. He dropped his morning nap by 6 months old and only napped for an hour in the afternoon. He still is early-to-rise, up by 6 every day of the week, and puts himself to bed by 9:30 most nights. He knows what he needs and sticks to it.

I know it's challenging when you're sleep deprived, but I would try not to worry about it. Your child will be sleeping more soon-- in the next year, certainly. I would also try to make sure your child isn't overtired at bedtime because that always led to poor sleep for us. There was a prime sleep window-- one before the meltdown. I would also make sure he has plenty of activity during the day.

DS at 2 years was tough to get to sleep - he wanted endless stories and then DD was born so that just made it more complicated with a baby in the house. Unfortunately, it was not really until he started school at 4 that we got to an early bedtime and normal sleep routine, and we suspect it was simply not enough mental stimulation during the day at daycare (they ran around a lot and played but it did not tire him out as much as his current school does). Before that, while he was 2 and 3, we were lucky to get him to bed before 9PM.

DD was a better sleeper but even with her, we stopped her naps at 3 at her current school because every time she napped, bedtime would not come until 10PM or later. At 3.5, it does mean that some days, she falls asleep on the way home, but she gets up at our normal time with no problem so she is getting what she needs. Occasionally, if the day was really busy and tiring, she will drift asleep for a short nap.

DD was very verbal very early--first word 7 months, sentences by 12 months, paragraphs by 18 months. She also knew the alphabet and numbers at about age one. She freaked people out.

DS was verbal for a boy, but not nearly as much as DD. We didn't see early ability to identify and classify, and he learned the alphabet as a late 2, maybe 3? I thought he might be mildy gifted at most until he learned chess at age 3 and began reading well before age 4.

syoblrig, what a good experiment you have there with twins in the same household and sleep! I have one child who needs more sleep than average and another who needs somewhat less.

This is quite interesting. I don't think "early ability" means "higher ability" for all kids. My DS was like your DD, he was just so advanced in everything at such an early age it was freakish indeed. DD on the other hand never showed any amazing signs. Then suddenly she took off in music at maybe 5 and is more advanced than DS at the same age. Then she suddenly took off in math in 3rd grade and can cover 3 years of math in each school year without sweat.

My daughter was a high achiever from an early age. Figuring out shape sorters by nine months old. Knowing her alphabet and many phonetic sounds by 18 months. Counting to ten before she was 2. She was reading by the time she was three, she could count to 100 by 3-something, etc. She's always been very advanced across the board when it came to cognitive skills, really. I figured by the time she was 18 months or so that she was different. But, I was 'scared' to say she was gifted, because you know there's such a stigma that it's just parental bragging. I did start to do research then. I was tested as gifted a child as well. By the time she was two, 2.5 I gave up being afraid of it and embraced it. It's not like I walk around TELLING people she's gifted, but I told myself it was okay to realize your child is a particular way. And it wasn't JUST the high achieving. If you just sit and have a conversation with her, she often doesn't talk like an 'average' child of her age. She says all sorts of idioms and phrases that are way beyond her years. She's freshly five now and can read pretty much anything with immense comprehension and memory. She also happens to be insanely hyperactive and has a hard to focusing on things that are of low interest. So, there's that aspect. She has taught me a lot about myself along the way as well. We're only getting started!

And yes, she's always been an incredibly lousy sleeper. She still wakes up at least 1-2x almost every single night, often comes and gets us for some completely unnecessary reason. It's been a struggle. My two year old sleeps better than she does. We've tried positive reinforcement, we've tried negative reinforcement (we're desperate, it's nothing extreme lol) - we're so desperate to get her to sleep, or at least not wake us up. She's been potty trained since she was 25 months old but still gets us up. It's a comfort thing, I guess, but I don't know how to change her ways. I happen to be a really lousy sleeper as well and it will often taken me over an hour or more to get back to sleep after getting up with her. My husband often takes the duty but he travels heavily so I'm alone a lot with the kids. It's tiring.

FWIW: I also think my son may be 2E - he has a lot of delays in all areas, but he also exhibits certain signs of intelligence that are more subtle. So, time will tell on him. He's not the 'stereotypical' high achiever like my daughter was/is.