Our daughter Margaret isn't strictly paleo at the moment - long story - but we're trying to keep her as close as possible.  We're feeding her paleo solids, and while we give her dairy, we try to get that part of her diet as close to human breast milk as possible by combining the right ratios of milk, cream, and dairy based formula.  She's a long way from standard American toddler fare, as we don't give her starchy or grain based baby foods; her macronutrient balance is pretty close to paleo.

We visited some of her friends for a play date this past weekend, arriving immediately after lunch.  The other kids were kind of hyperactive and noisy for the first few hours, to the point where their parents had to tell them to calm down quite a few times.  I don't think this was just because Margaret was there, as the novelty probably wore off after the first half hour or so.  It did seem pretty normal for modern American kids, except that Margaret was such a contrast, happily playing in a quiet way.

Has anyone else noticed anything like this?  It was as if the other kids were burning off the starchy neolithic portions of their lunch for the first few hours.  Is the way to have a child that's "seen but not heard" to feed them a paleo diet?

There's something to be said about how sugar highs affects kids, probably. On the other hand, personality and upbringing differences could have a bigger effect overall. Eg.: among my cousins, my sibling and me there were a couple clear troublemakers and a couple of chill kids with another one in between. We were all fed pretty much the same (non paleo) diet.

I think that a paleo kid would have an advantage just because their blood sugar wouldn't be crashing and spiking every few hours.

My daughter (who is in college now) freaked me out one night when she was 2 years old. My wife heard a noise in the kitchen and woke me. We thought someone had broken into our house. I grabbed the baseball bat and crept down the hall and around the corner to find a little girl with the fridge door half open eating a stick of butter!! I still remember the big yellow smeared grin on her cute little face! 

I didn't know about fats and paleo then, but now when I look back on it she may have just been trying to satisfy a natural urge for more fat in her diet. Heaven knows we had bought into the whole fatophobe society at that time.

Therei s research that shows that this type of diet helps children with autism and ADD, so I think there is probably something to be said about paleo and behavior.

http://jcn.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/18/2/113

http://www.springerlink.com/content/vr40331382376623/

More research, still not a strictly paleo diet, but if you eat paleo you would automatically eat the way both research studies were conducted.

Here's a nice study on ADHD kids 

http://www.macaudailytimesnews.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=7733&Itemid=33