The Drama of the Gifted Children

Examining the curious overlap between "giftedness", autism/ADHD, and gender dysphoria

“One of the things that my research clarified for me was that there are actually very few deeply “gifted” kids with transcendent cognitive or artistic abilities; therefore kids are being incorrectly labeled as exceptionally gifted. The peril is that some children who have been led to believe they are highly gifted will suffer, like Icarus, in their later lives.”

— Alissa Quart, Hothouse Kids: The Dilemma of the Gifted Child (2006), page 205. Quoted from larrygowdy.com/childprodigy.html.

William James Sidis was a precocious child. According to his parents—a psychiatrist and a doctor—William was reading the newspaper at 18 months and spoke multiple languages by age six, eventually learning between 25 and 40. He enrolled at Harvard University at age 11—his father tried to get him admitted when he was nine, but Harvard said no—and graduated in 1914 when he was 16.

William’s parents wanted their child to be a genius. They invested considerable time and resources into nurturing his intelligence, teaching him to recognize and pronounce the entire alphabet within months of birth and spending vast sums of money on books and other educational resources. His father, Boris Sidis, a well-known psychiatrist, had developed theories on how to raise children to be brilliant prior to the birth of his famous test subject. From day one, every aspect of William’s little life was geared toward academic achievement. His parents were eager to put their child and his accomplishments in the public eye, and the media would hound William for the rest of his short life.

William was bullied at Harvard. He later dropped out of law school, and joined a socialist movement. At 21, he was arrested for rioting and assaulting a police officer; he avoided prison time because his parents agreed to house him in their sanatorium, where they “set about “reforming” him and threatened him with a transfer to an insane asylum.”

After that, William did his best to escape public life, working as a bookkeeper in a variety of cities and under a variety of aliases, moving every time someone recognized him. He went no-contact with his parents, and “spent his time writing books, collecting streetcar transfer tickets, and even doing some unskilled jobs that can be considered very lowly for a person with gifted intelligence like him.” He never married and died in 1944 at the age of 46.

He was later believed to have had Asperger’s Syndrome.

Child prodigies and “gifted” kids have long captured the public imagination, attracting an often twisted combination of admiration, envy, resentment, and exploitation. (To qualify as “gifted”, someone must score in the top 2% on an intelligence test, which is considered to be equivalent to an “IQ” of 130-132 or higher).

A pattern has emerged among former—and current—so-called “gifted” kids: they aren’t doing so great. Many former “prodigies” and “gifted” kids grow up to be unexceptional adults, and, cruelly, those who were paraded through the media by their parents suffer the additional injury of failing in the public eye. One study found that only 3% of a sample of 210 “gifted” children went on to conventional success.

Burn out, anxiety, depression, diagnoses of ADHD and/or autism, immune dysfunction and chronic illness, substance abuse, and even gender transition all appear to be more likely outcomes for many children who do well on childhood “IQ” tests than any sort of significant real-world achievement. My husband is a clinical counsellor specializing in substance use, and has told me roughly 15% of his clients are former “gifted” kids (he works for a health authority and these are clients receiving free counselling).

The overlap between ADHD and/or autism and “giftedness” is so prevalent it has yielded its own term: “Twice Exceptional.” Many of the criteria for “giftedness” overlap with the criteria for autism spectrum disorder, but the “giftedness” of the child can “mask” the autism, resulting in the latter going unnoticed until the late teen years or adulthood.

While it is apparent that there is a correlation between autism and gender dysphoria—enough to inspire the term “autigender”—there is less discussion and research about “gifted” kids who go on to become transgender. However, there is strong anecdotal evidence for this phenomenon from transgender people, parents of transgender youths, and clinicians.

Parents of transgender children who believe that their child was caught up in a social contagion (i.e. “rapid onset” gender dysphoria or “ROGD”) frequently describe their child as being “gifted”, or testing above 130 on an “IQ” test. (“ROGD” is to be distinguished from those who presented as gender dysphoric from a very young age; the latter are not the subject of this essay).

