A child can need greater intellectual challenge and greater support at the same time. High ability does not prevent ADHD or autism. ADHD or autism do not erase exceptional cognitive, creative or academic strengths. Twice exceptionality describes precisely this coexistence, and it makes most sense when both parts of the profile are understood together.
Some children genuinely puzzle the adults around them. They may explain a topic with a depth that seems years ahead of their age and, ten minutes later, forget for the third time where they left their exercise book. They may teach themselves about astronomy, coding, history or animals and still become stuck on a straightforward worksheet. They may reason brilliantly while needing considerable help to organise a school bag, cope with an unexpected change or work out what to do in the playground.
Apparent contradictions like these often attract painful comments: “you are far too clever to be doing this”, “you could do it if you really wanted to”, “they are too intelligent to have ADHD”, “if they can speak like that, they cannot be autistic” or, in the opposite direction, “with those difficulties, they cannot really be highly able”.
Human development is more complicated than that. Strengths and difficulties do not cancel one another out. Sometimes one compensates for the other. Sometimes one makes the other harder to see. Sometimes both are present so strongly that a child can look remarkably able in one situation and unexpectedly vulnerable in another.
This is what is meant by twice exceptionality, often shortened to 2e: a person has exceptional ability or talent and, at the same time, another condition or difficulty that creates genuine support needs in learning, everyday functioning or participation.
In this guide, I will focus particularly on two combinations that can raise complex questions at home and at school: high ability with ADHD and high ability with autism. The aim is not to help anyone diagnose a child from a webpage. It is to offer a more accurate way of thinking about a profile that can look contradictory until all its parts are considered together.
What is twice exceptionality?
Twice exceptionality is not a DSM or ICD diagnosis. It is a psychological and educational concept used to describe people who have an area of exceptional ability alongside a disability, neurodevelopmental condition or other difficulty that also affects functioning.
In Twice Exceptional, edited by Scott Barry Kaufman, these profiles are described as complex precisely because strengths and difficulties can interact in different ways: a strength may conceal a difficulty; a difficulty may conceal a strength; or the two may partially compensate for one another so that the overall result looks deceptively ordinary.
This third pattern is especially easy to miss. A pupil can sit close to the class average while there is a very large gap between what they understand, what they could develop with appropriate teaching and what they can demonstrate consistently.
Why can twice-exceptional profiles go unnoticed?
Twice-exceptional profiles are often difficult to recognise because adults naturally expect consistency. If a child can solve a complex problem, we assume they should also be able to organise their homework. If they receive excellent marks, we may conclude that an important difficulty cannot be present. If they need a great deal of help, we may start doubting whether their ability is truly exceptional.
Development does not work along one single scale. General reasoning, working memory, processing speed, attention, cognitive flexibility, language, emotional regulation, social communication, independence and sensory processing can all develop quite differently within the same person.
Edward Amend's chapter in Twice Exceptional explains that some highly able pupils compensate so effectively that their difficulties are not recognised until secondary school or even later. The reverse can also happen: a disability or neurodevelopmental difficulty may lower performance on certain tasks and prevent exceptional ability from being identified.
A girl has outstanding verbal comprehension, learns vocabulary very quickly and makes unusually original connections. Yet she takes far too long to finish tests, loses multi-step instructions and needs constant prompting to hand work in. If we look only at her strong marks, it may seem that there is “no problem”. If we look only at her disorganisation, we may underestimate how advanced her reasoning is. A good assessment tries to understand both.
High ability and ADHD: understanding quickly does not remove executive-function difficulties
A highly able child can have ADHD. There is no clinical incompatibility between the two. The difficulty is that some behaviours associated with high ability can superficially resemble behaviours seen in ADHD, while high cognitive ability may also help a child compensate for genuine ADHD-related difficulties for a long time.
ADHD is not simply “being unable to pay attention”. It involves persistent difficulties with regulating attention and, depending on the presentation, inhibition, activity level, impulsivity, task initiation, time management, working memory, persistence and other executive processes.
