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it is important to understand and do better for our twice exceptional children whose abundant and limitless potential often is squandered because of a serious lack of understanding of their day-to-day experiences.

Gifted children with ADHD often show heightened intensity and sensitivity, but they are set up to fail in a system that only recognizes and expects intellectual proclivity without consideration of their emotional needs.

It is important for gifted children to feel fulfilled by meaningful relationships with parents, teachers and professionals who understand these other characteristics that accompany the high IQ scores.

There are at least three levels of giftedness: gifted, highly gifted, and profoundly gifted, all of which may require differentiation within the same classroom.

Asynchronous development is when someone demonstrates strength in one area and relative deficit in another. The stronger the strength, the more disparate the asynchrony and when some areas of accomplishment come easily and others do not, the result is confusion and frustration for both the child and everyone around him

Perfectionism, another characteristic of the gifted experience, often comes with anxiety.

Gifted children are often told how smart they are from an early age. This type of praise can set perfectionists up to fail as they worry about letting others down.

Anxiety is often found in gifted and twice exceptional children, as well as in children with ADHD. Because these children are frequently misunderstood, challenged to control emotions and impulses, frustrated over executive functioning challenges, regularly chastised for behavior and need for movement, they fear their next reprisal, their next failure, their next out-of-sync move.

Intensity is another shared characteristic. Frequently referred to as over excitabilities in gifted literature, gifted folks tend to experience emotional, intellectual, imaginational, sensory, and psychomotor realms in big, bold, all-encompassing ways.

Once you’ve met one twice-exceptional child, you’ve met one twice-exceptional child.

Behavior is communication

The best way to create safe spaces for these children is to set up systems in homes and classrooms that structure activities, account for potential social difficulties, dial down possible sensory challenges, and in effect, plan for potential pitfalls

Most important, knowing that these children desperately want to succeed and need an adult’s help to do so, is imperative for strengthening self-esteem and realizing potential.