In 2017, psychoanalyst, author, and podcaster Lisa Marchiano, LCSW, wrote on the blog 4thWaveNow:

“Since 2016, I have been consulting with families with teens or young adults who identify as transgender. Nearly all of these parents report that their child is bright or advanced, and a significant majority have shared that their transgender-identifying child was formally assessed as gifted.”

I also highly recommend reading the comments for the above article.

A year later, Dr. Lisa Littman published controversial survey results from 256 parents of “ROGD” children—the majority (82.8%) of whom were natal females—which found that nearly half (47.4%) of the children had been formally assessed as academically gifted.

While this pattern appears in both sexes, it is possibly more pronounced in natal males.

“[Giftedness is] a universal quality among young men who have trans identities yet displayed no signs of dysphoria in their very early years (and often betrayed no particular form of gender-atypicality). Sometimes, they’re history buffs; more often they excel in science. All are good at maths, and read at a level that’s well beyond their years.”

— Angus Fox, “When Sons Become Daughters, Part V: The Links Between Trans Identity, Gifted Minds, Categorical Thinking—And Anime”, Quillette

In one survey conducted by PITT (Parents with Inconvenient Truths about Trans), it was found that parents of “ROGD” natal boys reported that 78% of their children were “gifted”, with an average IQ of 140. In addition, 21% had autism and an additional 29% had autistic-like behaviours, and 73% suffered anxiety and 60% suffered depression in the six months prior to coming out as trans. More recently, PITT published an article entitled “The Island of Misfit Boys”, describing a school where 30% of the kids in the top 1% of academic achievement identified as transgender.

So what’s going on?

If you’ve read my previous essays, you can probably guess where I’m going with this, but I’m going to lay the argument out very carefully. (Feel free to skim over parts you find repetitive). I’ve been researching this for a while, and procrastinating on writing the actual essay because I’m hyperaware that all of these subjects are very sensitive and a delusional part of me thinks that if I can just figure out the right words, I might avoid the inevitable misunderstandings and backlash.

I’ve released my perfectionism and accept that I won’t reach everyone, and that I’m going to trigger people. As I wrote in “Particles and Waves”, I am no longer “letting my desire to be seen as good get in the way of doing and saying what I believe is right.”

And I believe the truth is important, even when the truth is inconvenient or painful.

Note: As I am looking at the relationship between autism and giftedness, the contents of this essay are mostly relevant to “high functioning” / “low support needs” autism, which was known as “Aspergers Syndrome” prior to the publication of the DSM-5 in 2013, not to more severe and disabling forms of autism. Furthermore, I do not believe autism is a unitary condition, but instead an umbrella diagnosis for a cluster of traits that can arise from a variety of causes; no cause applies to all cases, and no case has only one cause.

This essay will focus on progressive, white families. This is because autism has historically been associated more with Nordic/Germanic/WASP and Ashkenazi Jewish families (i.e. Northern and Western Europeans and their descendants in the colonies) compared to other demographics, and while this has since changed—particularly for more severe forms of autism—the reasons are multifactorial and outside the scope of this essay. However, when I use the word “white” I am referring to all people of European descent, as this is how the term is used in modern data collection.

The “gifted child” phenomenon has also historically been associated with white people, so much so it inspired its own entry in the 2008 blog Stuff White People Like.

Furthermore, the modern gifted/ROGD/autism overlap appears to be concentrated—or at least primarily discussed—in progressive, middle-class and affluent white families; this is the demographic of most of the parents active in the PITT community, and over 90% of parents interviewed in Lisa Littman’s study were white. This is also typical of the case studies discussed in Abigail Shrier’s controversial book on “rapid-onset” gender dysphoria in teenage girls, Irreversible Damage, and in her new one, Bad Therapy (see my review).

Many observations may still apply to lower-income families, but there are numerous additional factors related to poverty that are beyond the scope of this essay.

