So, I've been thinking and am wondering what some of you might think. My youngest has ADD and is gifted to some degree (HG+ or MG depending on which IQ test one wants to go with). If her older sister were not also HG without any corresponding disabilities other than slower processing speed, I don't know that I would have ever thought "gifted" or worried about 2e with dd10. She would have just been a good student with no issues on either end of the board (at least appearing that way).

If not recognized as gifted, she would be a very good student in typical or somewhat accelerated classes even taking into account being significantly younger for grade due to having changed districts to one where she didn't quite make the cut-off for the grade she is in and redshirting being somewhat common where I live. She would appear neither LD or gifted, basically, but like a good "high" kid who can get straight As without a lot of work (what her 2nd grade teacher saw her as at the start of that year).

With some definite work in dealing with ADD issues (O-3 supplements, caffeine, gum chewing in class, physical exercise, study techniques that break things into small parts for easy memory...), she did manage straight As at the end of this past year (5th grade) in a GT reading class and an accelerated 6th grade math class as well.

However, I wonder what the experience would be as a 2e person to never know that you are either gifted or LD. Would it be a problem to never be challenged to your ability level in school and would you know that something was off if you were getting all As and just not taking accelerated classes?

From what I am seeing with dd, I don't think that interventions for the ADD are needed if we just don't challenge her. Granted, I imagine that an average kid might be challenged by being the youngest in the grade and being grouped in somewhat accelerated in class groups, for instance, but the feel I get is that it is still easy enough for dd at that point that she doesn't need to deal with the ADD and can still get As.

Just one quick consolidation in case anyone doesn't want to read my whole longer rambling post!

Basically, would it be a problem for a 2e person to never know that s/he was gifted or LD? Would s/he know the difference?

I hear you Cricket2 -
My son is currently a 14 year old 9th grader. Last year this time he was a 13 year old 9th grader. We reversed his gradeskip because with the ADD he was getting graded on his organizational skills, and the local public school with it's honors program with the 1 year acceleration still wasn't meeting his intellectual needs at all.

Luckily we found a school were there is lots of small group discussion and very intelligent teachers and a reasonable amount of homework (2 hours a night) and he's really enjoying being 'a bit younger' but having any skip.

Will we miss the money later? Will this last 4 years? Who knows? I'm just happy he's having a good experience now. He has friends, is learning good work ethic, and is intellectually stimulated by his schoolwork. What a relief!

Crick - just because interventions for ADD aren't needed in 5th grade, doesn't mean that they won't be needed later. It took us until DS was in 8th grade to be 'really sure' we were seeing ADD and not the lingering effects of enforced underachievement. It sounds to me like the path she is on is a good one for her. Flexibility is the number one thing that is needed in parenting, moreso in parenting kids with very spiky profiles.

Peace hands bow,
grinity

If the person is leading a happy and fulfilling life, if she has an understanding of her strengths, weaknesses and interests (without scores), then this would be ok in my book.

We chose not to use medication for my non gifted, high average daughter. Sometime she gets frustrated with her concentration issues and the length of time it takes her to complete work. But, she is achieving mostly A's in a competitive HS taking a mix of Honors, AP and college prep classes. She is comfortable in her own skin, learning to self advocate, understands her learning style. She will be applying to college next year and should have some great options.

Would medication put her in a different bucket? Maybe, maybe not. And maybe when she can make decisions for herself, she will try medication. But for now, she is happy and doing well. Maybe I would feel differently if she were highly gifted - but I don't think so.

And I'm not against medication. My complex, gifted, 2-E son takes medication. But he has so many challenges, we felt it was necessary to address the attention issues and take at least one challenge of his plate.

I spent a lot of time going back & forth with dd as well. Even with the dx earlier this year, it was only in re-reading the chapter on ADD in the Misdiagnosis book that left me pretty sure it is ADD. He has four things listed @ the end of the chapter that basically say, 'if you see this, it may be a bored gifted kid not ADD.' Dd didn't hit any of those. Ability to entertain herself on things of interest such as building lego forts, reading, etc.? Nope, she is totally not self-entertaining and no one gets any downtime around her b/c she wants our attention constantly. I can't recall the other three things right now, but dd came out clearly ADD not just gifted and bored.

Short answer--for me, from my own experience, I would say yes. I was identified as gifted, but not really appropriately challenged. I diagnosed myself with inattentive ADD (or maybe Executive Function Disorder? must read more) as an adult. It would have made a significant difference in my life to understand what it meant for me to be gifted (i.e. idealism wasn't something youthful that I would grow out of, it is who I am) and to understand the weaknesses wrt attention and focus. An appropriate challenge at a younger age combined with actively being taught executive function skills would have made a difference. Learning more about giftedness and adult ADHD has been extremely enlightening for me, and it would have been helpful to have this information at a younger age.

