Tag: gifted children

Twice-Exceptional Children: Why Making Friends Is Hard and How to Support Them

by Anya Dashevsky

“I want to know: how do I compare in the world of 12-year-olds? How many people in the world are there with a personality like me? Where do I fit in?”

All children need connections in order to thrive. Learning to establish and maintain friendships is a crucial part of every child’s development. Sharing, turn-taking, trusting, communicating, and compromising are some of the vital skills children practice while interacting with peers. Although for some children acquiring these skills comes naturally and making friends is easy, others struggle to find and keep friends. Twice-exceptional children—because of both components of their exceptionality—often have difficulty finding a peer group and maintaining friendships.

Twice-exceptional children are children who are identified as being gifted while also having a disability. While “disability” is not the ideal word, it is the word used by schools and other agencies and, for sake of consistency, will be used here. The disability could be a learning, emotional, physical, sensory, and/or developmental disability (The Twice-Exceptional Dilemma, 2006). Dyslexia, ADHD, Autism Spectrum Disorder, and Generalized Anxiety Disorder are just some examples of disabilities that impact a child’s functioning.

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Twice-Exceptional Children: Who They Are and Why We Need to Talk About Them

by Anya Dashevsky

“Is my child gifted? Is my child delayed? What is my child?”

“Gifted and ADHD, how can it be both?“

These, and similar questions were asked by parents of children who were eventually identified as twice-exceptional.

Twice-exceptional children are a misunderstood and under-identified group of children. Many educators, professionals, and parents are not familiar with this term and do not understand the challenges and experiences of these children. It “can feel so overwhelming that you do not know where to start,” stated a parent of several twice-exceptional children. The first step in helping this group of children is to understand what it means to be twice-exceptional.

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Gifted Children: Who they are and why we should talk about it

by Jolie Straus

Parents bring their children into my office for a variety of reasons, but usually the children are there because somehow their cognitive, academic, or social-emotional needs are not being met by their current environment. Sometimes, after I get to know the child and conduct an evaluation, it becomes clear that the child is gifted, and that giftedness is part of the equation of this child’s unmet needs.

One 12-year-old boy told me his reasons for wanting to be evaluated:  “I want to find out how many people in the world have a personality like me, because I want to know: where do I fit in?”  He then poignantly added, “at lunchtime, all the boys want to talk about football, and I want to talk about physics!”  A 16-year-old I tested shared with me that middle school had been the hardest time for him, because that’s when he “had the most disagreements with teachers on the worth of what we were doing.”  A mother of a 6-year-old girl told me that her daughter comes home from school looking dejected, and described what she termed as her daughter’s “nerdy acting out.”  When the girl’s first grade teacher asked the children to write down different ways to make the number 6, the girl wrote “2×3” and “-1 + 7”. The teacher then told the girl that “that’s not what we are doing right now.”  After that incident, this child became even more disengaged from school.

When I share the results of the evaluation with parents and with the child, we discuss how being gifted is an important part of the child’s unique learning profile and of the unique way this child relates to the world.

At this point, it becomes important to clarify:  what does “being gifted” mean?

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