Renie -
I want to ask something. Is the therapist sure she's truly developing ODD? Do you have more than one opinion on the matter?
A diagnosis of ODD is very serious. I would hope that you are very certain it's not something else that appears to be ODD at first blush. I'd want to make absolutely certain that the diagnostician was very familiar with gifted children and their emotional needs first and made sure they ruled out other causes of oppositional behavior. Sometimes the extremely frustrated, emotionally under-developed, highly gifted child can only act out their pain because they can't really understand what they are so angry/frustrated about.
Has your child been evaluated for possible sensory processing disorders? One of the things that tipped me off to my daughter having some sensory issues is the fact that she got carsick quite frequently. This is a problem in the vestibular sense. A lot of behavioral problems can be "caused" by untreated sensory over-sensitivities (particularly in the vestibular sense). Also, reactive hypoglycemia (seen in 5-7% of gifted kids)causes extreme "irrationality" for lack of a better term, in otherwise "good" kids. My daughter would go from Dr. Jekyll to Ms. Hyde when her blood sugar was low. She would change back with a protein-rich snack.
I thought my daughter might have exhibited ODD tendencies. It turns out, her seemingly mild sensory issues (the carsickness I almost shrugged off as a quirk, the fact she didn't care to wash her hands when she was 3 and seemed to outgrow it, and the fact that other "normal" volumes of sounds seemed to bother her, and loud sounds really bothered her for a while but seemed to go away with time) actually played a large part in her behavioral difficulties.
I had my daughter evaluated by a pediatric neuropsychologist to be sure what I was dealing with and what I was not.
I just want to be absolutely sure they covered other possible reasons for oppositional behavior.
Please if you haven't looked into it, please read James T. Webbs Mis-diagnosis and Dual Diagnosis of Gifted Children and Adults.
ODD is the second most common Misdiagnosis of Gifted Children.
You can check out the excerpt on Google Books here
Misdiagnosis and Dual Diagnosis of Gifted Children and Adults. starting on page 66
