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Testing: Advantages and Disadvantages?


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I'm looking for some advice about testing for giftedness and / or autism. My children are accelerated but I have never had them tested.  In the past, testing had never really seemed relevant. They are learning at their own pace at home, making wonderful progress, and flourishing emotionally.  

 

I've always shied away from testing because I didn't want my kids to have a label.  Not that I would tell them their score, but even for me / DH to know their "score" or diagnoses - I'm afraid of how that might change my perspective. I'm afraid of labeling them in my own mind, and having that somehow affect the way I interact with them in a negative way.  

 

However, more recently, DH and I have been talking about how perhaps testing might benefit the children.

For one child, we wonder -would knowing the "gifted" diagnosis would open up any additional learning or experiential opportunities?

For the other, we are beginning to wonder whether the child is a high functioning autistic. DH is quite likely a high functioning autistic but was never formally diagnosed. He feels that if our child is HFA, behavioral therapy might help our child avoid some of the problems that DH faced growing up. 

 

 

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A close friend has a gifted HFA son. Her children has been in public school since Kindergarten so testing was useful in a very direct way. Her other child is gifted but not 2E. Her son has an IEP all through the years for HFA and he is now going onto 9th in fall. They didn't get any gifted services.

 

I can get free autism testing through my school district but we choose to go through medical/health insurance so we paid some amount out of pocket. We would have gotten therapy through the school district if my kid was autistic. We paid for private IQ testing and medical insurance covered part of it. I know some districts would do IQ testing if requested but I don't know anyone who went through school in my area. There are no known services for gifted and people tend to switch their gifted kids to the public charter with stipends or private school or homeschool.

 

What I was told was that unless it is obvious, the evaluators tend not to confirm autism until after 8. A neighbor's twins were diagnosed at 18 months with autism but not the HFA kind. She gets respite care, her twins get free preschool and other services.

 

Find out where your local parent support group for autism meetings are held and try to attend one to find out more about services available. Silicon Valley has a high level of autism so support groups are easier to find.

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We had testing done because out umbrella charter required it when Ds was younger. He did extremely well, but had/has test anxiety (though lots of intervention has greatly helped now). So we waited until he was 9/10 for achievement testing based on giftedness. We have never done IQ testing and I currently cannot see a reason in the future which we would choose to.

 

A few benefits to the testing:

 

1) Dh had to majorly lay off the idea if Ds not being accellerated, of me just pushing to hard, or the idea that we were all just pandering to him and believing him special because we loved him. Testing made it extremely blantant that Ds had actual special needs.

 

2) Many HG/PG individuals have co-morbid conditions. Ds and I are both poster children for this. By having the scores, it somehow granted me the legitamacy to approach Ds' perfectionism, anxiety, and sensory stuff from the standpoint of giftedness. It provided different language to me and different resources which have really helped.

 

3) I was suffering from gifted denial. Test scores forced me out of that. I really had to come to terms with the child in front of me. As much as I would like to say that I would have challenged my son and allowed him to learn at his own pace regardless, that is honestly not true. Hindsight is 20/20, but once you see numbers and can quantify, you have to get rather brutally honest with yourself. I knew my son was a bit ahead, but had no real idea what that meant. It changed a whole lot of what we did.

 

Downsides

1)The test scores basically meant that every school system we have looked at cannot meet the needs of my child. They are not bad, or wrong, or anything judgmental. It is just how it is and where he falls on the curve. That is a hard one to deal with. Dh is still not there, but then, he doesn't see the academic side of Ds all that much.

 

2)Forced social skills. Forced kid time. Forced silliness. Forced low intensity. These are not downsides for Ds or for me, but more difficult things to explain to others. We have changed the way we do vacations, have discussions, and give instructions. It is not something very many other families or other adults get all that much. As much as it works for us, it is sometimes very isolating or embarrassing for me since I cannot really explain it.