Some Important Background / Quick Recap

In my essay “The Dangers of Reading Too Much”, I discussed two similar (but not identical) theories that were first published independently about 15 years ago: Christopher Badcock’s theory of the diametric model of cognition, and Iain McGilchrist’s theory of brain hemisphere lateralization.

Badcock proposes there are two types of cognition:

• “Mechanistic”: “Things-thinking”, visual-spatial abilities, pattern recognition, technical skills, abstract/fluid intelligence, logic, attention to detail, semantic memory, truth-seeking/observation, categorical thinking, bottom-up thinking). Associated with increased activity in the task-positive network.

• “Mentalistic”: “People-thinking”, language/communication, sense of self, sense of others, theory of mind, imagination, storytelling, dream recollection and interpretation, autobiographical memory, meaning-making, spirituality, relational/holistic thinking, top-down thinking). Associated with increased activity in the default mode network.

McGilchrist explains that while both brain hemispheres are active for everything we do, each hemisphere is dominant in different areas (and inhibits the other) and each understands and interacts with the world in different ways:

• Right Hemisphere: Dominant in processing our relationships to our embodied selves, to nature, to food, to spirituality, and to other people and all living things. Dominant in processing music and nonverbal communication. Holistic, relational, uses top-down processing, emphasizes change, empathy, and openness, and is the hemisphere of the brain responsible for meaning-making. Sees the systemic whole.

• Left Hemisphere: Language centres of the brain (verbal communication, especially reading and writing), dominant when we interact with non-living things, such as machines. Abstract, literal, narcissistic, reductionist, uses bottom-up processing, emphasizes logic, order, rationality, and bureaucracy, and understands things in black-and-white. Sees things, including our own bodies, as an assemblage of parts.

Now, there are notable differences between these two theories, and Badcock’s “mechanistic” and “mentalistic” cognition do not map precisely onto McGilchrist’s “left hemisphere” and “right hemisphere.” For example, visual-spatial abilities, which Badcock describes as mechanistic, are found primarily in the right hemisphere, and language, which Badcock describes as mentalistic, is primarily in the left hemisphere. However, in The Diametric Mind (Chapter 7, “The Genius of Literacy”), Badcock clarifies that reading and writing are inherently more mechanistic than in-person, oral communication, which more closely aligns to McGilchrist’s distinction between the mechanistic left hemisphere (verbal) and the right hemisphere (nonverbal communication, e.g. body language, tone of voice, facial expressions).

That being said, one of the significant commonalities in their works is that both men believe that Westerners (Western/Northern Europeans and their descendants in the colonies) have become cognitively lopsided over the past several hundreds years, toward mechanistic cognition at the expense of mentalistic (Badcock) and the left hemisphere at the expense of the right (McGilchrist). Both men also believe that this shift has resulted in the West becoming more “autistic”, with Badcock going as far as to call our present era the “Age of Asperger.”

Iain McGilchrist in 2018; source: Wikipedia

#1: IQ Tests are Mechanistic, Intelligence is More than Just “IQ”

Badcock discusses intelligence at length in his books, and argues that “IQ” tests really only capture “mechanistic” cognitive abilities, as well as the “mentalistic” ability to conform to Western societal and cultural expectations. Badcock quotes Hans Asperger on pages 97-98 of The Diametric Mind (emphasis mine):

“[T]he Binet test, especially at older age levels, involves above all logical, abstract thinking. Since this is what autistic children often find so congenial, they may achieve a high score, which would give a false picture of their intelligence.”

And on page 99, Badcock writes:

“The Flynn effect […] could well be the manifestation of the greater abstract reasoning ability and superior fluid intelligence that emerges when an entire civilization comes to resemble Asperger’s syndrome in its cognitive configuration.”

(For examples and clarification on this, The Diametric Mind is available as a PDF here, and the relevant pages are 87-135 and 280-283).

