This post is based upon an interview with Mark Talaga, a licensed counselor and the owner of the Center for Identity Potential, to talk about 2e kids being too smart. These are the twice exceptional children who are both brilliant and struggling in the very same body.
2e kids or twice exceptional usually means gifted plus a diagnosis. Mark isn’t crazy about either word, and after twelve years with these kids, he’s earned the right to say so.
"Their learning profiles, their developmental profiles are so all over the place, there's so many gaps between where they're excellent and where they may be lagging, that it's more like 10e."
Most of us picture ability like a single volume dial. Turn it up, the child is too smart. Turn it down, the child struggles. Our 2e kids don’t have a dial. They look more like an entire mixing board with the sliders set at wildly different levels. One is jammed at the top, while three are down near the bottom.
Here’s why that matters. If you only see the tall slider (and the child gets labeled brilliant or simply too smart) everyone is baffled that they can’t do simple things.
If you only see the low ones (and the child gets labeled difficult) nobody sees the brilliance. As Mark put it, we support the high end or the low end, when we need to support both.
Schools are famous for saying: “The child doesn’t qualify for an IEP because he’s too smart and the grades are too good.”
In case after case, Mark sees a kid in the 99th percentile for verbal comprehension. But dig a little deeper looking at working memory or processing speed and the results drop off a cliff. That gap is invisible on a report card but it’s extremely visible in the effort.
The case you need to build isn’t “my child is failing” rather it’s “my child is passing at four times the effort.” That’s a very different conversation, and it’s one a school can actually act on (when pushed).
Many of those 2e kids who spend seven hours compensating at school are running the engine in the red by the time they get home. The nap on the couch, the tears over a granola bar, the door slamming over nothing, are all signs that something is off. So when a school says the child is well adjusted, you need to share the evidence that they may be “fine at school” but they are coming apart at home. That data helps change the narrative.
Plenty of 2e kids cruise for years simply because they are so smart. Mark describes it as resting on intellectual laurels.
But the demands keep increasing. Freshman and junior year in high school is where he sees kids come apart time and time again. AP and IB classes, college level reading loads, sports until seven at night. The anxiety spikes, assignments stop being completed, and some 2e kids start to unravel.
The gaps didn’t appear in eleventh grade. The gaps were always there. The academic demand finally exceeded the workarounds.
Mark reframes the frazzled teenager the way I reframe a struggling reader. The overwhelm is simply the symptom. The problem is a set of skills, mostly executive functioning, that never got built because the child was too smart to need them.
The good news is that it’s never too late. Mark works with adults because 2e kids become gifted adult.
First, know what a school evaluation is. Think of school testing as a triage center. It catches the obvious things quickly, and it does that reasonably well. However, for 2e kids with spiky profiles, triage isn’t enough. A comprehensive evaluation is a different animal, and knowing that difference is how you avoid being told that they tested your child and they are fine.
You don’t have to go this alone. Yes, you can absolutely become an expert in this. But you don’t have to teach yourself a second profession in the middle of an already hard year. Consider bringing in an expert who understands 2e kids. they can help you organize what you’re seeing, so a complete profile is created.
The kid who can build a working model of a suspension bridge but not remember to hand in the permission slip is not intentionally choosing to frustrate you. You can find Mark at The Center for Identity Potential, and you can listen to his podcast, Hopelessly Gifted on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
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