Research discussed in Twice Exceptional has found that gifted children with ADHD can show greater difficulties than gifted peers without ADHD in working memory, processing speed, inhibition, planning and organisation. This helps explain a profile that can otherwise look baffling: very advanced reasoning alongside an unexpectedly chaotic school day.
“But they can concentrate for hours on what they like”: why this does not settle the ADHD question
One of the most common objections is: “They cannot have ADHD; when something interests them they can sit with it for three hours.”
It sounds logical, but it relies on an oversimplified view of attention. In ADHD, the issue is not an absolute inability to concentrate. Attention and effort can be highly variable. Novelty, interest, challenge, urgency and immediate reward can make a significant difference to performance.
At the same time, we should not make the opposite mistake. A highly able child who focuses deeply on interests and switches off during repetitive work does not automatically have ADHD. A pupil may disengage because material is already mastered or insufficiently challenging.
More useful questions include:
- Do difficulties with starting, organising or finishing also appear in activities the child genuinely values?
- Do they occur across more than one setting?
- Have they been persistent over time?
- Do they cause meaningful impairment in everyday functioning?
- Does the child need substantially more external structure than would be expected for their age?
- Does behaviour improve substantially when the level of challenge is adjusted?
These questions do not diagnose ADHD, but they help move the discussion from assumptions towards a more careful assessment.
Boredom, curiosity and ADHD: why context matters
Gifted-education literature has long discussed the possibility that boredom, intellectual intensity or curricular mismatch may sometimes be mistaken for ADHD. Webb and colleagues' work on misdiagnosis helped draw attention to the importance of context.
There is, however, an equally important qualification. Later reviews discussed in Twice Exceptional point out that there is not good evidence that gifted children are being misdiagnosed with ADHD or autism on a massive scale. We therefore need to avoid both extremes: diagnosing too quickly and dismissing a genuine diagnosis by attributing everything to high ability.
A situation may resemble ADHD when
- attention drops mainly when work is extremely repetitive;
- the child talks because they have already grasped the material and are waiting for the class;
- they ask constant questions around a subject that triggers intense curiosity;
- they move while listening but continue to follow the content accurately;
- engagement improves clearly when the level of challenge becomes more appropriate.
It is worth exploring ADHD more fully when
- disorganisation appears across settings and not only when the child is bored;
- materials, appointments or tasks are forgotten persistently;
- starting and finishing activities depend heavily on external supervision;
- impulsivity or inhibition difficulties cause real impairment;
- the problem remains present even in activities that matter to the child.
You can explore this further in our ADHD assessment and psychological treatment page and our guide Autism and ADHD in children: differences, similarities and why they can co-occur.
Executive functions can be the point where ability and everyday performance diverge
Carlos Chagas' introductory guide to high ability and ADHD gives particular attention to organisation, time management, task initiation and self-regulation. It should not be treated as a stand-alone diagnostic authority, but it captures an important everyday reality: thinking at a very high level does not guarantee efficient execution of an ordinary task.
Consider a school project. Understanding the subject is only one part of the job. The pupil must remember the deadline, locate materials, interpret instructions, divide the work into stages, estimate time, sustain effort, resist distraction, check the result and finally hand it in.
A child may be exceptional at the first step — understanding — and need explicit support with several of the others.
A teenager may be able to explain the entire exam topic from memory and still receive a disappointing mark because they revised at the last minute, missed a page, managed time poorly or lost marks through rushed answers. Saying “they do not make enough effort” describes an outcome, but it does not tell us which process needs support.
High ability and autism: another combination that is not contradictory
High ability and autism can also coexist. Intellectual ability does not remove the core characteristics of autism, and autism does not prevent someone from showing exceptional reasoning, memory, creativity, mathematical ability, language, visual processing or other strengths.
