2E

Recently I was asked about my experience with cutting out food dye, and other natural ways for managing ADHD, and I realized I haven't shared about it in quite awhile. I started thinking about all the options out there, about all the different things we personally have tried, both for ourselves as adults and for our 9 year old, and about which things actually worked for us.

There aer so many different sources out there, from your pediatrician, to your therapist, to your naturopath, to websites like ADDitude, to Facebook groups, to mom blogs, to your own personal circle of friends... It can very quickly get overwhelming. How do you decide what to use for your own family? How do you know what will actually work and what is just hype?

First of all, what does 2E even mean? Well, it's an abbreviation for twice exceptional. What this means is that the person, often a child, has 2 exceptionalities. Typically is means giftedness + disability (often learning disability or disorder) but technically it can be any disability/disorder, not necessarily giftedness. What I'm talking about today is specifically giftedness + learning disability/disorder which affects their maturity (usually something related to executive function). My experience with myself and my child is ADHD, sensory issues, and anxiety, but this could also easily apply to children on the autism spectrum.

So, why is it so dang hard? The disconnect lies in the difference between their emotional maturity (or really immaturity) and their intellect. These kids are so incredibly smart, often functioning at a level 2+ years ahead of their biological age. However, their emotional maturity is often that of a child 2+ years younger than them. So at best there is a 4 year age gap between intellect and emotional maturity. For some reason we (I anyway) am drawn to focus on the intellect. I want to focus on the fact that he's so incredibly smart, and that he can comprehend such complex concepts, that I (incorrectly) expect that he should behave like a child 2+ years older than his biological age too, or at the very least a child who is his same biological age. But that's completely unrealistic because his brain isn't wired that way. His brain lacks that emotional maturity, it just hasn't developed as quickly as most kids his age, so it's really unfair to expect his brain to do something it can't, just because he's so smart.

In my experience, these unfounded expectations lead to a good portion of the conflicts in our house. When we expect him to function in a way that his brain is not yet ready to function, we set ourselves up for failure and heartache. I recently had this illuminated for me in a previously unseen area...