McGilchrist, for his part, claims in his books that intelligence relies more on the right hemisphere than the left hemisphere. However, in a recent conversation with Scott Barry Kaufman, Kaufman argues (emphasis mine):

“[A]ll the most recent data I’ve seen on general intelligence [i.e. IQ tests] – when you look at the common variants across various sub-tests – shows that general intelligence is more left-brain activated, because it is involved in abstraction and logical reasoning […]

[…] I think it’s important to recognise that intelligence as a construct seems to be richer and deeper than just IQ-test performance.”

In other words, while people who are cognitively balanced (between left/right hemispheres and mechanistic/mentalistic cognition) and highly intelligent will perform well on IQ tests, so will many people who are cognitively imbalanced in favour of the left hemisphere and mechanistic cognition (i.e. people higher on the autism spectrum), while their deficits will not be captured by these tests. (It is possible, then, that the average difference in IQ observed between atheists and the religious/spiritual is a product of the relationship between left hemisphere dominance, IQ, and autism.)

#2: “Giftedness” and Androgyny Are Linked

“Gifted” children are more androgynous, on average, than other children.

Androgyny can be broadly categorized into two types:

• Positive Androgyny: Roughly equally high in traits associated with healthy, mature (i.e. positive stereotypes of) masculinity and femininity.

• Negative Androgyny: Roughly equal in traits associated with negative stereotypes of masculinity and femininity and/or low in traits associated with healthy, mature masculinity and femininity; possibly more immature or “childlike” (also called undifferentiated androgyny).

Both positive androgyny and undifferentiated androgyny are associated with “giftedness”, with the latter being more common in males. Unsurprisingly, negative androgyny or undifferentiated androgyny is associated with significantly worse mental health outcomes than positive androgyny (which may protect against mental illness).

Undifferentiated androgyny would most closely fit the gender identity “agender”, a sub-type under “non-binary” where one sees oneself as lacking a gender. While I don’t believe this has been officially researched, I’ve noticed that it is common for autistic social media influencers to identity as “agender” (perhaps more so than “autigender”; but again, I don’t have any hard data).

It’s worth noting here that there’s evidence that testosterone exposure in the womb has a curvilinear relationship to fluid intelligence, which too little or too much being associated with a lower IQ.

#3: Autism and Androgyny Are Also Linked

The idea that autism is an example of “extreme male intelligence” was originally suggested by Hans Asperger, and later researched and popularized by Simon Baron-Cohen, as part of his “empathizing-systemizing theory”. Baron-Cohen argues that females are more likely to score highly on “empathizing”, whereas males are more likely to score highly on “systemizing”, and that autism is an example of extreme systemizing, or extreme male brain.

The extreme male brain theory would predict that masculine women and lesbians would have higher-than-average rates of autism, whereas there would be no increased risk for feminine males and gay men. This theory could explain the high rates of autism diagnoses among young women who currently or previously identified as transgender. And, as expected, “there is now good evidence of some measure of physical masculinization—or at least de-feminization—in autistic women” (Christopher Badcock, The Imprinted Brain, page 175).

However, the “extreme male brain” theory of autism does not explain why so many “gifted”, autistic young men are also coming out as trans, nor why there are so many feminine women seeking and receiving diagnoses of autism. And while autistic men are far more likely to be heterosexual than autistic women, autistic men are still more likely to be homosexual or bisexual than neurotypical men (one study found that only 82% of autistic men and 57% of autistic women reported being heterosexual).

To say the “extreme male brain” theory “rests on shaky ground” is putting it mildly.

A competing theory, the “gender incoherence theory”, predicts that “[autistic] males should be more similar to [typically-developing] females and ASD females should be more similar to TD males.” 

Supporting this, a 2012 study noted that “somewhat paradoxically, many individuals with ASD display androgynous physical features regardless of gender.” The authors state: “Rather than being a disorder characterised by masculinisation in both genders, ASD thus seems to be a gender defiant disorder.”

It is possible that both the extreme male brain and gender incoherence theory are partially true, depending on which areas of the brain are looked at. In one study, researchers found that autistic males showed an “extreme male shift” in the default mode network and in “goal-directed behavior or attention”, but more female-typical connectivity in sensory and motor brain regions.

