Hi Rosie,

I think you mentioned in one of your posts that your gifted son also had dyspraxia so I think you might understand some of the things we are going through. I want my sensitive, gifted ten year old son with motor dyspraxia and hypotonia to grow up happy and healthy. I know that isolation can sometimes lead to depression and I want to protect my son from this if at all possible. Anxiety issues run in my family so I really worry about this. We still have the teen years ahead of us.

Since my son is unable to do sports in a sports obsessed community we don't have that connection with lots of other families with kids his age. He is in cub scouts but he feels very different from the other kids, except for one gifted kid his age, and the leaders are now asking me if I want him to go ahead and cross over to Boy Scouts after the first of the year along with his gifted friend. He has several older friends already in Boy Scouts but I worry about the physical challenges.

At holiday dinners with our extended family the discussion is often about the cousins who get a lot of attention for their sports ability. One of the cousins has received a lot of attention for his ability as a quarterback on our local high school team and has been interviewed several times on a local television station, but he is also very smart and one of the relatives recently told us that this cousin also aced the ACT. Relatives wonder why my son needs to be homeschooled if his cousin did just fine at the school.

My son doesn't feel like he fits in with his cousins. He is quiet around them. He knows they don't want to hear anything about what he is doing. It isn't socially acceptable to talk about musical theater or spelling bees in a sports community or even in your own family.

It is isolating for an only child at home to be homeschooled in a town where the school is the center of the community and in a neighborhood with no other kids. All of his gifted friends are in public school and busy with after school activities so he doesn't see them very much during the school year.

We really had no choice but to homeschool. I was told by several people at the school, including the principal (a relative of mine) and a teacher who believed my son was probably highly gifted that it was my duty as a parent to homeschool my son because it was just a small town school and they hadn't seen anyone like him before and didn't know what to do with him. When I asked if he could at least play on the playground during school hours with the kids he knew from Kindergarten, they said no because of liability reasons. I was supposed to keep paying taxes to support the school that refused to even try to come up with a plan for an appropriate education. I found out that there was no law in our state requiring an appropriate education for twice exceptional kids and I was just supposed to accept it and this was hard for me.

One of the pediatricians he saw at a military base wrote "seems to be high IQ" in my son's medical records but none of the pediatricians he saw at the military base recommended OT or PT for the hypotonia until we demanded to be referred to a developmental pediatrician and an OT. He didn't get any OT until he was almost 10 and I didn't think one OT session every two weeks for three months was enough to really help my son, but that was all our insurance would pay for. The OT did give me suggestions and told us what to work on at home but I find it hard to make him do some of these things, especially since he also gets migraine headaches. Spinning on a tire swing is not something you want to do when you have a migraine.

My son and I both felt even more isolated when we didn't fit in with our local homeschool group.

So when my son and I see my dad also dealing with isolation as he takes care of my mother without ever taking breaks, even when he is sick, it does add to our sadness and feeling of not fitting in with our community and even our extended family. My son has learned a very hard lesson about people. Most people tend to avoid people who are not like them in some way, even family and church members, even so called homeschool "support" groups and it makes me sad.

The sadness and anxiety that I feel sometimes take away from the energy I need to help my son overcome issues that are a result of his dyspraxia and sensory issues. Luckily he learns very well on his own thanks to the internet and educational shows on the History, Science and National Geographic channels and lots of curiosity that I was once told that he needed to learn to stifle.

I think my son needs to know that there were other people in our family and elsewhere who were gifted and lived through difficulties and went on to become successful adults, but I think his dyspraxia has made it harder for him because nobody else in our family has it.

We would like to hear more success stories about twice exceptional people with dyspraxia who were able to work around the issues that my son deals with to become successful adults.