The road to learning about my twice exceptional child

It would have been useful to have known much more about gifted children, or even better, twice exceptional children before my older son started school. As it turns out, my son has ADHD, sensory integration dysfunction, and auditory processing disorders as well as being gifted. His inattentiveness is considerably greater when he is bored because of elementary learning material. He would also act out or not pay attention when he was running up against issues with his learning disabilities. Despite all of his issues, he continues to make huge leaps and bounds in the growth of his knowledge, far surpassing his peers on annual testing. It took a lot of effort to get there, however.

Children aren't able to verbally communicate why they don't like a topic. They know that they are being compelled to do something that doesn't feel right or that they don't like. Being taught in a way that is nonsensical to a child creates a lot of frustration and confusion. The child doesn't say, "The way you're explaining that doesn't make sense." They change their focus, don't pay attention, and try to find something to fill the space of whatever it is that makes them uncomfortable.

However, many teachers don't interpret their actions this way, and most parents do the same. The children's behavior is interpretted, in most cases, as an active avoidance or intentional misbehavior. The key differentiator between intentional misbehavior and that of a child who is frustrated with the learning process is if the behavior is far more prevalent in the classroom. However, when the child is frustrated enough, the behavior leaks into the home environment as well.

My son was reading Harry Potter books in first grade and spent hours playing with Legos. He would spend hours on mazes and puzzles. However, he would rush through is school work, doing a very sloppy job or simply not completing it due to boredom or lack of understanding. Because he was not completing his work, his teacher, who at the beginning of the year thought he was very bright, started saying that he wasn't gifted. His first year in school, my son went to several specialists because his teacher and school administrators would not accept that my son was gifted with ADHD. They were correct that there was more going on, but it wasn't autism, as they kept insisting.

The biggest problem, however, was that they simply refused to provide more challenging material to my son. Given he could and did concentrate on areas of interest, his first year in school would have gone much better if they had been willing to do what the doctor's recommended: provide more enriching learning material and make sure it is presented in a visual manner. Instead, they continued to insist that he was being adequately challenged and they were, in fact, presenting concepts in a visual manner.

By the middle of the first year, my son had shut down, and the teachers blamed him. He was soon diagnosed with opposition defiant disorder (ODD). It should be noted that ODD is almost always comorbid with some other type of attentional or learning disorder. Had I known that, I would have realized that what was happening was my son's frustration level had exceeded all of his coping abilities. I often think his teachers should have known this.

Instead, I began homeschooling, which was a very long journey of untangling all the knots that tied together his learning abilities and disabilities, his various disorders, and his self-esteem. Ultimately, we came to understand how he could learn, when he could and couldn't concentrate, and how to appropriately challenge him in his learning. Now, as a teenager, he is beginning to understand these things about himself and becoming an independent learner.

Dabrowski's Overexcitabilities/Sensory Integration Dysfunction

Sword's article, mentioned in the previous post, was a relief to read once I knew we were dealing with a gifted child. Most importantly, it tied together some very odd behaviors that baffled me. It explained some of the characteristics of the visual-spatial learner. This confirmed, for me, that my son was gifted even while having some behaviors which most people assume aren't present in a gifted child. More importantly, it discussed the overexcitabilities present in gifted children, especially emotional overexcitabilities.

Unfortunately, when most people discuss gifted overexcitabilities, there is often no explanation as to how to deal with them. Parents of gifted children are very often left with the impression that they and their children are held captive to the whims of the child.

In my experience, some of the wisest people in the public education system are occupational therapists. They deal with children who have these strange reactions to normal stimulus on a regular basis, and few things surprise them. They are invaluable in that they actually can provide you with ways to deal with these overexcitabilities, which they often label as sensory integration dysfunction or, more simply, sensory issues.

When a child has sensory issues, what looks like misbehavior can very often be an attempt on the part of the child to make his environment more comfortable or, if possible, to make the offending sensation go away. Children don't know how to explain this, however, and their behavior is completely mystifying and frustrating to adults.

Occupational therapists can explain these overexcitabilities or sensory issues in terms of children who are sensory seeking and sensory avoiding. It is also entirely possible to have a child who is both. By examining these issues from this paradigm, you can find ways to help children who are sensory avoiding to either become more aware of their issues, making it easier for them to explain the problem, or to provide ways to make the sensations less frightening. (My son had a friend who needed to have his skin brushed for short periods throughout the day because he was so touch avoidant, as an example.) For children who are sensory seeking, you can find ways to meet their needs either through therapy, activities at home, or socially acceptable means within a classroom.

Most sensory issues may be worked around when a child is young and therefore the issues may not be addressed. When the child is in school, the sensory issues will become more pronounced. Unfortunately, therapy is most effective when a child is between the ages of 3 and 6, so it important to discover as soon as possible if your child is dealing with these issues.

In my case, I didn't discover this until my child was six, and he still, as a teenager, is in the process of determining ways to cope. However, I could not believe some of the differences I saw in my son once we began therapy. Therapy was worth it even though it was not preventative.