They dwell on their day, wondering what they could have done better, they look for solutions to problems that are not theirs… Many children, and especially gifted children, struggle to fall asleep once their head is on the pillow.
Some children experience the joy of falling asleep with their heads on the pillow and then enjoying quiet nights where witches make such brief appearances that they leave no memory. This happy nature allows them to look more serenely at the vagaries of existence. Gifted children experience this state of grace, they are not overwhelmed by their torments, we consider that they are lucky and we bless this serenity.
In reality, many people review their day : they dwell on the moments of annoyance, they replay the scene, they finally find the sparkling response that they should have given to the derogatory remarks of unpleasant comrades. They are, each time, surprised by these attacks, sometimes well-covered, which nothing justifies. Their harmless and banal appearance does not attenuate their hurtful aspect which the child thus attacked felt very well, but, at the moment, he did not find the dazzling repartee which would have nailed his adversary. Now, in the calm and silence of the night, these retorts come to him quite naturally, they would have given him an undeniable advantage and he would have put the hesitant children on his side instead of looking like an imbecile without reflex, to the great joy of his attacker.
He also finds in his memory the answer that he was unable to give to the professor, and yet he knew it, he is too quickly destabilized, he immediately loses his means and the control of his reasoning. He is not happy with himself, he blames himself for having shown himself to be so mediocre, and even worthless, he ends up falling asleep, bathed in bitterness. The next day his little face clearly reflects his torments. It’s never good to rehash. He sees clearly that he does not have the good reflexes that all others possess quite naturally, it seems, and he does not know how to acquire them: it is not at school that he will be provided with these instructions, school would mainly serve to point out his shortcomings and his clumsiness. Perhaps he is doomed to remain this clumsy all his life. If his parents don’t talk about it, it’s because they know that no cure exists, they don’t want to increase his pain, but, no doubt, they are as distressed as he is to see him so clumsy.
It is easy to imagine that such gloomy thoughts prevent him from falling asleep. Helping him to combat this sometimes paralyzing emotionality would be very useful to him, by himself he feels incapable of such a victory, he blames himself for such weakness and this anger deprives him even more surely of all the repartee of which he is capable. There are all kinds of methods and approaches in this sense and then he will grow, acquire knowledge and strengths which will allow him to find THE repartee and to draw on his well-organized memory to find the answer that the teacher expects. Joyful tales evoke the triumph of those who appeared to be the weakest; we can never say enough about the therapeutic aspect of tales where evil is always and inexorably defeated.
Gifted children, invested with a mission to help their parents
This is not the only torment that prevents them from falling asleep peacefully: many children, and especially gifted children think of themselves, sometimes from the moment they come into the world, as charged with a mission. Their hypersensitivity allowed them to grasp the discomfort that could be felt by their parents, even if the latter made all their efforts to keep the newborn away from their troubles. There is nothing that can be hidden from a child who senses the slightest change in mood and children naturally make every effort to remedy this harmful state. It does not occur to them to evade, they have come to fulfill this mission, but they have no idea how to proceed. They have to invent everything to get their parents out of the slump into which they see them sinking, they have no one to ask for advice, since it is precisely these parents who teach them how to behave in all situations and, what’s more, they are generally still too young to express themselves in words. They are trapped in a role which they are assured is incontestably theirs, with no possibility of resignation, but without having, here either, instructions on how to behave.
While they know nothing about the adult world, they think they have a specific mission. They understand that they must help their parentsor especially the one who is in their care, if the parents are separated, but they also worry about the other, deprived of the support of their child. You might think that they are very young and inexperienced to take on such a heavy task, but for them, nothing is too heavy. Besides, they lack points of comparison. It is the adults, when they see the situation, who describe this situation as an “overwhelming burden”, but, most often, they do not even imagine that such a young child could be tormented by his fear of failing in his duties and not fulfilling his mission properly. The adults consulted, whose profession it is generally, understand that this disturbed sleep is related to the parents’ situation, but they do not necessarily understand the extent to which the child feels invested with such responsibility: such sensitivity, such capacity for analysis seem, in fact, inconceivable to them. Reason prevails over their feelings, they cannot really help this child who nevertheless needs specific advice and who is worried about having to feel his way even though he knows that he is needed.
The search for a solution, an obstacle to falling asleep peacefully
Sleep disorders are only a distant consequence of all the thoughts that assail him. Sometimes he hears his parents arguing: once he understands that it is not about him and that he is not responsible for these quarrels, he believes that it is up to him to appease them, since they are his parents and they must therefore stay together. He certainly has a duty to intervene, but he knows nothing about how adults function, even if sometimes they behave like children who are not always very mature or very responsible. He has no reference and it is when slipping into sleep that these questions come back in forceprecisely at the exact moment when, sometimes, a solution appears almost miraculously in a flash seemingly from the depths of the mind.
This mechanism works well for particularly difficult math problems or for finding the precise word that accurately reflects the thought in an essay. It should therefore be the same when it comes to finding the appropriate reaction to adults’ quarrels, but this solution does not appear and sleep is slow to come. Are added the many questions that gifted children ask themselves about life, death, destinytheir scope allows them to grasp these components of existence, without the beginning of an answer and without them daring to disturb their parents with these almost metaphysical questions.
Advice : it is always preferable to consider all the situations experienced by the child who has difficulty falling asleep without fear of questioning oneself and without trying to place the responsibility on the parent considered to be failing. Appropriate and neutral help can be of great help.