Many autistic people have androgynous facial features, which supports the “gender incoherence” theory.

Interestingly, while autism is highly correlated with all LGBTQ+ identities, it is particularly so with asexuality; one autistic trans woman, writing for the blog Embrace Autism, claims (with considerable evidence) that as many as 8% of autistic men and 22% of autistic women are on the asexual spectrum. ADHD, on the other hand, is known to be associated with both hypersexuality and hyposexuality.

While I couldn’t find any official research linking “giftedness” with asexuality, a thread regarding “giftedness” on the Asexual Visibility & Education Network suggests that the link exists, but via high-functioning autism / Aspergers.

From this and the previous sections, I think a research question worth investigating is whether negative / undifferentiated androgyny is more associated with autistic traits and with left-hemisphere / mechanistic dominance and atypical brain lateralization than positive androgyny. That autism in adults is associated with emotional “immaturity” and a lingering affection for children’s toys and media suggests this may be the case.

#4: Children Mature at Different Rates: The Problem of Precocity

Childhood “IQ” tests measure “IQ” by determining the child’s “mental age” (i.e. mechanistic cognitive skills), dividing it by the child’s physical age, and multiplying by 100. So a 10-year-old who performs similarly to average 14-year-olds on an IQ test will be said to have an “IQ” of 140. IQ tests given to children are not necessarily accurate, as scores can fluctuate over the course of development.

The problem is that not all children mature (mentally or physically) at the same rate, and so presumably precocity would be a confounding factor in childhood IQ tests. Sure enough, many “gifted” children who hit cognitive milestones (e.g. talking, reading) early also hit physical milestones (e.g. standing, walking) early as well.

Let’s look at another measure of precocity, that of sexual development:

One study found that “[g]irls with precocious puberty had a significantly higher verbal IQ score than the control subjects”, and there is anecdotal evidence that many “gifted” kids, particularly girls, go through puberty early. For example, from Exceptionally Gifted Children (1993):

“Like many other highly gifted children, particularly girls, she reached puberty earlier than her age-peers and she was taller and more physically mature than many of her classmates.”

Or from a 2000 blog post by Annette Revel Sheely, a staff member at the Gifted Development Centre (emphasis mine):

“Asynchronous, or out-of-sync, development so commonly seen in highly gifted children, wreaks havoc not only with educational needs, but also with the milestones of growth and maturity. Many parents of highly gifted children have reported that the physical changes of puberty and the emotional adjustments of adolescence began years earlier than expected for their children.”

This phenomenon was also observed well over a hundred years ago, by none other than Sigmund Freud in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905):

Sexual precocity often runs parallel with premature intellectual development, and, linked in this way, is to be found in the childhood history of persons of the greatest eminence and capacity […]

Obviously, this does not apply to all “gifted” children, but points to the existence of a particular subset whose “giftedness” may partially result from accelerated development.

In these cases, the gap between the precocious children and their peers would shrink over time as their peers caught up developmentally, and could explain why some “gifted” children—in particular those who are identified at very young ages—grow up to be average adults. (On the other hand, I expect that “gifted” children who develop / hit puberty at an average or slower than average rate would be far more likely to grow into gifted adults.)

Tying this back to autism, research has suggested that autistic people’s brains “grow too quickly during childhood, and shrink too fast during adulthood.” There is some evidence autistic children go through puberty earlier than their peers, with multiple studies finding that early puberty is particularly common in autistic girls.

I wasn’t able to find any significant evidence (other than anecdotal) that going through puberty earlier increases the likelihood that a child or teenager will later come out as transgender; this is a research question I hope someone will eventually be brave enough to address. The strong correlations between autism and (“rapid onset”) gender dysphoria and (“rapid onset”) gender dysphoria and giftedness predict this relationship would exist.