I would worry that keeping the 2E info from your dd would be harmful because she surely knows she is different somehow and she is probably working much harder than anyone realizes just to appear average. This alone could lead to major depression: "life is so hard and it's just going to keep getting harder, what's the point?"

A lot probably depends on your school and your child. My experience was that my DD sailed through 6th grade (with math acceleration and Orchestra instead of reading due to testing out). In 7th grade she hit a wall and her grades just went from straight A's to totally random. My DD stayed in the most advanced classes available and aced all of the tests and quizzes in those classes but she just didn't have the organizational/time management skills (EFs) to handle all of the assignments and deadlines.

We discussed putting her in the regular classes since they were less demanding (at that time we didn't know about the ADD) and she was horrified, she explained that she was passing the advanced classes because she already knew most of what was being taught, so the regular classes would have been even more boring. Her biggest objection though was that the other kids in the regular classes were...well... I don't know how to put it politely, but basically there was no potential for finding anything in common with those kids. She was pretty peerless in the advanced classes already, she would have been even more lonely and depressed in the average classes.

My DD already knew she was gifted because every time we moved to a new school district, her teacher would recommend her for the GT program within a week. I think knowing she was smart but her grades not living up to expectations was frustrating for everyone and having teachers questioning her work ethic and calling her lazy was demoralizing. Once we found out about the ADD, it was so good for her sanity (and ours) to finally know what was going on. She knew that she was the smartest one in the class but she didn't know why it was so much harder for her to just remember to do the work and turn it in.

Sorry for going on...

Nik, I've not kept the dx from dd. She truly doubts that she is gifted and I've not shared her exact IQ scores with her other than to give her a general idea of her profile and that, one of the times, her IQ came out higher than anyone else in the family who has been tested b/c she thinks that she is the slow one in the family. She thinks that must be inaccurate and doesn't matter.

I've also shared the ADD dx with her and she was part of that process. I just wonder if we had never sought either dx whether she'd be better off as a high-avg kid in her mind rather than questioning the gifted id.

She does have to work harder than dd12 has in the GT and subject accelerated classes so I'm assuming that she has to work harder than the average gifted kid in GT placement. However, I don't think that she has to work harder than the average kid in an average class. She daydreams and gets As in those types of classes.

My dh, also ADD, on the other hand struggled in the more typically paced classes due to his deficits. He thought, and still thinks, that he must be stupid b/c he had to work so hard. I am kind of thinking that dd is more able than dh or dh is more disabled by ADD than dd. I do think that dh is likely 1-2 SDs above the mean and more likely 2 than 1 with significant impairments that kept him from performing as such.

I think that sailing through average classes on stored knowledge and then suddenly hitting classes in high school or college or grad school where attention and organization were actually required in order to master the material, without knowing ahead of time that there was a disability that might need accommodation or intervention, would be devastating and incredibly frustrating, and could seriously derail a person's career prospects if the problem wasn't recognized immediately, which it almost certainly wouldn't be.

I also think that the other issues that go along with giftedness, including the issue of needing to be around peers who get your jokes, would be unaddressed in that scenario. You still wouldn't fit in, but you wouldn't know why, and you wouldn't know where to look to find what you needed.

I didn't mean in the academic sense, I was referring to the mental energy it takes just to get through the day like a non 2E person.

If she has real friends that "get her" in the regular classes and she wants to be there I see no harm in it. If she is getting by and happy, I certainly wouldn't advocate medicating her so she can be pushed to achieve more academically. She can make that choice herself when she is older. I personally think learning how to work with the particular strengths and weaknesses you have is the most important thing you can do.

In my DD8.5's case... she would know the difference. She needs to understand why she thinks differently than others and why she struggles more than others. Putting a name to it and defining it makes her feel more 'normal' in that if it can be defined than other people must have it too. She has a need to make sense of all things, including herself. Her ADD covers a lot of her GT abilities, so she often feels stupid (her own words) because she can't show others what she knows. In her own words, again, she's a hammer without a handle.

I concur that you should let them know - my point was about addressing the ADD or not. My dd was evaluated, was at the read out, has read the report. She has a 504 plan and knows what's in it.

My ds doesn't know his scores - but absolutely knows he is bright, dyslexic and organizationally challenged.

