Late Identification of a 2e Child: A Letter to the Parent I Used to Be

A letter to the parent I used to be, and to every parent who is wondering right now.

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Dear younger me,

I know you're tired.

You've been to the parent-teacher conferences where they tell you your child is "on level." You've smiled and nodded while a quiet voice inside you whispered, but something isn't right. You've Googled things at midnight and then closed the tab, half-convinced you were overreacting.

You weren't.

It would take until high school for someone to finally put a name to what you had been watching for years. By then, you would have spent more than a decade watching a child who seemed to carry a quiet weight: low self-esteem that didn't match what you knew about him, a need for support that you could feel but couldn't quite name. He needed to be seen. And you would spend years not fully understanding what was keeping that from happening.

I want to tell you what I know now.

I Didn't Know What I Didn't Know

There's something I haven't told you yet, something that took me a long time to understand about why I missed so much for so long.

My brain works differently too.

I didn't have a name for it when my son was young. I just knew that certain things came easily to me and other things were quietly, persistently hard. The way I moved through the world felt normal to me, because it was the only way I had ever known. And so when I watched my son move through the world in a similar way, it didn't register as a signal. It registered as familiar.

That's something I've since learned isn't uncommon: unidentified neurodivergent parents are statistically quite common, and when your own brain has spent decades normalizing certain traits, those same traits can feel unremarkable in your child.² I didn't ask for help because I had never learned to ask for help. I didn't flag the struggles because I had quietly learned to manage my own, and I assumed he would too.

I wasn't failing to see him. I was seeing him through the only lens I had.

Understanding this doesn't erase the years of wondering. But it does replace some of the guilt with compassion, for him and for myself. If you recognize something of yourself in your child's story, that recognition matters. It's not a reason to look away. It's the most important reason to look closer.

The Signals That Didn't Register

In kindergarten, my son was referred for gifted testing. He wasn't accepted. I shrugged it off. I'd had a similar experience as a child myself, and it just felt like part of the process. I knew he was smart. I knew he was kind. I knew he was a great reader and strong in math. His school didn't use grades; the only feedback was whether a student was "on level" or not, and he was always on level. There was nothing flashing red.

And that's exactly the problem.

He wasn't reading at two or three. There was no single dramatic sign of profound giftedness. But he was consistently one of the top readers in the words-per-minute assessments. He was in advanced math. He was capable, quietly and solidly capable, and that capability became the very thing that made everyone stop looking.

When a child is performing, the system stops asking questions.

The Smartness Was Real, and So Were the Struggles

Here's the thing nobody tells you about twice-exceptional kids: their gifts don't cancel out their challenges. They mask them. As the Child Mind Institute describes it, gifted kids can use their strengths to compensate for their specific needs and in the process mask their learning problems, and in some cases neither the disability nor the giftedness is recognized.³

I didn't see significant anxiety at the time. But looking back now, with everything I've learned since, I can see it in the details I explained away.

The hives. The breathing trouble during and after basketball that I assumed was exercise-induced asthma. The time I took him to a naturopathic doctor and discovered he had a candida overgrowth, so we went gluten-free, dairy-free, and sugar-free for three months, and it helped. I thought we'd solved a gut health problem. I've since learned that candida overgrowth appears more frequently in neurodivergent individuals, and I now wonder if some of what I attributed to physical symptoms was his body carrying stress he couldn't name or describe. (Research published in the Journal of Clinical Medicine found that Candida overgrowth in the gut may influence immune function and behavior in children with neurodevelopmental conditions, and a 2018 study found anti-Candida antibodies in 36.5% of children with ASD compared to just 14.3% of neurotypical children.¹) Those breathing episodes? Looking back, they may have been panic attacks.

He was a child who couldn't tell me what was wrong, possibly because he didn't know. Possibly because his brain was working hard to hold everything together on the outside.

The Friends That Stopped Coming

Between third and fourth grade, we moved. And from that point on, something quietly shifted.

The friendships thinned. Friends stopped inviting him over. The easy social connections of early childhood didn't follow him to the new town. We moved again, and it started a little better, and then dropped off again. Each time, I hoped it was the transition. Each time, I told myself he'd find his people.

What I didn't understand then is that social navigation is one of the places where twice-exceptional kids often struggle most invisibly. Research on 2e students describes a paradox: the coexistence of giftedness and challenge can make it hard to fit in with gifted peers and equally hard to connect with those who experience difficulties, leaving some 2e kids without a clear social home.⁴ They may be articulate and perceptive with adults and completely at sea with peers. The gap between their intellectual world and their social-emotional experience can be wide and confusing, for them and for everyone watching.

