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

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.