Trevor Clark's Exploring Giftedness and Autism focuses on a particularly specific group: autistic children with savant skills or very marked talents. Its relevance here lies in the shift of educational perspective: rather than building the whole programme around what a pupil cannot do, Clark also asks what the child can do extraordinarily well and how that strength can be developed.
An important distinction is needed. Not every autistic person with high ability is a savant, and not every savant skill implies globally high intellectual ability. Clark makes a clear distinction between these concepts. We should therefore avoid using dramatic examples of calendar calculation, extraordinary memory or musical skill as the template for “autism plus high ability”.
Twice exceptionality involving autism and high ability is often much more ordinary in appearance: a child with remarkable verbal reasoning who does not know how to enter a group game; a highly academic teenager who comes home exhausted after every school day; a pupil with extraordinary knowledge in one area who becomes overwhelmed by last-minute changes; or a girl who talks confidently with adults but struggles to interpret the social rules within her peer group.
Preferring adults, intense interests or feeling different do not automatically mean autism
This is another area where isolated traits can easily be overinterpreted. Some highly able children prefer talking with older teenagers or adults because those conversations offer greater intellectual compatibility. Feeling out of step with age peers does not, by itself, establish autism.
Equally, a highly intense interest is not enough. A child may spend months learning everything possible about a subject because it fascinates them without showing the broader developmental pattern required for an autism diagnosis.
When autism is a realistic possibility, assessment looks at the whole developmental picture: social reciprocity, understanding of implicit communication, flexibility, routines, the nature of interests, sensory processing, adaptation across settings and the internal cost of that adaptation.
A comparison discussed in Twice Exceptional is useful here. Profoundly gifted children may feel socially isolated or prefer older company because they struggle to find intellectual peers. When autism is also present, differences tend to extend more broadly into social reciprocity, flexibility, perspective-taking or emotional and behavioural regulation.
No single behaviour should decide the diagnosis. Limited eye contact, preferring adults, talking at length about an interest, needing routines or being highly sensitive to noise can all have different meanings. What matters clinically is the pattern, developmental history, intensity, context and functional impact.
You can explore these areas further in Autism in children and teenagers, Sensory differences in autism and Autism in girls: signs that can go unnoticed.
Interests are not merely behaviours to restrict
One of the most valuable aspects of Clark's work is its strengths-based perspective. In the pupils he studied, intense interests and skills were not treated only as behaviours to reduce. They were also approached as possible routes into learning, communication, participation, independence and talent development.
This does not mean that every interest should dominate the day or that flexibility should never be supported. The point is simpler: when a child has a genuine strength, we should not extinguish it in order to prove that we are addressing their difficulties.
Instead of saying “they only want to talk about maps, so we need to take maps away”, we can ask: can that interest be used to work on reading, route planning, distance, history, geography or presenting information to classmates? We can still teach conversational turn-taking, flexibility and engagement with other topics. Supporting one does not require abandoning the other.
When a strength also helps a child regulate
For some twice-exceptional pupils, interests have an emotional or regulatory function as well. Reading about a topic, drawing, coding, building, classifying information or engaging in a creative activity may provide structure, competence, calm and a sense of predictability.
If school or family use that interest only as a reward that is removed whenever something goes wrong, they may be taking away one of the few areas in which the child feels effective and regulated.
Kaufman and colleagues propose a different approach: use strengths and interests as bridges for developing harder skills while also creating genuine opportunities for talent development. Not everything has to become therapy. A child is also allowed to be very good at something simply because it is part of who they are.
An uneven profile is not an incoherent profile
Families often describe these children with comments such as: “it feels as though they have two different ages”, “in some ways they seem much older and in others much younger”, “they can talk about physics but cannot find their shoes” or “they understand a system perfectly but have no idea what to do when two friends fall out”.
These differences may reflect asynchronous development and, in some cases, genuine twice exceptionality. The problem begins when we use a strength to invalidate a need:
- “if they can teach themselves that, they can organise themselves if they choose to”;
- “if they can talk to adults, they cannot have social difficulties”;
- “if their grades are good, the ADHD cannot be significant”;
- “if they need this much support, their ability cannot really be that high”.
