Communication in the Gifted and Twice-Exceptional Family

This article has been adapted from a virtual event presented by our Family Services team. Members of our Young Scholars program have access to a recording of this virtual event in full on the members-only Davidson Member Community (DMC) platform.

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One hallmark of the gifted and twice-exceptional child is often different modes of communication. We often hear about young, gifted children who learn to speak early or seem to go from babbling to full sentences very quickly. We also hear about gifted people who could speak passionately about their favorite topics for hours. And, we also hear about gifted people who struggle to speak about their emotions, communicate with age-peers, or navigate conversations with authority figures. How do we celebrate the communication skills of gifted children while also supporting them in areas that there may be friction?

First, it may be helpful to really dive into our understanding of communication. One commonly held belief about communication is that it works sort of like the postal service. Person A has a thought, feeling, or idea, and they package that thought into a neat string of words. Person A “sends” or “gives” this word package to Person B. Person B extracts the meaning or unpacks the message from the word package. While this is a nice idea, it oversimplifies communication a lot—in part because it doesn’t leave a lot of room for miscommunication. Miscommunication happens all the time. In this postal metaphor, miscommunication would happen in one of two ways: Either one of the people is unskilled in some way; for example, one person is using jargon that the other doesn’t know, and thus Person B can’t really unpack the message. Or, one of the people is malicious, purposely hiding the meaning of their word package or deliberately misinterpreting the meaning.

So, if communication doesn’t work like the postal service, how does it work? It’s messy. It’s a skill that takes a lot of time, effort, energy, and practice to build. Some professionals spend their entire lives learning and honing this skill: authors, journalists, actors, teachers, lawyers, and anyone in any field that is trying to get a message out about what they do and why they do it.

The postal service metaphor does set us up to explore two of the sides of communication: listening and responding. To start, let’s dive into the nuances of those skills:

As the chart illustrates, there are several skills that are used to communicate: speaking and taking action, comprehension, sensory processing (including proprioception), processing speed, working memory, social literacy, emotional literacy, and interoception. In addition, executive functioning skills play a big part in communication including decision making, perspective taking, focus, regulation of emotions, and regulation of inhibitions.

Many profoundly gifted individuals experience some developmental asynchronies in these areas, and it is particularly common to see executive functioning asynchronies. (See our article, “The Profoundly Gifted Brain” for more on asynchronous development and executive function.)

This asynchronous development can impact how profoundly gifted children communicate, and their differently wired brain may impact their communication style throughout their lives.

To get a window into how that looks, let’s turn to an autistic individual themselves and listen to what they say about communication. In one of her videos, Pippa Hastings describes her response to the framing of communication as a game of tennis. She had been told that communication was like a game of tennis, with conversation being “batted” back and forth between individuals. But what may seem obvious to neurotypical people doesn’t come as intuitively to neurodivergent individuals. She says that having a ball thrown at you can be scary and put you in the mindset that every conversation is a battle. Instead, many neurodivergent people share little pieces about themselves waiting for other people to jump in and respond.

Hastings, in her video, is talking about a few common neurodivergent communication types or strategies at the same time. Let’s dig a little deeper into some of those now.

Info-Dumping or Monologuing

One of the common communication strategies that we hear profoundly gifted children using is info-dumping or monologuing. This can take a few forms, but it basically means sharing more than usual in a conversation or dumping information onto another person. Info-dumping happens frequently when people are talking about a subject of interest to them, but info-dumping is more expansive than that. It may look like overexplaining directions or a rationale for something. It may look like getting caught in a verbal spiral as they discuss their feelings.

Many neurodivergent adults discuss that their info-dumping is mistaken for self-centeredness. If a neurodivergent person and a neurotypical person are in a conversation, there is a pretty common misunderstanding that can happen. It goes something like this:

Neurotypical person: sharing something about themselves.

Neurodivergent person: shares something about themselves as a direct response.

Now the neurotypical person might feel glossed over or unheard by the response. On the other side, the neurodivergent person feels like they connected over a shared experience and built some camaraderie. Each person leaves the conversation feeling like something totally different was communicated.

In Chris Gad’s video, he describes an experience of info-dumping when his parents come to visit. The conversations that he shared in the video illustrate the process of info-dumping and an example of how parents and children can communicate when info-dumping is understood and embraced.

When supported and strengthened, info-dumping is a powerful communication style. There are many communities in which this style of communication is celebrated and encouraged. The most obvious one might be theater: The monologue has a well-established place in most plays. By participating in traditional plays and learning acting, students can not only build their storytelling and monologuing skills, but they can also learn turn-taking, perspective-taking, and empathy by understanding others through their character roles. Other forms of theater and entertainment, such as improv, stand-up comedy, and slam poetry, teach similar skills and also teach students how to speak/perform in front of others and work a crowd—skills that are valuable in many careers and fields. Students may also find their info-dumping skills useful in speech and debate (or similar activities such as Model UN or Mock Trial), student government, and other contests, competitions, or clubs that have a performance aspect (such as National History Day, Destination Imagination, and even some science fairs have a presentation component). Outside of school, students may find fellow info-dumpers in role-playing game communities (including tabletop RPGs such as D&D and live-action roleplaying, e.g. LARPing), historical re-enactment groups, and interest-based community groups. There are so many professions that rely on this communication type (professors/teachers, tour guides, journalists, lawyers, museum educators and docents, politicians, actors, and more!).

