My daughter (age 10.5) has lately been having bad insomnia, unable to fall asleep until after 1, 2 AM. At this time, I am usually a zombie on my night meds. All I want to do is sleep, and if I can think of a sentence to form in the fog of my brain, it comes out slurred and hard to understand (this is not unusual for me since I have been on psych meds, especially stuff that helps sleep like Seroquel & Clonidine with some Klonopin). Even when I needed less powerful meds for sleep (hydroxyzine & Trazodone), that was the case. So my husband is left to deal with it.

Now, he is more lax with my daughter than I am by far. She is supposed to go to bed at 9 PM and then can read some or play on her iPad. for up to 1 hour. She is not playing on her iPad of late (when I wake up and check the battery on it, it will be 99% or 100%, meaning she wasn't playing on it at night as she never charges it herself unless the battery is lower than 10%). She will read past the 1 hour mark, which I've told her she should try to sleep afterwards (I have seen this as she is busy logging minutes read on a summer reading program for a local library; one night it was 120 minutes read). But she's reading books, which is not a bad thing for a child, just she's reading too late. I don't know for certain, but I think after reading, she comes over to see what my husband is doing. if he is playing a game on his iPad or Xbox, she wants to watch it, learn all about it. I have told him to stop allowing this after her bedtime, but he doesn't listen. My daughter is his little princess; I have to be the one who sets the rules and makes sure they are followed. Maybe I should stay awake later, but by 9:30 PM or 10 PM, I am ready for my night meds and to sleep and after taking the meds, asleep in 30 minutes or less.

I always had problems with insomnia for as long as I remember, and according to my mother, I was a colicky baby, never sleeping well, and she was quick to give up on getting me to nap. I remember not being able to sleep around 4 years old when my mom had me sleeping in a double bed with my younger sister (16 months younger). We'd talk awhile, and then my sister would just fall asleep. I was SO jealous of her, and that was before I learned to read, not to mention, we didn't have a bedside lamp, so to look at books, I'd have to turn the room light on (in hindsight, that probably wouldn't have woken my sister because of how deeply she slept, but I didn't realize it at the time).

Later, talking with a pdoc, they said lifelong insomnia like that can be a sign of psychological problems. I'm not sure if they meant current problems or problems to come. I was sexually assaulted by an uncle around the time I was 4 or 5, and later in the 3rd grade, all 3 of my living great-grandparents passed away in 1 school year which made me a bit paranoid about death, constantly asking my mom questions about death and Heaven and the Bible, which was probably painful for her as she said she never visited her maternal grandmother in the hospital at the end; it was too painful because she had been so close to her.

Do these sleep problems my daughter is having signal something psychological to come, such as depression or bipolr? (I worry about her inheriting something; my mother's side of the family is riddled with anxiety, depression, bipolar, alcoholism, and of course, I'm a tangle of psych issues). Also, I think my daughter is very narrowly short of the autism spectrum. When she was in kindergarten and first grade, she would even do stimming type behavior, like flapping her hands and this weird neck movement if I told her it was time to do something she didn't want to do, like get ready for bed or do her spelling homework. They had spelling homework daily starting on Monday, but if she didn't know how to spell the words at first on Monday, she did by the time she finished her Monday spelling homework and saw no point in doing spelling homework the rest of the week, even though it was nothing hard, such as write each word in a different color using crayons or colored pencils or write the vowels in a different color. Nothing hard and easily done.

The stimming stuff stopped after first grade (my husband rarely saw it with the homework, only sometimes with the bath stuff because it happened before he got home from work), but she would have meltdowns at school up to the 3rd grade. Sometimes, there was an obvious cause, like she won a medal in school for something and the medal fell off the ribbon. There were always causes for the meltdowns, but they would be subtle, she wouldn't use words, the teachers & counselors couldn't understand her until she calmed down enough to use words, which could be upward of an hour. Also, her speech was hard for everyone to understand a lot of the time, except for my husband & me. That improved during 2nd grade without therapy, though she still has her moments. They finally started sitting her with the principal if the principal was available and doing paperwork or something. The principal has been there since my daughter started school there & my daughter likes her (there has been a high turnover of counselors), so the principal was both familiar to my daughter, and wonderful to my husband and me, telling us she had a daughter with some similar issues, gifted & talented like our daughter but with similar behavioral issues in school. My daughter will be in 5th grade this school year, and they still send her to the nurse's restroom, so she doesn't have to hear the hand blow dryers in the normal restrooms (obviously, the nurse has paper towels in her restroom). The meltdowns seemed to have stopped last year (thank goodness; at least at school, she still has them at home). She has sensory issues - won't eat mixed foods (though she eats healthy foods, pretty much all fruits and veggies except bananas and cooked carrots though raw carrots are fine, unseasoned fish, shrimp, or chicken but doesn't care much for beets (I hate beets too). She doesn't like any seasoning, so I have to pull out foods for her while cooking, which is a pain. However, she eats healthy foods, so I feel like that is an issue not worth pushing right now though I will often require one bite of something seasoned like chicken with paprika, salt, pepper, simple seasoned foods. She won't wear pants or shorts (always complains they are too tight around her waist; anything loose enough falls off her hips and onto the floor). Getting her into a bra was awful, but she was developing and needed one. I finally thought to consult a Facebook friend from high school who often posted about one of her daughters, a bit older than mine, diagnosed with autism, and she gave me suggestions that worked for my daughter. Now, my daughter needs to shave her underarms (thankfully, her leg hair is growing blonde right now and not needing to shaving yet). She was so fearful of cutting herself even with the most elaborate safety razor (she hates blood, all medical issues, refused to visit me the 6 days I was in the hospital with the perforated ulcer, wouldn't look at my scar over a month later) I could find that I finally bought Nair for it. My husband was against the Nair but I told him if he wanted to take up puberty issues like underarm shaving, he was welcome to, and then I never heard him complain about the Nair again. So her sensory issues are a ton - also delayed motor skills (not jumping until she was 3.5 years old which is very late for children, took stairs downstairs in an extremely weird fashion that only just stopped - her 2 yer old cousin could take the stairs down easier than she could, and she was 9 years old at the time, won't tie a bow and has no inclination to learn). Her sensory issues pretty much permeates parenting her. Even if my husband agreed to occupational therapy, we'd have no way to afford it. Our finances are dismal

This awful insomnia (3-4 days a week, sometimes up to 5 days) has started this summer and only seemed to have gotten worse & worse. Does it mean something? Is it just growing and brain development? Is she unable to shut down her brain due to ideas and thoughts (often, she has dozens of projects she wants to work on, or computer issues she needs to solve to write and illustrate a story on the computer). But I worry it signals a coming psych issue because of the genetics on my mother's side of the family and the fact that I think my own dad is undiagnosed Asperger's, and sometimes, I see her copy behaviors my father does (though to a much, much less extent). I just don't know what to do.

I am so worried she will end up with a psychiatric issue