Psychology should not force us to choose between these statements. It should help us build a more accurate map.
The emotional cost of appearing capable while not always being able to show it
One of the most important risks of unidentified twice exceptionality is the identity the child may gradually build around their difficulties. If, for years, they repeatedly hear two conflicting messages — “you are incredibly bright” and “you are a disaster”, “you could get top marks” and “you never do anything properly” — they may begin to interpret genuine difficulties as a moral failing.
Some develop fragile self-esteem. Others stop trying because not trying protects them from finding out what would happen if they genuinely tried and still struggled. Some become perfectionistic because they feel they must constantly prove that they are “as clever as everyone says”. Others respond with anger, opposition or apparent indifference.
One of the most painful conclusions is: “if I am clever enough to understand it, then everything I cannot manage must be because I am lazy, irresponsible or somehow defective.”
If there is intense school refusal, panic, marked withdrawal, significant changes in sleep or eating, self-harm, persistent hopelessness or thoughts about death, grades and diagnostic labels are no longer the priority. Safety and emotional wellbeing need appropriate professional attention.
Is it high ability, ADHD or autism? Sometimes the question is framed too narrowly
Families often arrive at assessment feeling they must choose one explanation: “is this high ability or ADHD?” or “is it high ability or autism?”
Sometimes a contextual or developmental explanation does fit better and a neurodevelopmental diagnosis is not confirmed. But in other cases the most accurate answer is: both.
The purpose of assessment is not to decide which label wins. It is to test which explanation, or combination of explanations, best accounts for the person's overall functioning. That requires looking at:
- developmental history;
- the settings in which difficulties occur;
- persistence and frequency;
- real-life impact on independence, learning, relationships or wellbeing;
- areas of exceptional strength and performance;
- possible compensation strategies;
- what changes when the environment or level of challenge changes.
This approach reduces two opposite errors: pathologising behaviours that are better explained by context, while also missing genuine ADHD or autism because a child is “too intelligent”.
Why grades cannot rule out ADHD, autism or twice exceptionality
Grades are useful information, but they are not a diagnostic instrument. A child with very high intellectual ability may maintain excellent results for years through memory, rapid understanding, family scaffolding, last-minute studying or enormous effort.
Difficulties may become more visible as demands change: more teachers, more subjects, long-term assignments, independent revision, more complex peer relationships, classroom changes and less adult supervision.
This helps explain why some 2e profiles are recognised relatively late. School failure is not a requirement for having a support need. Equally, a good grade should not be treated as proof that everything is easy.
A much more informative question than “are they passing?” is: what do they have to do to achieve that result, and how sustainable is the effort?
What should an assessment of twice exceptionality look like?
A useful assessment needs to see strengths without allowing difficulties to hide them and difficulties without allowing strengths to compensate for them completely. This principle appears repeatedly in specialist 2e literature and has practical consequences for how assessment is designed.
One intelligence test is not enough. Neither is an ADHD questionnaire or an online autism test. Depending on the referral question, assessment may integrate:
- Developmental history. Early development, language, play, relationships, interests, sensory profile, regulation, independence, schooling and changes over time.
- Educational history. Progress over time, stronger and weaker subjects, teacher observations, work habits, homework, behaviour and response to different levels of challenge.
- Cognitive assessment. Not only one global number: verbal and visual reasoning, working memory, processing speed and other indices that may reveal meaningful discrepancies.
- Academic attainment where relevant. Reading, writing, mathematics or other areas to understand whether demonstrated performance is consistent with ability and history.
- Attention and executive functions. Evidence from tasks, interviews, rating scales and observation, without treating any single attention test as a diagnosis.
- Specific assessment for ADHD or autism where the evidence justifies it. Using appropriate tools, information from more than one setting and consideration of functional impact.
- Emotional and social functioning. Anxiety, self-esteem, perfectionism, frustration, mood, relationships and the possible impact of years of being misunderstood.
