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.)
