What Does "Gifted" Actually Mean? The Gifted Child, 2e and Masking

By Emily Hanlon

When most people hear the word gifted, they picture a particular kind of child. Quiet at the front of the class, finishing first, collecting top marks and making everything look effortless. If that's the picture in your head, you're in very good company, because it's the one most of us were handed.

As a child and adolescent clinical psychologist, I want to say this clearly: that picture is incomplete, and in many cases it is inaccurate. A child can teach themselves to read at three and still find a morning routine hard to get through. A child can hold an hour-long conversation about quantum physics and fall apart when a plan changes. Giftedness is one of the most misunderstood ideas in both education and clinical practice, and the gap between what people expect and what is real has consequences for children.

So let's look at what giftedness actually is, why these children get missed, and what helps.

What does gifted actually mean?

At its most foundational level, giftedness refers to advanced cognitive ability. It's usually defined as intellectual functioning that sits significantly above the population average. In psychometric terms, that is generally understood as an IQ score at or above the 98th percentile, which places a child in the top two percent of the population for intellectual ability.

That number is a starting point. IQ is one measure of one dimension of a complex construct (a useful clinical tool, but not the whole picture of a gifted child).

Researchers in gifted education have long argued that giftedness reaches beyond test scores. Joseph Renzulli's Three-Ring Conception of Giftedness, one of the most widely cited models in the field, proposes that giftedness emerges where above-average ability, creativity and task commitment meet. Françoise Gagné's Differentiated Model of Giftedness and Talent separates natural abilities, which he calls gifts, from systematically developed skills, which he calls talents. He argues that not every gifted child will become a high achiever without the right environmental conditions and support.

In practice, this tells us that giftedness is multidimensional and context-dependent. It looks different across different children, different environments and different points in development.

The myth of the straight-A student

Perhaps the most damaging misconception is the assumption that giftedness automatically turns into academic achievement. Many gifted children do not achieve at the level their intellectual capacity would suggest. This is called underachievement, and it is one of the most common and clinically significant presentations in the gifted population. A child can have an IQ in the 99th percentile and be achieving at an average or even below-average level.

There are many contributing factors. For some children, the curriculum simply doesn't engage them. Work that is too easy, too repetitive or not stimulating enough can lead to disengagement, avoidance and apparent apathy. For others, the social side of being different from peers (thinking faster, asking more questions, needing less repetition) can create anxiety and withdrawal. And for twice exceptional children, neurodevelopmental differences such as ADHD, autism, dyslexia or anxiety can create a ceiling on academic output that has nothing to do with intellectual capacity.

Because these children don't 'look' gifted by the usual measure of grades, their intellectual capacity can go unrecognised. Their struggles then get read without that context. Children in this position are often told they aren't trying hard enough, or that they are lazy. What they are rarely told is that something is getting in the way, and that it is not their fault.

In many cases, average grades in a gifted child are a sign that something significant is interfering with their ability to perform at the level their brain is capable of. Recognising that is one of the most important things a parent, educator or clinician can do.

Asynchronous development: ahead in some ways, age-appropriate in others

One of the most useful concepts for understanding gifted children is asynchronous development. It refers to the uneven pace at which gifted children develop across different areas. A child's intellectual ability may be advanced well beyond their age, while their emotional regulation, social skills, fine motor development and self-management are developing at an age-appropriate pace, or sometimes slightly behind their peers.

The Columbus Group, a group of gifted education researchers and clinicians, formally described this concept in 1991. They defined giftedness itself as asynchronous development, where advanced cognitive abilities and heightened intensity combine to create inner experiences and awareness that are qualitatively different from the norm.

Here's what that can look like day to day:

• A five-year-old may read chapter books and ask sophisticated questions about mortality and justice, then have a meltdown because her sandwich was cut the wrong way.

• A ten-year-old may debate at an adult level and still find the social complexity of the playground unmanageable.

• A teenager may produce creative work of extraordinary depth and originality while struggling to organise a school bag or remember to hand in assignments.

These children are not being difficult, and they are not immature. They are navigating the disorienting experience of having parts of themselves years ahead of their peers, alongside parts that are exactly where you would expect for their age. That internal mismatch is real and often distressing, and it needs understanding rather than correction.