- Integrated formulation. The most important part: explaining how strengths, difficulties, environment and support needs fit together.
Our complete guide to psychological assessment explains in more detail why a useful assessment integrates several sources of information rather than simply handing over a list of scores.
Why one overall IQ score may not tell the whole story
In a relatively even cognitive profile, an overall score can provide a useful summary. In a twice-exceptional profile, it may conceal clinically meaningful variation.
Twice Exceptional discusses how cognitive indices can show important discrepancies between reasoning, working memory, processing speed and other areas. A weakness may pull down some tasks enough to make overall ability look lower than it is. Conversely, a major strength can compensate so effectively that a difficulty remains hidden within an apparently average outcome.
This does not mean that every difference between scores has diagnostic significance, or that the highest score should always be taken as the “real” ability. Interpretation needs to consider the whole pattern, developmental history and real-world functioning.
What can school do? Support the difficulty without suppressing the strength
One of the most common errors in twice exceptionality is supporting only one half of the profile. A pupil with ADHD receives organisational help but spends most of the day working well below their intellectual level. An autistic pupil receives social or behavioural intervention while nobody develops their talent. Or the reverse happens: advanced content is provided while genuine sensory, executive or emotional needs are ignored.
The 2e literature consistently points towards a dual response: develop strengths and provide specific support for areas of need.
Match the intellectual challenge
Use depth, enrichment, flexible pacing or acceleration where appropriate rather than simply increasing the quantity of repetitive work.
Externalise organisation
Visible instructions, interim deadlines, checklists, step-by-step plans and staged dates can reduce unnecessary executive load.
Adjust the environment where needed
Reduce avoidable distraction, consider sensory load, prepare for changes and allow reasonable regulation strategies.
Use interests as bridges
Connect harder skills or curriculum areas with genuine strengths instead of treating every interest as a reward for compliance.
Teach skills that may not emerge automatically
Planning, revision, checking, communication, asking for help, time management and flexibility may need explicit teaching.
Measure progress broadly
Marks matter, but so do independence, participation, wellbeing, self-advocacy and continued development of strengths.
Clark's work with autistic pupils who had very specific talents illustrates how acceleration, enrichment and mentoring can help turn isolated abilities into meaningful opportunities for learning and participation. His findings cannot be generalised to every autistic child with high ability, but the underlying educational principle is valuable: a difficulty should not make talent invisible.
What can families do at home?
At home, one of the most useful changes is often a change in language. “With how clever you are…” almost always makes the problem worse because it turns ability into an accusation.
It is more useful to describe exactly what is happening: “you understand the task but getting started is hard”, “when the plan changes you need more time to reorganise yourself”, “you can focus deeply on coding, but long tasks without structure are difficult to sustain”.
- Separate ability from behaviour. Being highly able does not automatically provide every executive, social or emotional skill the child needs.
- Avoid rescuing every task. Helping build the system — planner, steps, reminders — is different from doing the work to prevent a poor mark.
- Protect areas of competence. A child needs places where talents can grow and where they are not defined only by their difficulties.
- Look for patterns rather than isolated bad days. Poor sleep, illness or a difficult week affects everyone. We are looking for persistent patterns over time.
- Coordinate messages with school. The same behaviour can receive completely different interpretations when families and teachers do not share concrete examples.
- Talk about the profile without shame. Understanding that strength and support need can coexist helps build an identity that is more accurate and less blaming.
Ocnos exercises to understand the profile more clearly
The following exercises do not diagnose high ability, ADHD or autism. They are designed to organise observations and turn vague concerns into more useful information for families, schools or a professional assessment.
Two lenses: strengths and support needs
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What changes across different contexts?
This can help distinguish a difficulty that mainly depends on level of challenge from a more persistent pattern. It does not produce a diagnostic conclusion.
What they achieve / what it costs them to achieve it
🔒 This exercise stays in your browser. Try to describe situations without including names or identifying information.
