Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Twice Exceptional how can I rise my 2e son self-esteem ?

Hello
Let me introduce myself. I am the father of boy (7) and a girl (5 tomorrow). We are French living in France. I am on this forum because of my boy who has been diagnosed with giftedness. He is also an AD (HD?) child (due to his behavior at school and home and to the large discrepancy between the IQ verbal score (155) and the treatment speed (83)). He is on Ritalin (or so). He is also dyslexic, dyscalculic and is followed by a graphology therapist.
So, I guess he can be considered as 2e � It seems that this "2e" state is not well-known in France. It seems that learning disorders are not compatible with giftedness in France. You can be gifted and ADHD, but in that case your attention problems are just simply counterbalanced by your intellectual capabilities. That is definitely not the case of my boy who has a lot of difficulties when it comes to reading, writing, calculating (basics school learnings). I am still wondering on how it is possible to have such high performance in wisc4 and have such problems. When you talk with people who are involved in the "giftedness" stuff in France, it looks like the only way to get the gifted child interested in school when there are problems is to skip a grade � I am quite confident in that is not a solution in the case of my child. So what ? In France, it looks like there are no solutions�
Now let's come to why I am here. During the WISC4 passing, my child showed great performances in some tests (he answered sponteanously to things that I cannot respond even after a short thinking � well, maybe I am not very intelligent but I have a PhD in Chemical Engineering. Seeing my 6-year child, just answering in real-time these questions leave me stunned). Nevertheless, doing the homeworks is just entering war at home. I and his mother too are completely lost in front of that. The big question for me is how I can try to challenge him on a ground he would enjoy to be challenged on. I do not know if I am clear (it would be easier for me in French :)). Let's try it another way. It is very hard to get my son interested in things. It does not mean that he is not interested in anything (he has a lot of imagination, can play with anything, he is very fond of books but not of reading them). I often say to myself that it is because I am not capable of raising interest in him, of making his brain works in a way he will like. He is a kind of race car running 10 mph, and I am not capable to help him driving faster. His self-esteem is so low. So, my questions are : how can I try to interest him ? As he has learning disorders but succeeds in IQ tests, is there a means to make him work on other abilities than just basic school stuffs (I mean just to make him understand he can do great things .. a kind of work around self-esteem rising) ? Can you provide me advices, book references, websites which can be helpful?

Merci and sorry for my poor English.

Hi, Raoul,

My child is 2E as well. I'll offer some ideas from our experience and see if anything is useful for you.


Do you have therapies in place for the dyslexia, dyscalculia, and dysgraphia? Experts here recommend particular methods to teach reading for children with dyslexia (Orton-Gillingham is one such method, there are others, I don't know them all but will leave that to experts).

First, I'd make sure that your son is getting all the therapies he needs, so that his disabilities hinder him less and less over time.

Our son has never been formally diagnosed as dysgraphic, but he has had a lot of difficulty with written expression. We still do speed-writing practice drills as a way of making his writing more fluent (copying a text, seeing how many letters he can write legibly in 60 seconds, gradually increasing to 2 minutes).


It wasn't for mine either... considered it, but decided against. We're glad we chose as we did. I think there is more than one path through this process.


You have my sympathy. We've been there too. We had the most success by (1) praising wildly even the smallest success and (2) breaking things into steps, and doing only one step at a time, with a break between.


I'm not sure what's available there...surely there are things to be involved in where his skills are valued. Cub scouts, Lego league, chess club, Odyssey of the Mind or Destination Imagination tend to be pretty supportive places for unusual kids to find both friends and interests. It isn't that hard to start most of these up, if they're not already available.

I wonder if your son would like filmmaking or photography, bypassing his academic weaknesses but giving him room for self-expression?

Hope that helps,
DeeDee

Welcome French Papa
Your English is very good. I believe that you are intelligent enough to be a good learning partnet for your son.

To raise his self esteem try Special Time. Make a regular appointment with your son to do what he wants to do. During this period of time let him decide what to do and how to do it. Your job is to be interested and get to know both him and yourself under these conditions. You can set limits as needed for safty and money but try to go a bit outside your routine comfort zone.

One big difference between children and adults is that many adults have some freedom to structure their live to avoid certain challenges. During special time the shoe is on the other foot. As you try and spend time with your son he may insist that you aren't fun. This is his way of showing you how it looks to him that he is being treated. If you can get him laughing about your supposed faults then he can release tense feelings about the challenges he faces.

Try Special Time and let us know how it went so we can cheer you on.

2E is just starting to be known in the US. It is frustrating indeed to imagine how much talent is currently being lost to both our Nations and to the world.