It also changes how we read assessment results. A gifted child's cognitive profile will often show significant variability across subtests, with very high scores in areas of strength sitting beside average or even low-average scores elsewhere. That variability is a clinically meaningful reflection of who the child is.

Intensity and overexcitabilities

Many gifted children experience the world with a depth and intensity that sets them apart from their peers. This is not a behavioural choice or a sign of poor emotional regulation. It is a fundamental part of how the gifted nervous system processes experience.

Polish psychiatrist and psychologist Kazimierz Dabrowski described this through his concept of overexcitabilities. He identified five domains in which gifted individuals tend to show heightened responsiveness to stimuli:

• Psychomotor: a surplus of physical energy, a need for movement, rapid speech and difficulty settling. Children with psychomotor overexcitability are often misidentified as having ADHD, when their energy can be an expression of a highly activated nervous system.

• Sensory: heightened sensitivity to sound, light, texture, taste and smell. These children may be overwhelmed by environments their peers find manageable, and their responses are often dismissed as fussiness.

• Intellectual: an intense drive to seek knowledge, ask questions and engage with ideas. These are the children who cannot stop asking why, and who are deeply unsatisfied by surface-level explanations.

• Imaginational: a rich, vivid inner world and a strong capacity for fantasy and creative thinking. In early childhood, these children may find it hard to tell what is real from what is imagined.

• Emotional: feelings experienced with extraordinary depth. Their joy is expansive, their distress is profound, and their empathy can be deep and sometimes overwhelming.

These overexcitabilities are not pathological, and they are not symptoms of a disorder. They are part of the gifted experience, and they are the same qualities that fuel creativity, compassion and intellectual drive. The goal is to understand them, help children build the skills to navigate them, and create environments that make room for them.

Why gifted children are so often misunderstood

Understanding why these children get misread matters, because it affects how we identify, support and advocate for them. There are four main reasons.

The high-achiever myth. If giftedness is supposed to look like effortless success, a gifted child who struggles may not be recognised as gifted at all.

Gifted traits can look like problems. Intensity, overexcitabilities and deep engagement with interests can look, to an untrained eye, like behavioural or emotional difficulties. A child with psychomotor overexcitability can look hyperactive. A child with emotional overexcitability can look dysregulated. A child with intellectual overexcitability can look oppositional when she refuses an answer she finds unsatisfying.

Giftedness and neurodivergence can mask one another. A gifted child can use their intellectual capacity to compensate for difficulties, which delays identification of both.

The systems weren't built with these children in mind. Gifted education remains under-resourced and inconsistently delivered. Clinical training rarely includes substantial content on giftedness or twice exceptionality, and the assessment tools most commonly used were not designed to capture a twice exceptional profile. Teachers are, in most cases, doing their best with the information and resources they have. The gap sits in the training and the systems.

The consequences matter. Gifted children who are not recognised and supported appropriately are at significantly elevated risk of underachievement, anxiety, depression, school refusal and a pervasive sense of not belonging. Many of them take in the message that something is wrong with them, rather than understanding that something is different about them, and that different is not the same as broken.

What is twice exceptional (2e)?

The term twice exceptional, often shortened to 2e, describes children who are both gifted and neurodivergent. They carry extraordinary intellectual or creative capacity alongside a learning difference, attention difficulty, autistic profile, anxiety disorder or another neurodevelopmental characteristic. They are exceptional in two directions at once.

The term entered the educational and clinical arena in the 1990s, though the phenomenon has existed for as long as giftedness and neurodivergence have co-occurred. Research suggests that somewhere between three and five percent of school-aged children may meet criteria for twice exceptionality, though that figure is almost certainly an underestimate, given how often both giftedness and neurodivergence go unidentified.

The most common pairings seen in clinical practice are giftedness with ADHD, autism, anxiety and learning disabilities such as dyslexia. Each has its own presentation and its own masking dynamic.

Masking works in both directions. A gifted child with ADHD might use fast processing and mental flexibility to find workarounds, appearing to manage tasks their peers with ADHD can't. A gifted autistic child might use analytical intelligence to decode social norms and build a set of learned social scripts that let them appear neurotypical in structured settings. A gifted child with dyslexia might use strong verbal reasoning to compensate for reading difficulties. In each case, the compensation is real and remarkable, and it comes at a cost.