#5: Early Childhood Stress May Speed Up the Development

Multiple studies have found “[c]hildren who suffer violence or trauma age faster.” “One frequently reported finding is that psychological stress, experienced during early childhood, accelerates pubertal development, a phenomenon termed “psychosocial acceleration”.” This is also a recurring theme in case studies of childhood abuse and in particular neglect; in order to survive, the child “grow[s] up fast.”

“[M]any of the stress hormones that are released when children are experiencing psychosocial stress can also mimic sex hormones. This means that once puberty begins, it ends up happening much faster than it would under normal circumstances.”

— Sara Novak, “Stress May Be Causing Early Puberty”

Other studies find that different stressors affect children differently, with abuse being associated with delayed brain development (particularly in emotional-processing circuits) and neglect being associated with “whole-brain maturation” or accelerated development.

“The rollercoaster fortunes of William Sidis gave rise to an entirely new concern regarding the treatment of gifted individuals. To this day, his name is synonymous with a theory aptly named “early ripe, early ruin”, based on the belief that overemphasis on early development leads to a form of intellectual burnout.”

— Alistair Duff, “The curse of a high IQ – being super bright isn’t always a gift”

Clearly, the type and context of childhood stress is important here. William Sidis was raised by well-off, highly educated parents and there’s no evidence he experienced physical abuse or neglect. But his academics-focussed early childhood certainly constituted emotional neglect and he would have been under significant stress from the pressure to meet his parents’ demands for precocious achievement.

“I regret all the ways I never got to be a child because I was too busy being a child prodigy.”

— Kate Alexandria, “I Was A Child Prodigy. Here’s The Dark Truth No One Ever Talks About.”

#6. The “Cold” Parenting - Autism Connection

Autism, which was first described in papers by Hans Asperger (Austria, 1944) and Leo Kanner (United States, 1943), was originally attributed at least in part to “cold” parenting, in particular from mothers. 

Kanner states (page 34): 

“It is not easy to evaluate the fact that all of our patients have come of highly intelligent parents. This much is certain, that there is a great deal of obsessiveness in the family background. The very detailed diaries and reports and the frequent remembrance, after several years, that the children had learned to recite twenty-five questions and answers of the Presbyterian Catechism, to sing thirty-seven nursery songs, or to discriminate between eighteen symphonies, furnish a telling illustration of parental obsessiveness.

One other fact stands out prominently. In the whole group, there are very few really warmhearted fathers and mothers. For the most part, the parents, grandparents, and collaterals of persons strongly preoccupied with abstractions of a scientific, literary, or artistic nature, and limited in genuine interest in people. Even some of the happiest marriages are rather cold and formal affairs. Three of the marriages were dismal failures.”

Although Kanner later clarified he still believed his patients were born with an “innate inability to form the usual, biologically provided affective contact with people”, his paper would set the stage for the rise of the “refrigerator mother” theory of autism, which was popularized by Bruno Bettelheim in the mid-1900s. 

From Bettelheim (quoted in Far from the Tree (2012), Andrew Solomon, page 231):

“The precipitating factor in infantile autism is the parent’s wish that his child should not exist.”

Bettelheim’s theory, like Freud’s theory that parenting styles were the cause of homosexuality, has “fallen out of favour” since the 1970s, and Bettelheim—who was revealed to have lied about his academic credentials and was allegedly abusing autistic children put in his care—has been thoroughly discredited. However, a handful of psychologists and doctors, such as Peter Breggin, Frances Tustin, and Alice Miller, continued to believe that there was an element of truth to the refrigerator mother theory, and the theory is still believed by some people in Europe (e.g. in France) and South Korea. 

This observation is complicated by the fact that PTSD (or complex PTSD) can look very similar to autism, especially in children, and many people with autism also have PTSD. Overlapping characteristics of the two disorders include sensory sensitivities, increased amygdala activation, difficulties with emotional regulation, substance abuse, self-harming, dissociation, suicidality, and increased risk of future victimization, as well as lack of interest in peers, repetitive play, outbursts/meltdowns, and difficulty sleeping. Autistic people may also be more likely to develop PTSD following a traumatic experience than non-autistic people, and research has found that a majority of autistic adults report “severe” trauma histories.