DeMistification is essential. Pressing for acceleration is not - as long as the person is happy and well balanced. Life is a journey. Students can arrive at the same destination taking different routes. And sometimes the different route can be more inspiring than any school curriculum.

Dd has generally had a hard time socially in elementary. She had "friends" in the non-accelerated classes but she really felt like they were acquaintances more than friends and she put on whatever it was that it took to make them happy. She was rather dissatisfied with the relationships and felt very, very lonely, though. In the GT/accelerated groups, I'd say that it has been a better fit but still not quite good enough. She still doesn't feel like she fits with the other kids, but she does feel like she fits better.

I just wonder if she might have somehow fit with the average kids if we had thought that's who she was, though, and she hadn't had an older sister who was so obviously not average. That's an alternate universe, though !

For us our journey with DD9 so far has involved a great deal of "Oh you mean that's not normal? *I* do that", alternating between DH and I who the trait came from. DH and I are both probably around MG, each with LD issues that we did overcome/learn to live with, and our poor DD got BOTH sets of issues. We survived, we have turned into functional adults with interesting careers. But school was a thoroughly miserable experience for both of us and neither of us managed to actually fully complete our degrees at Uni. There are so many levels on which our lives could have been easier had our parents had a clue what was going on with us and been more able to be appropriately supportive, or had we had more understanding at least of our "quirks", and that's without actually doing anything to actually remediate our various issues. For me personally, understanding what is happening makes so much difference to my ability to cope with issues. I can't honestly even imagine what life might have been like with actual treatment for some of our issues!

So from my perspective I am SO glad that we do know as much as we do about where my DD is at, I will keep pursuing more information and I do expect it to help her her. I have to say that in my DDs case she was not functioning at all in a school environment, which is how we started down this path in the first place, so not diagnosing her issues would have left her illiterate. She has a 43 point (83 percentile point) gap between her VCI and her WMI. So it's hard perhaps to compare to a child whose blend of G/LD produces closer to "average" or "high average" performance than my DDs does.

I don't expect that she's going to suddenly start performing years above her age but I do hope that she will be able to both master the academics at least normal for her age AND that she learn all sort of executive function skills that no-one in my DHs family seem to have mastered. Investigating why she seemed so bright and was failing so miserably also provided answers to a whole lot of issues that explained how hard it was just to get through the day with DD. She is SO exhausting to parent and understanding how exhausting it must be for her just to exist has made us more tolerant and less harsh on ourselves and her for "not doing better" (and here I mean not doing better at teaching her to get out the door on time in the morning with everything she needs, or not doing better at spending 30 mins alone).

I think that you can take credit for helping her be in good enough shape, emotionally, that she was willing to 'really work' at trying to be friends in the heterogeneous environment.
I don't think you can take credit for the way she doesn't fit with average kids. That's just par for the course with being on an alternative developmental path. Could you really have a deeply rich and satisfying emotional life in a room full of your-aged version of the kids in her heterogeneous classes? Gifted kids as young as preschool notice that something is up and can feel distressed by it.

Shrugs and more shrugs,
Grinity

My dd has an 43 point spread btwn her VCI and WMI as well but in her instance that came out to the difference btwn an average score on WMI and above the 99th on VCI so just a bit more than 52% difference. Both times she was tested, her VCI was like that and WMI and PSI average, but not really below. In knowing her, I strongly suspect that what suppressed the WMI and PSI were tons of mistakes not actually doing things slowly on PSI, for instance. Yet, she still looks average or above even with those mistakes and divergences.

I think that my dh, while he didn't have as bad of a time as it sounds like your dd would have without any interventions, had a hard enough time that he didn't come out as well as dd would have with no assistance. I do have the experience of having grown up knowing something was different about me and interpreting that as something wrong, but I was just straight gifted not 2e so it was easy enough to get to that "aha" moment and heal once I realized that dd12 was gifted and to realize that had also been my problem. I could accept that about myself b/c my school performance had, for the most part, been very good and I didn't question whether I was smart.

I guess that I was just wondering if a 2e person who doesn't struggle in school, at least as long as s/he isn't pushed to his/her ability level, would also grow up knowing that s/he was different in some way and feel misplaced in the world if neither exceptionality was ever ided. It sounds like, for the most part, that you all think s/he would.

I really do think they would. Gifted often presents as academically advanced but what produces that advancement is thinking differently. 2e kids are still thinking differently even if they don't necessarily have the ability to perform academically the way that other gifted kids do. In some ways I think the feeling different has got to be worse because they may not be seen as an a peer by the people they feel most like, it may be even harder for them to find their people...