 

3)Once I shifted my thoughts and actions to better meet Ds' needs, he sort of took off at a feverish pace. His current academic and life accomplishments are difficult to be relatable for others. We don't talk about them much. That is isolating as well. It makes connections hard sometimes. Had I not shifted I do not know if Ds would be this successful.

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We did testing for DD at 3 because she suddenly withdrew from the world.  She only would talk to myself or my husband, and completely shut down for other people. We did an initial eval with a psychiatrist who did a full work-up on her, and recommended additional SLP and OT testing.

 

IQ scores at 3 are not reliable, but it gave us an idea that she was certainly advanced. We won't know exactly where she falls on the curve unless we retest at an older age, which we may or may not do depending on circumstances. Understanding the giftedness helped us understand some of her social/emotional difficulties, and help her to work on those. We accepted that other 3 yr olds (now 4 yr olds) are not necessarily the best playmates for her, and have allowed her to expand her friend circle to include much older kids.  We've started to run into issues that her friends are hitting puberty, and she clearly isn't.  But she's better able to handle and interact with a variety of ages now, and is much more open than she had been initially.

 

There are some developmental delays that seem to be related to the giftedness (as far as the doctors can tell).  Because she never babbled, just went straight from crying/yelling to using words, she has a speech delay.  Not language---she can understand and use complex phrasing.  But the actual production of speech and movement of the mouth is tricky for her. She has sensory issues (which also hurts the speech) and she can't tell what her body is doing unless she can see it.  She struggles to put on shoes once the foot goes into the shoe and you have to wiggle it.  She struggles to put on a shirt because she can't coordinate her body while the shirt is over her face.  And there are a number of other sensory/dyspraxia things.

 

It's been useful for us to have that testing---it's helped us to explain her difficulties to others, and to find resources where she can thrive.  She gets SLP and OT services through the district. 

 

Both sides of the coin are isolating--the gifted and the special needs.  You can't really talk about a 4 yr old being gifted without eye rolls, even though it completely impacts how she interacts with the world. You can't really play word/math games with your child in public, because it seems like bragging somehow.  DD's favorite game right now is to take a word, and try to make other words out of the letters in it. And a game where you try to make any 2 numbers equal any other 2 numbers, just by adding symbols (ie 28=15 would be absolute value of 2-8 equals 1+6).  It's a fun game, but people get judgy about 4 year olds talking about absolute value.

 

The special needs is also isolating--people chalk it up to behavioral issues or parenting.  Ugh.

 

But we'd be just as isolated feeling without the testing.  Overall we are glad we did the testing. 

 

 

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DH is quite likely a high functioning autistic but was never formally diagnosed. He feels that if our child is HFA, behavioral therapy might help our child avoid some of the problems that DH faced growing up. 

 

This, by itself, seems reason enough to me to test. 

 

I will repeat with someone else said--sometimes iffy cases of ASD in gifted kids won't really be obvious until about 8 or 9.

 

Find someone really good with 2e that has some experience with autism.

 

Ask some questions ahead of time--you don't want someone who is going to say that it's not autism because your child makes eye contact or is empathetic.

 

Educate yourself about the current diagnostic criteria. Then research what real world examples of those things look like. Spend time gathering and/or writing down observations going all the way back to birth if you can think of stuff, and then revisit. All of that will help at the intake and paperwork stages.

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I have had two situations where I could've tested and didn't.  

 

One, I suspected that one of my children had Aspergers.  I asked the pediatrician, and she said "He might, but does testing help you?  What's really important is how he does in school.  If he's doing fine, then do you really want the label?"  So I waited, and he did fine in Kindergarten, and I never had him tested.  He seems to me to be a bit behind socially, but I don't think a label would necessarily help him, and now, a couple of years later, I see that he is on a path to being a well-functioning adult. 

