Twice Exceptional (2e) Family Stories
By Dr. Melanie Johnson Hayes
The following stories come from interviews with parents of 2e children. I made up fictional families comprised of people I have worked with over the years. The families’ names are fictitious, to protect the real participants’ privacy, but the stories are true, the examples unaltered, and the quotes verbatim. I hope they demonstrate the lengths many parents of 2e children have gone to try to engender understanding and accommodation for their children.
I acknowledge that most of my families had resources, or knew how to find resources, for building systems to help their children. I am haunted by the knowledge that there are 2e children who have never had an advocate or been given opportunities to succeed. I know there are parents who don’t understand anything about twice exceptionality, or who know their child needs help but can’t pay to get what they need. I hope that increasing general knowledge of twice exceptionality, among those who hold the most power, will eventually lead to support for those who hold the least.
Overall, the experiences of the families in the stories are not positive. In many of the interviews, it was clear how often 2e children are seen as deficient or problematic. Most often their giftedness is masked by their disabilities. When considering what twice exceptionality looks like to those outside of the 2e community, these parents understood that their children do not fit the image of a gifted child. People might picture an eight year old musical prodigy, others a middle school chess grandmaster, still others, a sixteen year old computer genius. The vision might include a talented child actor or painter whose work is in demand. Or, perhaps, people might imagine a very young figure skater qualifying for the Olympics. They might even think of the toddler who appears on a talk show and astounds the audience with her reading ability.
Rarely does one picture, as a prodigy, the child who is covering his ears and rocking back and forth at a loud birthday party. Teachers usually do not think of the child who cannot sit still or stop disrupting the class as gifted. Neither does the painfully shy, socially awkward girl, come to mind. We may not consider that the boy who still cannot write legibly in fourth grade is also a math genius. Nor do we think the obnoxious child who talks non-stop about one topic is brilliant. We may associate emotional sensitivity with gifted artists, but rarely do we pair it with the child who is having a public melt down. We do not usually envision gifted children as socially inept or behaviorally challenged. Yet all of these 2e children are gifted. Giftedness has many hidden faces.
People learn through stories. The backbone of any culture is its stories: the shared narrative that reveals common history, values, and knowledge. The following are our stories, 2e stories.
The families I interviewed relied on me to accurately depict their experiences. As part of the 2e community, I comprehend, at a visceral level, the experiences and issues at hand. I was honored to undertake the task of writing these narratives to give voice to the families, but also tried to be true to the real life experiences they shared. I hope telling these stories will help you, the reader, to better understand their lives, so that the true faces of 2e children will begin to be revealed.
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