I know for my DD being completely unable to learn to read as all of her friends one by one started reading was just devastating. Of course she wouldn't ever acknowledge it to us but she went from feeling equal to her group of friends to falling literately years behind them in the space of 12 months and she knew that she should be able to do what they were doing... Retrospectively she started school with a very skewed cohort of kids who I would say were all at least MG, one I suspect maybe even PG, they had parents like us that bordered on actively avoiding having their kids read before school. But they all progressed from not reading to reading chapter books in kindy. My DD was still struggling with the alphabet at the beginning of yr 2. Intellectually in play and conversation she fit perfectly, achievement wise they were worlds apart. Now she's heading back into the ball park and at speed but who knows what her future holds.bi am hoping that now she can read and is no longer dependent on auditory skills she doesn't have that she will start to perform more in line with her potential. It's a beautiful thing to see her calm and confident (true or not she believes herself to be one of the best in the class now).

She was so shut down when she did her WISC two years ago (the report states how hard she was to engage, easily tired, disinterested, etc), I am really curious to see what shows up when she's retested. She scored 99+ on the Ravens I sat her infront of last month so I think the potential is there but it's hard to trust an internet test result is "real".

I completely agree with this, from my own experience! I was always the smartest kid (or one of two) in my class, but there was no accelerating, and since my whole family was made up of really sharp cookies, it was just normal. I have thought in recent years that it would have really helped to have been accelerated and challenged, as I grew up with a really lousy work ethic (learning-wise) that I still have to force myself out of. And just this past year I have self-diagnosed myself with ADD, from recognizing attributes discussed on this board. (Boy, do I know what "itchy brain" feels like!) I haven't tried to get any medication for it or a diagnosis from the doctor, but I might just try it one of these days to save my kids from the impatience of their mother. Knowing these things earlier would indeed have been enlightening and helpful. It's good to know what makes one tick.

After listening to a college writing professor/published poet/song writer/musician speak at a poetry contest my son entered, I decided to write to him and I included a copy of my son's poem with some background about some difficult things my son was dealing with as a twice exceptional child with motor dysgraphia and dyspraxia and scoliosis, which made it difficult for him to fit in with kids his age. My son's poem didn't win, and the winner was a happy poem that sounded like it was written by a child. My son's poem sounded more like it was written by someone older. It was about a difficult journey, his journey to the place of his dreams. Some of the metaphor sounded like it was referring to difficulties he encountered as a twice exceptional child, like "as I slowly tire, like an animal caught on a tangled wire." He sometimes referred to his problems with motor dyspraxia and low muscle tone as having tangled wires. The "tangled wires" thing would happen sometimes in piano when he was tired or getting a migraine and it didn't seem to matter if he practiced or not. Sometimes he did better with no practice than he did when he had practiced a lot. I think if he didn't understand that he was twice exceptional, that it would be even harder to deal with. In his poem there was also a line that said "I was distraught, but I had a thought that I should try another way." With his disabilities he will have to find another way and I have no doubt that he will.

The professor wrote back about the poem and said my son did a beautiful job with his words. He said he didn't find out that he had an ld until he was older. He also said he never fit in--not in any grade, ever. He said the K through 12 state-run institution has never known what to do with students like him and quite possibly my son. He said they do not fit the mold and learn in very different ways.

The professor also said that creativity was the therapy that got him through his early years and encouraged my son to keep writing.

I also wrote to a woman who is a university graduate student doing research on pain management after seeing an article about her in the paper. She has pain from scoliosis and arthritis. She had to learn to focus on her work instead of the pain and my son is working on that. My son doesn't have ADD but pain does distract him and make it harder for him to concentrate on things like math and piano. He proved this year that he can make high grades in language arts even with his disabilities. He is also doing really well in musical theater and he gets lead roles now. My son has gifts and disabilities and he needs to know about all of it so he can learn to compensate for the disabilities but spend more time on the gifts so that he can be the best he can be.

I am finding smart, successful people with some of the same disabilities my son has. So far, the people I have talked to are very helpful and willing to share their stories with us and it is helping us get through a difficult time.

I think my son was better off knowing that he is twice exceptional, but I remember he was surprised that his dysgraphia was a learning disability when he felt he had never had any trouble learning anything, it was doing things (like handwriting) that he had trouble with. Now that we have the health issues, I think it is a little harder for him to learn because it is a distraction but I still think he would benefit by taking accelerated classes, especially in language arts. His writing composition teacher things he would do well next year in the high school class if we can find a way to manage the health issues.