Hello there. I'm pretty young at 24 but I've had a shunt since I was about 11 and I am actually a pretty fortunate case, knock on wood; had a lot of revisions in a short amount of time but have been fine since 1999.

As far as your questions, it all depends on the challenges your child will face further on down the line (every person is different, obviously); for me, my Hydro really crushes my mental capacity. I luckily don't really have any issues with intelligence but I have a very poor short-term memory. Physically? Depends. I studied martial arts as a kid before my diagnosis and shunt placement but it wasn't long before my neurologist cleared me, barring the circumstances.

Sadly you probably won't know your child's limitations until he grows up. As far as what to watch out for, really just a lot of the traditional symptoms occurring at once. As far as I know everyone's different; some people live with headaches and others having headaches is an indicator of something being wrong. The one thing you can be certain of that means something is wrong is sundowning, which is simply a person's inability to keep their eyes level or raised. I knowingly realized in 99 when I had my last malfunction that something was wrong because I suffered from this, along with extreme drowsiness and blurry vision (all strong warning signs) along with headaches.