Prepare useful information for an assessment
🔒 Nothing is stored. This summary can help organise what you want to discuss with a professional.
Support does not mean lowering expectations
Families sometimes worry that providing support will make a child “too dependent”. But a well-chosen support does not remove the learning objective; it removes a barrier that prevents the child from showing what they know or participating sustainably.
Written instructions do not mean giving up on independence. They may be scaffolding while the pupil learns to create their own system. Allowing headphones at certain times does not mean avoiding all noise forever. It may make participation possible without unnecessary sensory overload. Reducing twenty repetitive questions to five carefully selected ones does not necessarily lower expectations when the concept is already mastered.
The principle is: maintain challenge that reflects strengths while providing support that reflects needs.
Adolescence can reveal what was previously being compensated for
Many 2e profiles become more visible towards the end of primary school or during adolescence. This does not mean that ADHD or autism has suddenly appeared. More often, the environment has begun to demand much more self-regulation.
There are more long-term assignments, independent study, teacher changes, complex timetables, peer expectations, social ambiguity and less direct adult support. Strategies that once worked may no longer be enough.
A teenager who previously passed without revising may discover that rapid understanding is no longer sufficient. An autistic girl who copied peers effectively may find adolescent relationships much harder to navigate. A young person with ADHD who depended on family scaffolding may start struggling when the system expects a level of independence they have not yet built.
This stage needs care because the teenager may interpret the change as “I have become less intelligent”. Often, what has changed is the relationship between their resources and the demands placed upon them.
How to talk to a child about being twice exceptional
There is no perfect script. The aim is not to hand a child a collection of labels, but to give them language that helps them understand themselves accurately and without shame.
“Your brain has some areas where learning or reasoning comes very easily, and other things that need more support. Needing help with organisation, certain changes or some social situations does not erase the things you do exceptionally well. And being very good at something does not mean you should be able to manage everything without help.”
As the child grows, the explanation can become more precise, including information about ADHD, autism, high ability and the strategies that work for them. Understanding one's own profile can support self-advocacy, better anticipation of needs and an identity that is less dependent on constant comparison with others.
Common mistakes when supporting twice-exceptional children
Try to avoid
- “with how clever you are, you have no excuse”;
- using high ability to dismiss ADHD or autism;
- using a diagnosis as a reason to stop developing talent;
- attributing every difficulty to boredom;
- turning every intense interest into a symptom;
- judging functioning only by marks;
- always removing the child's strongest interest as punishment;
- looking for one single score to explain the entire profile.
Usually more helpful
- describe specific behaviours and settings;
- look at strengths and needs separately;
- ask how much effort a good result costs;
- compare home, school and extracurricular settings;
- adjust challenge and support at the same time;
- teach self-regulation strategies explicitly;
- develop genuine interests and talents;
- review support when demands change.
When might a professional assessment be worth considering?
Not every curious, intense, inattentive or solitary child needs a psychological assessment. It may, however, be useful when there is a persistent discrepancy that neither family nor school can explain satisfactorily.
- observed ability seems far above academic output or everyday independence;
- attention or organisation difficulties persist across more than one setting;
- very strong abilities coexist with significant social, sensory or flexibility difficulties;
- there is a marked gap between oral expression and written output;
- good marks are maintained only through disproportionate effort or adult support;
- unexpected academic decline appears as demands increase;
- anxiety, perfectionism, low self-esteem or school refusal are becoming tied to functioning;
- previous questions about ADHD, autism or high ability do not seem to make sense when considered separately.
You can also visit our high-ability assessment and support page, use our OSIAC indicative screening of high-ability indicators, or read about our autism spectrum assessment.
Frequently asked questions about high ability, ADHD, autism and twice exceptionality
Can a child have high ability and ADHD at the same time?
Yes. High ability does not protect a child from ADHD. A pupil may show exceptional reasoning while also having persistent difficulties with attention regulation, inhibition, organisation, working memory or time management.