 

My other son is probably gifted (1 in 3000 range from the Cogat results), but I never officially tested him.  I didn't think of him as gifted because he was so social, articulate, and well-rounded.  He's wasn't quirky, wasn't a perfectionist, and he didn't come up with off-the-wall brilliant thoughts.  I simply thought of him as a young adult.   It was the testing that came out of his school--9A on Cogats, and very high Iowa percentages across the board that started to make me wonder.  There is a gifted school in the area that I should've had him tested by, but I was afraid he wouldn't come out as gifted, and that he would feel like he wasn't smart or that I would view him differently.   I was afraid I would be disappointed.   In retrospect, after being bored at school as long as he was, I believe that I should've tested him sooner so that I knew one way or another--I might've gone ahead and homeschooled.  Or maybe the school would've been more receptive to some of my requests (probably not...but.....).

 

I still haven't had him tested, but he is now at a school that is happy to meet his needs academically.  There are a lot of things about the school that make me happy that my husband doesn't or didn't originally think were a good thing.  For me, the idea of having college level classes or teachers that had previously taught at the college level was a good thing--I had taken such classes as a kid, I loved it, and thrived in that environment.  My husband didn't have that experience, and considered it a negative.  Perhaps if my husband thought of him as "gifted", it would have been easier to say to him "that's what a gifted kid needs, I'm sorry if you don't understand that."  

 

At this point, unless there's a particular program I want him to apply to, I'm not sure it matters as long as he's having his needs met academically.  If people think otherwise, I'd be curious to hear.  Right now, I'd be more worried about him seeing himself differently or treating others differently if he has a label.  

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Right now, I'd be more worried about him seeing himself differently or treating others differently if he has a label.

 

We all have labels, and lots of them. I have labels that say "woman", and "left-handed", and "liberal" and, "white", and "straight", and, yes, "autistic".

 

"Autistic" isn't a bad label - it's who I am.

 

Do I see myself differently from the way I did before I got a diagnosis? Absolutely. Before I knew there was a word to describe me, my labels were "strange" and "lazy" and "doesn't live up to her potential" and "can't fit in" and "clumsy" and "doesn't understand things everybody else does". I'm still actually really upset at my parents for not telling me they suspected autism from the time I was a baby.

 

You say your son is doing well in school. Great! But he's not going to be at that school forever. He's going to go to college, he's going to get a job - and he might need formal accommodations in those places that he doesn't need here. They might not be willing to give these to him without a diagnosis - and trust me, it's easier to get a diagnosis now than later.

 

Do you really want to label him? Life's gonna label him, no matter what. The question is "what label is he going to have?" and "Is it better to have it and not need it, or need it and not have it?"

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  • 2 weeks later...

My 7-year-old is at a day camp now that is focused on autism, and I am seeing that it is a nice environment and opportunity for some of the older kids to make friends.

 

I know this is not a label I would usually associate with helping to find a niche for some friends with similar interests (it looks like this is Legos) but it is a different perspective for me.

 

They are also going swimming at a smaller indoor pool, that has a lot less going on with sensory (no radio, not a ton of other kids) and that seems to be a nice thing, too.

 

There is no requirement to have official testing or anything for this day camp, and also I am hearing that a lot of this Lego group of kids will probably move on to a STEM day camp in middle school.

 

Still, I am seeing that it seems to be opening doors for some of these kids :)

 

My son is younger than this group of kids and not necessarily going in this direction, I think, so I am more going off of impressions.

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I have found resources for autistic kids about social interaction some of the most helpful in trying to relay the very illogical social norms our culture has.

 

Ds also greatly enjoys the company of older autistic kids because his oddities are okay and he does not have to mask being geeked out or completely not caring about many arbitrary social niceties.

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We chose to have both an ASD diagnosis and a cognitive assessment (WISC IV)  to 'diagnose' the giftedness in our 2E kid.  

It was partly a matter of obtaining the appropriate paperwork to access certain funding and resources.  But it was also because I had read that it is common for giftedness and ASD to mask each other, resulting in a child who looks like they are doing well but in fact needs more/different support and learning opportunities.  Having been a 2E child myself, with no diagnosis or help offered, I was very motivated to do better for my child because I suspected that her brain is similar to mine.  Therefore I wanted to get as full a picture as we could of her strengths and weaknesses.

 

Edited by IsabelC
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