The refrigerator mother theory is frequently described as “debunked”, however, never with a link to an actual study. I looked for evidence that “cold” parenting could not cause (or exacerbate) autism and was unable to find any. I was able to find many other risk factors, but the existence of other potential causes of autism does not disprove that “cold” parenting is a cause. It merely proves that “cold” parenting is not the cause; and it is unlikely that it is a cause in every case, or that it is the only cause in any one case (e.g. dietary factors seem to play a huge role; but you would expect some overlap between “cold” parenting and a diet higher in processed convenience foods).

It bears repeating: autism is not a unitary condition.

I think here it is important to distinguish “cold” parenting from abusive parenting and narcissistic parenting. A narcissistic parent will always be at least somewhat “cold” but not every child who has a “cold” upbringing has narcissistic parents. “Cold” parenting is far more common, a consequence of bad advice in parenting books, high mobility and the breakdown of extended family support, and an individualistic and “low nurture” culture that prematurely pushes independence on babies and toddlers and willfully downplays the importance of family caregivers—in particular mothers—out of an economic incentive to have as many adults in the workforce as possible.

In addition, there are countless factors families have to deal with that did not exist in Kanner’s and Bettelheim’s heydays—e.g. the Internet and social media, various toxins, and low wages and high living costs which make supporting a family on one income difficult. So I think it’s also appropriate to distinguish “cold” parenting from “cold” development; a child with “cold” parents will always experience “cold” development, but “cold” development can also occur with “warm” parents, if those parents are stressed out, unavailable (i.e. due to lack of parental leave, early daycare use, and long work hours), and lack family support.

“When a baby has a sensitive and present mother, the outcome for that baby in terms of brain development and DNA expression is likely to be different from that for a child who has an absent or distracted mother.”

— Erica Komisar, Being There (2017), page 43

The COVID-19 lockdowns are also an excellent example of children being forced in “cold” development (i.e. lack of in-person interactions, excess time online) by forces (mostly) beyond parents’ control.

By “cold” development (/parenting), I am referring to any childrearing practices or upbringing factors that:

• Neglect the right hemisphere (RH): The critical periods of RH development are the first three years of life and adolescence (roughly ages 10-25). RH neglect would include: lack of exposure to nature/sunlight; lack of face-to-face interactions; lack of body-to-body contact (i.e. use of strollers instead of baby-carrying); lack of security due to parents’ not responding to cries; lack of opportunity to socialize in-person in groups, and/or to develop and sustain long-term, stable relationships with family and friends; lack of laughter and humour; lack of opportunity to physically explore and be “present” in one’s body (i.e. through play, dance, and/or sport); lack of exposure to music and singing; lack of spirituality/religion; and a diet high in processed foods instead of whole foods.

• Prematurely push left hemisphere (LH) tasks: E.g. trying to teach a child to read or do basic math while they are still a toddler (under the age of three) and use of other LH-dominant academic activities such as flashcards. (Erica Komisar explains in a short video). I suspect this is one of the reasons for the prevalence of “hyperlexia” among high-functioning (and gifted) autistic people, and partially accounts for the unhealthy perfectionism associated with “giftedness”. To be clear, reading to your baby/toddler is different than trying to teach them how to read. (However, I think singing is better for RH development; babies can’t even see books properly until they’re four or five months old anyway). Update 30/04/2024: Here’s a recent example of a popular article encouraging parents to teach two-year-olds to read.

• Excess time spent in LH-dominant and/or mechanistic activities: This includes excess academics, all types of screen time (with those that result in more focussed (LH) attention being worse—the smartphone is worse than the TV), and even excess time playing alone with toys/puzzles/games and/or reading books. Book, game, and/or screen addiction can also be a symptom of loneliness in neglected and/or abused children.

• Impair healthy attachment to family: Narcissistic parenting falls under this category, but so does parental stress and busyness/unavailability, which is often at least somewhat out of the parents’ control. Growing up without extended family who live close also contributes here (especially for only children).