And here is the part I only understand in hindsight: he found a way to manage it. Every break at school, he played wall ball. Not casually — he became the school wall ball champion. He mastered every sport he took on. I thought it was passion and competitive drive, and maybe it was, partly. But I now see that sport gave him something just as important: a structured reason to be occupied. When you are on the court, focused and moving, you don't have to make conversation. You don't have to navigate the awkward rhythms of small talk or figure out where you fit in a group. You have a role. He was so motivated to stay in the game that he often became the leader, the one organizing the play, directing others. What looked like confidence and natural ability was also, I think, a very clever way of staying safe.

I wish someone had told me that the drifting friendships weren't just a phase. They were a signal. And that the things he was good at might be worth looking at twice.

When It Finally Broke Through

There is something else about 2e students that I have come to understand, and it is a bit of a paradox: many of them are extraordinarily self-aware. They often know something is different about the way they experience the world. They can sense the gap between what they feel capable of and what they are actually producing. The Colorado Department of Education notes that many 2e learners are acutely aware of their challenges, which can lead to self-frustration, insecurity, and a lack of motivation, and that without help understanding why they struggle, some develop coping behaviors like perfectionism, avoidance, or apathy just to get through the day.⁵

That self-awareness, as remarkable as it is, can also become its own obstacle. A child who is bright enough to see their own struggles is also often proud enough to hide them. Accepting help can feel like admitting defeat. Asking for an accommodation can feel like confirming the very thing they have been working so hard to conceal. So they don't ask. And the people around them, seeing a capable child who is managing, don't push. And the gap between what the child needs and what the child receives quietly grows.

By fifteen, my son was crashing. Depression settled in. Anxiety, the kind that had been building for years beneath the surface, came fully into the open. School, which he had always managed to get through, became something he could barely complete.

That was when we finally got answers. He was diagnosed with ADHD and Anxiety. Testing also revealed a Superior IQ, the same intelligence that had carried him through years of looking "fine" on the outside, finally recognized alongside the challenges that had been quietly exhausting him all along.

The diagnosis didn't change who he was. But it changed what was possible.

Where We Are Now

He isn't "better" in the tidy way we sometimes hope for. But he is getting better, slowly and genuinely, in the ways that matter. He is learning to advocate for himself. He takes care of himself. He is building the self-knowledge that so many of us don't find until much later in life.

We are patient. We understand that his future is full of promise, even when the path there doesn't look the way we imagined. We hold onto that.

To the Parent Reading This Right Now

If any of this sounds familiar, I want you to hear this directly:

You are not alone.

The gap between "something seems off" and "we finally have answers" can stretch across years, a decade even. That is not your failure. It is a failure of a system that was not built to see kids like yours. A system that looks at "on level" and stops asking questions. A system that sees a strong reader and a kid who's managing, and calls that enough.

Give yourself grace for what you didn't know. Parenting requires us to pay attention to so many dimensions of a child at once, their health, their learning, their emotions, their friendships, and none of us comes to it with a complete map. Not knowing isn't negligence. It's human. Especially when the child in front of you has spent years becoming very good at looking fine.

But here is the other side of that grace: when something does surface, when your child finally tells you they're struggling, or a teacher raises a concern, or the mask slips and you see what's underneath, take it seriously. Take it very seriously. Because by the time a struggle becomes visible, it has almost always been there for a long time. What you are seeing is not the beginning. It is the moment they could no longer hide it alone.

Your instincts are data. The report card that says everything is fine, and the child who struggles to make friends, who gets hives, who comes home exhausted in ways you can't explain, both of those are real. You are allowed to hold both truths at once and keep asking questions.

Keep asking.

And trust your gut. You have been watching your child longer and more carefully than anyone else. What you notice matters.

With love and hard-won hindsight,

A 2e Mom

Sources:

¹ Herman, A., & Herman, A.P. (2022). Could Candida Overgrowth Be Involved in the Pathophysiology of Autism? Journal of Clinical Medicine, 11(2), 442. https://doi.org/10.3390/jcm11020442; Yeast Overgrowth in Autism. The Autism Community in Action (TACA). https://tacanow.org/family-resources/what-is-yeast-overgrowth/

² Hamstead, B. (2025). It Runs in the Family: Intergenerational Neurodivergence and What We Owe Each Other Across Generations. https://bridgettehamstead.substack.com/p/it-runs-in-the-family-intergenerational

³ Twice-Exceptional Kids: Both Gifted and Challenged. Child Mind Institute. https://childmind.org/article/twice-exceptional-kids-both-gifted-and-challenged/

⁴ Łukasiewicz-Wieleba, J., Reis, S. M., & Gierczyk, M. (2025). Social Difficulties Experienced in the Peer Relationships of Twice-Exceptional Female Students: An Examination of Three Cases. International Journal of Pedagogy, Innovation and New Technologies, 12(2), 2–15. https://doi.org/10.71358/ijpint.2541

⁵ Twice-Exceptional (2e). Colorado Department of Education. https://ed.cde.state.co.us/gt/twice-exceptional