Other Forms of Neurodivergent Communication

• Penguin Pebbling: Just as penguins leave each other pebbles as a form of affection, neurodivergent people sometimes communicate their affection for others in a similar way. Telling someone a joke you know they’ll love or sending them a video that makes you think of them is a form of penguin pebbling. Children may penguin pebble by pointing out things in their favorite books, movies, games, or shows. As @BrainsAndSpoons discusses, penguin pebbling can be a way to tell someone you are thinking of them or starting a conversation without all of the social small talk that doesn’t always make sense to neurodivergent people. When someone is penguin pebbling, they aren’t necessarily expecting a response or a thank you, they are simply saying their part and letting the other person respond or not.
• Parallel Play or Body Doubling: This is how neurodivergent people say that they want to be doing independent activities near each other or in the same room. Think of this like working in a café or a library; everyone is working independently, and the ambient noises from everyone helps the person to maintain focus and attention on their own task. In addition, it may help neurodivergent people to feel like someone is watching them to keep them on task, without someone actually having to do that. Jessica McCabe discusses body doubling.
• Questioning or Questing: Sometimes, going down the rabbit hole leads you to an unexpected place! For neurodivergent students, following them down their rabbit holes engages their imagination and helps them to make connections between concepts.
• Creative Expression: Many neurodivergent people use music, art, or dancing to express themselves and communicate with others.
• Humor or Wit: Many profoundly gifted people have a quirky sense of humor and particularly like wordplay. Making puns out of your words or playing with them in imaginative ways is a form of communication.
• Meltdowns or Shutdowns: remember that all behavior is communication. Meltdowns and shutdowns have a reason, and by communicating to you that there is a problem your profoundly gifted child is trying to communicate something, even if they can’t further articulate it.

Putting the Pieces Together

Communication can seem confusing and opaque when there’s so much flying around about communication style and preferences. Let’s step back and go from the basics.

• The Body: Our body is giving us signals about the world around us all the time. Our body tells us that we are hungry, tired, too hot, or thirsty. Honing knowledge about how our bodies are trying to communicate with us is helpful for neurodivergent people, especially in areas like sleep, diet, and movement. Scientists call our feelings of our body interoception, and sometimes neurodivergent people are less sensitive to the signals from their bodies. You can read more about interoception.
• Emotions: Just as our bodies give us signals about our environment, so do our emotions. Emotions can give neurodivergent people valuable information about the safety and stimulation level of an environment. Expanding a PG child’s emotional vocabulary can help them to more accurately articulate how they feel at any given time. When people struggle to identify and feel their emotions and differentiating emotions from interoceptive cues, that may be referred to as alexithymia. Alexithymia can occur on a spectrum, and it isn’t a medical diagnosis but rather a personal trait. You can read more in-depth information about alexithymia.
• The Self: Once someone has some knowledge about the signals that their body and emotions are sending them, they can begin to interpret what those signals mean. For many neurodivergent people, this process takes time, trial, and error. Masking, a common phenomenon, makes it more difficult to accurately interpret the signals from one’s body and emotions. Let’s take a quick example: If a child was made to hug every family member despite their relationship to the person, then, as an adult, that person might have trouble distinguishing when they themselves might want a hug.

Questions, Directions, and Compliments

Now that we’ve addressed how our bodies, emotions, and selves impact communication, let’s talk about one of the most common conversational strategies we use with one another: asking questions.

Some parents find that asking their profoundly gifted child a question may lead that child into a spiral instead of receiving an efficient answer. Why is that?

While every child is different and we don’t live in your house with your family, there are a few common explanations.

The brain structure and processes of profoundly gifted children are different than those of neurotypical children. For one thing, profoundly gifted children tend to experience greater connectivity across the regions of their brain in addition to increased brain activation. This may lead a child down a rabbit hole when they are asked a question because their brain lights up and starts going many different directions at the same time. So, there are several different directions of thought going on, and it may be difficult to organize an answer in their brain because everything that they are thinking about is an important piece of context.

Some neurodivergent people experience questions as demands on their nervous system, sending them into fight or flight, even when there is no demand in a question. For someone who processes and thinks differently, a question might not seem like a simple fact-finding excursion. A simple question like “How was school?” might not be so simple to your child. In your head, you might implicitly asking if they had a good day or felt safe being at school that day. There’s no right answer, but the child might strongly feel like every question has a right answer and then living with that pressure can be difficult. A child might need a bit more autonomy to be able to tell you about school whenever they are ready, in their own way.