I think before you try and make hin understand that he can do great things that the self esteem must be solidly in place. That means that your first job is to make it plain that you love and enjoy and respect him in his current state. While you wait you can become an expert in 2E folks who did do great things or even stories of othe 2e kids on this board. Look up cousins and see if you have any family members who overcame silimilar challenges. Talk about these people and let them live in your imagination so that they can start to live in your son's imagination as well.

A last point is that I believe for most people, the mind and body enjoys what the mind and body are talented at. Observe and experiment to find out what your son enjoys and we'll help you brainstorm ways to nurture the spark of love into a driving talent.

Then we can all think of your family and say: Un veritable marve de civilization France.

Sort for the spelling problems in both languages...this is the only French phrase I know.

Peace and Love
Grinity

Welcome Raoul - I think your English is excellent!

I have two 2e children - my ds is 12, and your description of your ds reminds me so much of my ds at 8 years old. I'm sorry I don't have much time to reply right now but I'll add a few quick thoughts:

1) Our ds was diagnosed at 8 (2nd grade). We had to tackle the issues that were caused by his 2e challenges before we put a lot of focus on his strengths. This seems sad in a way, but it's what he needed at the time. Our ds' largest challenge was writing - both handwriting and being able to express himself in written language. Those two challenges were making it impossible for him to be successful at school, and his frustration over school turned inward into anxiety and depression and panic attacks. So the first two-three years were full of figuring out accommodations and remediation and advocating over and over again at school.

2) I wish we'd tried to push for more challenging work for our ds in the areas of school he excels at and really loves (he's a math science kid). Because of all his 2e-ness, we didn't realize until he was in 5th grade (11 years old) that for years he'd been bored to tears listening to the level of discussion in his regular-level school classroom among typical peers. He would have benefited tremendously by being in a full-time gifted program with accommodations for his challenges, but we'd turned down a full-time gifted program because we felt it would be too much stress - still do! It's really tough knowing what to do with kids who have such wild discrepancies in abilities.

3) I'm not an enthusiastic fan of full-grade acceleration - or even subject acceleration for EG kids if it means they are in a class with a mix of non-gifted kids. I'm not saying I'd never do it - we have our ds subject-accelerated, and 90% of the time, it's a-ok for him, but there are other times when the pace is simply too slow. Radical acceleration might have been more appropriate for him and he could have handled it intellectually, but he couldn't have kept up with the writing demands in elementary school and we (parents) needed several years just to figure out what path to take re accommodations (ok, we're still figuring it out because things change every year!).

4) Are you sure your ds is ADHD? I don't mean to question and I hope you don't think I'm out of line in asking - the reason I ask is our ds was misdiagnosed with ADHD at 8 when really the symptoms that looked like ADHD were due to his undiagnosed disabilities combined with giftedness. If your ds responds well to the Ritalin then he's got ADHD so *please ignore* what I just said!

5) I've always felt like it was hard to get my ds interested in things. It is! He gets interested in what he is interested in, not what someone else finds for him to be interested in. That's ok (although it was annoying for me at times when he was younger!).

6) Since it sounds like he has dysgraphia, I'd start him keyboarding now - let him use whatever fingering he wants to on the keyboard, maybe just his thumbs and index fingers. If he is dysgraphic, eventually he'll most likely need to be using the keyboard for his schoolwork, and the sooner it seems like just a regular part of his life, the easier it will be to integrate it at school.

That's all I can think of right now - you might want to just go through a few old posts here on the 2e board to get a feel for what other people's experiences have been and how they've approached the world of 2e.

Best wishes,

polarbear

One of my favorite stories about Albert Einstein is that one of his teachers tried to have him expelled from school. The teacher said, "All you do is sit in the back of the room and smile." Apparently, the class wasn't either math or philosophy, because those were the only classes that interested Einstein before he went to the polytechnic.

Chances are, you will be frustrated--again and again--when he doesn't seem to be interested in anything. And you will be puzzled when his imagination catches a spark about something that seems so dull to everybody else!

There are two huge reasons for his lack of interest. His intelligence means that so many things are so easy for him to figure out. Boring! And his disabilities mean that so many things are just too hard for him. It takes him so long to figure it out. Boring! Unless his education is very individualized and very carefully planned, he won't spend much time at all in the "Goldilocks Zone", where the challenge is just right!

You know the Goldilocks Zone should be called the Baby Bear Zone, because it was always the Baby Bear's stuff that was just right for Goldilocks!