Can a highly able child also be autistic?
Yes. Autism occurs across a very broad range of intellectual abilities. High ability can coexist with support needs in social communication, flexibility, sensory processing, regulation or everyday adaptation.
Is twice exceptionality a diagnosis?
No. It is a descriptive and educational concept used when high ability or talent coexists with a disability, neurodevelopmental condition or other significant difficulty. Specific diagnoses, where appropriate, are assessed separately.
Does being able to focus for hours on an interest rule out ADHD?
No. Attention can vary considerably according to interest, novelty, challenge or urgency. What matters is the wider pattern of attentional and executive regulation, how persistent it is and how it affects functioning across settings.
Does preferring to talk with adults mean a child is autistic?
No. Some highly able children find greater intellectual compatibility with older people. Autism assessment considers a much broader pattern involving reciprocity, social communication, flexibility, interests, repetitive behaviour, sensory processing and developmental history.
Do good grades rule out ADHD or autism?
No. Academic attainment is only one part of functioning. Some children compensate for years through high ability, memory, enormous effort or strong external support. Assessment also considers independence, relationships, organisation, regulation and the cost of maintaining performance.
Can high ability hide a difficulty?
Yes. Strong reasoning, memory or prior knowledge may compensate for a weakness. This is one reason some twice-exceptional pupils are not identified until school demands become too complex for compensation to remain effective.
Can ADHD or autism hide high ability?
Yes. Attention difficulties, written-output problems, behaviour, communication or regulation needs can become so visible that adults focus on the difficulty and do not investigate areas of exceptional potential.
Is an autistic child with high ability necessarily a savant?
No. Savant skills and high general ability are not the same thing. Some autistic people have very specific savant abilities, but most autistic people with high ability should not be understood through that stereotype.
What support should a twice-exceptional pupil receive at school?
Support needs to be individualised. In general, the pupil needs sufficient intellectual challenge for their strengths and specific support or reasonable adjustments for areas of difficulty. Supporting only one half of the profile is often not enough.
The idea I would most like you to take away
Twice exceptionality asks us to move away from an overly simple way of understanding children. A person is not the average of all their abilities. They can be exceptional in one dimension and need substantial support in another.
Once we stop using strengths to dismiss difficulties and stop using difficulties to diminish strengths, a much more useful question becomes possible:
What does this child need so that their difficulties do not unnecessarily limit their life, while their strengths still have genuine room to grow?
That change in perspective can influence far more than a school mark. It can change how a child understands their own effort, how family members respond, how school interprets the profile and what expectations the young person develops for their future.
Sources consulted
- Kaufman, S. B. (ed.). Twice Exceptional: Supporting and Educating Bright and Creative Students with Learning Difficulties. Oxford University Press, 2018.
- Pfeiffer, S. I. (ed.). Handbook of Giftedness in Children: Psychoeducational Theory, Research, and Best Practices, 2nd ed. Springer, 2018.
- Clark, T. Exploring Giftedness and Autism: A Study of a Differentiated Educational Program for Autistic Savants. Routledge, 2016.
- Webb, J. T., Amend, E. R., Beljan, P., Webb, N. E., Kuzujanakis, M., Olenchak, F. R. & Goerss, J. Misdiagnosis and Dual Diagnoses of Gifted Children and Adults, 2nd ed. Great Potential Press, 2016.
- Chagas, C. Giftedness, High Abilities, and ADHD: A Basic Guide. BookFactory, 2023.
- American Psychiatric Association. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition, Text Revision (DSM-5-TR). American Psychiatric Association Publishing, 2022.
Clinical note: this article is for educational and informational purposes. Twice exceptionality cannot be confirmed from a list of signs or from the exercises on this page. ADHD or autism, where relevant, requires an individual assessment by suitably qualified professionals, integrating developmental history, information from different settings and real-world functioning. Likewise, identification of high ability should interpret the wider profile rather than reducing the person to one isolated test score.