In the other direction, a child's challenges can hide their gifts. When the focus is on meltdowns, school refusal or learning difficulties, the question of whether that child might also be intellectually gifted often goes unasked, and if it isn't asked, it won't be answered.

Masking and the after-school restraint collapse

Masking is the process by which a neurodivergent person consciously or unconsciously suppresses, conceals or compensates for characteristics of their neurodivergence in order to appear more neurotypical. For twice exceptional children, it is rarely a single process. It is layered, and it can involve managing attention, social performance, sensory discomfort and emotional intensity all at once.

Masking is evidence that a child is working extremely hard to appear fine. A child who masks effectively may not be identified as having any difficulty at all.

Research shows that girls, particularly gifted girls with autism or ADHD, are disproportionately affected by masking and are significantly more likely than boys to go unidentified, or to be identified much later. Part of the reason is that diagnostic criteria for autism and ADHD were developed mainly from research with male participants.

Many parents describe what is known as the after-school restraint collapse. A child holds themselves together all day, managing their sensory experience, following social scripts, meeting behavioural expectations and containing their feelings. They arrive home and, immediately or soon after, experience a significant emotional or behavioural release. It is the neurological consequence of sustained, effortful self-regulation, and it is not misbehaviour.

For parents, it can be bewildering. The teacher describes a wonderful child, and the child at home is explosive within minutes. Both accounts are true. The child who manages at school is real, and the child who falls apart at home is real. Understanding that the second is a direct result of the effort required to produce the first helps parents support their child without taking it personally.

Masking can break down at times of transition or increased demand, such as the move from primary to secondary school. When it does, it often looks sudden and dramatic. It isn't a regression. It shows that the gap between a child's needs and the support available has finally grown bigger than they can bridge alone.

What helps

The guide I wrote on this goes much further, but here are a few starting points drawn from it.

1. Validate before you advise. Validation doesn't mean agreement. It means telling a child their feelings are real and make sense. "That sounds really hard" works better than "You shouldn't feel that way." "I can see how overwhelming that was" works better than "It wasn't that big a deal."

2. Reduce demands at low points of the day. The period right after school is often one of the hardest. A quiet, low-demand stretch before homework or household expectations can help, with the child's preferred regulating activities offered without conditions.

3. Give transitions lead time. Moving to a new school or a new stage takes preparation. Visits to the new environment, meetings with key staff, visual timetables and maps, and a specific person the child can go to when overwhelmed can all lower the cost of transition.

4. Celebrate strengths specifically. Telling a child they are smart means less than telling them that the way they connected two completely different ideas was remarkable. Specific feedback shows genuine attention.

5. Talk to your child about giftedness and neurodivergence. For neurodivergent children, accurate, affirming information about their neurodivergence is associated with better outcomes. Lead with the gifts, be honest about the challenges, and make clear that the challenges are not their fault.

6. Look after yourself too. A depleted parent can't offer the co-regulation, validation and advocacy that twice exceptional children need. Your wellbeing is a prerequisite.

Want to go deeper? Grab Brilliantly Wired

Everything in this post comes from my guide, Brilliantly Wired: Understanding, Identifying and Supporting the Gifted Child. It was previously available only to members of the Clinicians' Forum, and after the positive feedback I wanted to offer it as a stand-alone resource for anyone who needs it.

It's written for parents, educators and clinicians, with a neuroaffirming lens from start to finish. Inside you'll find what giftedness actually means, the twice exceptional child, the masking problem, what's really going on at school, the emotional world of the 2e child, a section for parents, a section for clinicians on assessment and identification, pathways forward and a quick reference checklist. Real-life examples run through the whole guide.

Grab Brilliantly Wired here.

NOTE: This post and the guide are for educational purposes only and do not constitute clinical advice, diagnosis or treatment. If you are concerned about your child's development or wellbeing, please seek guidance from a registered psychologist or your child's treating team.

Emily Hanlon is a Child and Adolescent Clinical Psychologist and the founder of The Playful Psychologist.