My son has a similar discrepancy between his verbal capabilities and his processing speed. He has some other "E"s, as well. For our family, we have found it easier to homeschool so that we can provide the right level of support for the disabilities while allowing him to go as far as he wanted as fast as he wanted to support the giftedness. I don't know if that is even an option for your family, but it has worked well for us. Having a scribe, voice-recognition software, and/or keyboarding for all written work, as well as extended time, so that he can get what is in his head down on paper, has been incredibly helpful for my son, who was convinced he was stupid because he couldn't write like other children. If your son is dyslexic, the options that don't require him to know how to spell words, such as a scribe or a voice recognition program like Dragon Naturally Speaking, might really be a godsend for him, particularly if he can get permission to use them for school. I second the recommendation for Orton-Gillingham-based reading instruction methods for dyslexia.

Therapy, therapy, therapy to work on skills while he's still young, but also giving him a chance to really learn things at the level he is capable of is the strategy I would recommend. Think about using audio books, videos, programs like Learning Ally, if you have something similar in France, and just plain reading aloud to him: not only his textbooks, but books at his conceptual reasoning level (fiction and non-fiction), and giving him a voice recorder so that he can get his ideas recorded even if there is no one available to act as a scribe at that moment.

It's late here, and I think I may be babbling, so I'll stop. I hope some of this was helpful.

My spouse and youngest son both are 2e, so I feel lucky in some ways to have had a "cheat sheet" for my son by being able to draw for my spouse's own experiences when making decisions about what to do.

To me, the challenge for 2e kids' self-esteem seems to lie in the discrepancy between concepts coming easy yet still struggling with basic things like writing, reading, and even riding a bike or tying shoes. It's frustrating to watch their peers quickly write something or memorize math facts that seem beyond reach for themselves.

Things I learned from my husband that have helped me with our son (and it is NOT a one time thing; moving to mid school has meant we are having to start all over again with him feeling dumb again as his peers adapt to the new, faster pace and he has struggled with organization and keeping up with more busy work).

1. Make sure you are subtly and continually presenting the idea to him that for about 5% of the people in the world, their brains function differently - giving them some advantages and some challenges in the process. People with dyslexia tend to be able to view ideas globally or in 3-D, giving them a real advantage in some types of problem solving and in thinking outside of the box. There are a ton of websites that talk about famous people who had dysgraphia or dyslexia. It is very important that your son does not see himself as defective, simply different.

2. Comfort him when he is frustrated, but also let him struggle. Push for allowances in class that allow him to keep up with his peers, but let him work through the frustration and exhaustion at home. If he doesn't learn he can push past the frustration, he will be limited in how much he believes he can do.

3. Get him the therapy he needs, and do it as soon as possible. My son required speech, physical, and occupational therapy for everything from learning how to grip a pencil to how to decode sounds. In our part of the US, our speech therapist used the Wilson Reading program, and with the new approach to reading, he jumped several grades in a few months once it clicked.

4. Make sure he is doing things that he loves outside of class. My son loves making music, so we bought him a keyboard that hooks up to our Mac computer so he can create, record and produce his own music. He also likes to play with Legos (this is great therapy for fine motor skills as well), and he is also goes climbing with his dad. It is a sport where he challenges himself and it also helps develop his core muscles and fine motor skills. Do things with him that he likes.

5. Educate yourself on all of the research and data you can find on 2e kids and learning styles. You will be his best advocate for change in his school and with his teachers. If the French system does not yet give your child legal protection for services or accommodations, get really good at sweet-talking his individual teachers into learning how he best learns and what help he needs to succeed. As in all things, you'll have some teachers who readily see his genius in spite of his challenges and others will refuse to vary their teaching style. If it is unbearable, is home schooling an option?

6. Don't readily accept the ADHD diagnosis. Perhaps he really does have it, but maybe not. High IQ kids' boredom and zoning out can often be interpreted as an inability to focus when it is actually a heightened ability to tune out what is around them while they escape inside their own head.

Hang in there - it's a tough challenge for both of you, but 2e kids also bring a journey that is new and unique and often quite inspiring.

Great post ABQ. As usual.

Just a quick but huge thank you for these answers. I will answer them later on .. It took me some time to get through all these English words and I think it will take me a little bit to answer (in an comprehensible English)... So please be lenient !

Bonjour, Raoul:

My son has problems with dyslexia and dysgraphia. I helped him write down his stories, and he drew pictures to illustrate them when he was your son's age. It got his ideas down on paper, and was fun for both of us.

We bought him a small voice recorder that he used to record his stories or homework. He would play them back and write down what he said. He could not remember what he wanted to say because he spent so much effort on drawing, not writing, his letters. He wrote some long and good stories this way.

As he got older, he learned to type on a computer. We bought him typing games like Sponge Bob Square Pants, and he now types quickly (still 2 fingers, but quickly).

Does your son learn better from watching videos than reading books? I often get my son a video as well as the book when he needs to write an essay on something. It helps to have 2 ways to learn the material. His self esteem improved over time, and now that he is 14, he knows what his strengths and weaknesses are in school.

Good luck