On the flip side of the coin, sometimes there are implicit demands included in questions. When someone asks, “What are you reading?” for example, they may be interested in what you’re reading, or they may be interested in inviting you into a broader conversation. “Do you want to come to my birthday party?” for example, is a question that usually comes with implicit and explicit demands. Those demands include explicitly showing up at the party. Implicitly, it means being in a celebratory mood, participating in activities, and even buying a gift. But a birthday party is also a wonderful opportunity for children to feel close to their friends and do something outside of the norm together. Understanding the nuance and difference in a question that has a demand found within it and a question that is asked for curiosity or community building will likely take time for neurodivergent children.

Directions are another place where neurodivergent people may struggle with communication. Many parents remark that their profoundly gifted children are like “little lawyers” or that they are experts at finding loopholes. It might seem like you have to choose every word with professional specificity or else risk a clever response rather than following the direction. If this is the case in your household, your child might be trying to wiggle some choice for themselves into the matter or otherwise assert their own sense of control over a situation. You might think that a direction like “Unload the dishwasher,” should be simply understood, until you walk into the kitchen and see every dish on the counter instead of properly put away. The dishes on the counter might be a sign of your child trying to equalize (meaning neutralize the demand) to maintain their autonomy.

But seeing all of the dishes out on the counter could also lead you to ask: Is there a skill that your child needs help developing? There could also be a misunderstanding about what the demand “unload the dishwasher” truly means, and they may think that they are following your wishes. If there is just a lack of understanding and a need for skill building, you can have a conversation about what chores look like in your house and then scaffold and model the chores with your child.

Some profoundly gifted children, because of their high expectations of themselves and others, have difficulty accepting praise or compliments. It may feel like the person giving the compliment is disingenuous, or they are omitting the truth. Sometimes a child’s perfectionism and loud self-talk can drown out what someone is trying to tell them. Developing a growth mindset likely won’t happen overnight. One thing that families can do to encourage a growth mindset in their PG children is to be specific while praising the process. So, after the yearly piano recital you could say something like, “I heard you improve so much from the spring when you got this music until now! Remember when it was a struggle to play [insert part]? People in the audience smiled hearing that exact part!”

Declarative Language

So how do you effectively communicate with profoundly gifted children?

Traditionally, parents are told that using imperative language with their children will be effective. Traditionally, imperative language is direct and simple, and towards a singular directive. Asking direct questions (with correct answers) and using simple commands seem like the most straightforward way to communicate. But that’s not always the case.

Instead, many families with neurodivergent children have found success adopting a more declarative language style helpful. Declarative language comments or describes what’s happening, shares your own feelings or experiences, or problem-solves aloud. Taking this approach rather than one focused on imperative language means that your child has the opportunity to think for themselves, hear their own voice/thoughts, and develop their own problem-solving skills. To many profoundly gifted children, this type of interaction feels like more of a two-way street than answering direct questions. Declarative language can invite a different dynamic that promotes social reciprocity more. More information about declarative language can be found in The Declarative Language Handbook.

It can sometimes be a challenge to shift one’s natural or trained communication style. In the moment, it may be difficult to think of what to say to your child. Here are some examples of imperative and declarative statements:

Daring to Communicate Differently

If this conversation resonated with you, it is never too early to try something different. The book How to Talk So Kids Will Listen & Listen So Kids Will Talk details even more strategies for communicating more effectively with your PG child. You can teach children alternative means and methods of communication. One of the ways to begin teaching children how to communicate differently is to model for them. If you are trying to use more declarative language, but struggling to smoothly make the switch you can model that in front of your child. If you just made a demand with an imperative statement, you could say, “Wait. I didn’t say that the way I wanted to. Trying again, I would say: __.”

Some of the following questions and prompts may help you begin to think about communicating with your child in a different way:

• Take a few minutes to take an inventory of your child’s strengths in communication and conversation. When do they light up? What listening and responding skills are the most developed? What patterns are you noticing?
• Try some pebbling with your child. There’s no need for a deep explanation, you can just give them the “pebble” or say something like, “I was thinking about you,” without expecting a demand or a thank you. A possible “pebble” could be:
  • Post it notes with a message
  • A picture of something you saw during the day
  • A rock, leaf, or flower
  • A favorite snack or treat
  • A funny picture over text
• Challenge yourself to not ask your child any questions for the whole day. Try to come up with alternative declarative statements for these common questions:
  • What do you want for breakfast?
  • How are you feeling about that big Spanish test today?
  • We’re late! Can you hurry up and get into the car?
  • What homework do you have?
  • Can you take out the trash?
  • Why didn’t you tell me this until right before bed?
• Think about a task that you regularly ask your child to do that they struggle to start or complete. Break that task down into as many steps as you can think of –at least 13 things. With those steps in mind, decide on an action that you could take or a different phrasing to use that might help your child succeed the next time you ask them to do that task.

Are you still curious about why so many aspects of communicating with PG children can be challenging? Check out our articles, “The Profoundly Gifted Brain” and “Meeting Expectations –Your Gifted Child and Yourself.”

Permission Statement

This article is provided as a service of the Davidson Institute for Talent Development, a 501(c)3 nonprofit dedicated to supporting profoundly gifted young people 18 and under. To learn more about the Davidson Institute’s programs, please visit www.DavidsonGifted.org.