As I discussed at length in a previous post, following advice in most parenting books will often impair healthy attachment. For example, co-sleeping is vilified in the West and sleep-training is promoted by “experts”; but sleeping next to your baby and toddler is common throughout most of the rest of the world, and is better for babies’ development than sleep training.

The idea that young children should sleep alone is a fairly new “Western” (dare I say “colonialist”?) invention—for most of our history, families shared a room and often a bed. The stress hormones released when a baby is left to “cry-it-out” alone impair brain development, during that first critical period of right hemisphere development.

I believe multiple generations of neglecting babies’ and toddlers’ right hemispheres (and mentalistic cognitive development) has resulted in an epigenetic shift toward the dominance of the left hemisphere and mechanistic cognition observed by Iain McGilchrist and Christopher Badcock.

This isn’t the only factor contributing to the shift, but I believe it is a major one.

Note: While I hope it’s clear that I do not believe all autistic (or all autistic/gifted/ROGD) people have narcissistic parents, it’s still apparent that many do. Here are several reddit threads by autistic individuals discussing how they had narcissistic parents (or maybe their “autism” was trauma from narcissistic parents all along?) and discussing the potential overlap between narcissism and autism (also highlighted in a Psychology Today article). And here’s a thread about struggling former gifted children from r/raisedbynarcissists.

Update 01/05/2024: In this interview with Abigail Shrier, Jordan Peterson claims “about half” of mothers of ROGD daughters who proceed with therapy and treatment are diagnosable with borderline personality disorder.

At the risk of sounding cynical, I am deeply suspicious of mothers who launch TikTok or Instagram accounts shortly after receiving (or, often, while still seeking) an autism diagnosis for their child / social media star. Similarly, I am suspicious of parents who announce that their toddler or young child is transgender or “gifted” to the media, or do bizarre stuff like sign them up for Mensa and tell the world about it.

#7: The Trauma of the Gifted Children

“They do well, even excellently, in everything they undertake; they are admired and envied; they are successful whenever they care to be—but behind all this lurks depression, a feeling of emptiness and self-alienation, and a sense that their life has no meaning.”

— Alice Miller, The Drama of the Gifted Child (1979), page 5 (book summary)

The “emptiness” Miller describes in the quote above is frequently reported by autistic people, and is also associated with many other conditions known to be highly co-morbid with autism (e.g. borderline personality disorder). It is also associated with childhood emotional neglect. What she calls “self-alienation” describes the “diffuse sense of self” and “depersonalization” often seen in autism and related conditions, including “giftedness”.

According to Iain McGilchrist, our sense of meaning is predominantly in the right hemisphere, as are the intertwined senses of self and others. From The Master and His Emissary (pages 87-88, emphasis mine):

“It is hardly surprising that the ‘sense of self’ should be grounded in the right hemisphere, because the self originates in the interaction with ‘the Other’, not as an entity in atomistic isolation. ‘The sense of self emerges from the activity of the brain in interaction with other selves.’ The right orbitofrontal cortex, the part of the right frontal lobe most crucial for social and empathic understanding, is larger in primates than the left. It is likely that this part of the brain expands during the period of playful interaction between infant and mother in the second half of the first year, and the second year, of life, during which the sense of the self emerges, and indeed the right orbitofrontal cortex is seen by Allan Schore as the crucible of the growing self. The right hemisphere matures earlier than the left, and is more involved than the left in almost every aspect of the development of mental functioning in early childhood, and of the self as a social, empathic being.”

Further reading: Daniel J. Siegel and Tina Payne Bryson’s The Whole-Brain Child (2011), Chapter 6 “The Me-We Connection”, in particular pages 125-127.

Communities like the PITT parents and writers like Abigail Shrier tend to dismiss accusations by young transgender and/or autistic and/or mentally-ill people that their parents are narcissistic. As evidenced above, I believe some parents of these children meet clinical criteria for narcissistic personality disorder (NPD)—after all, writers such as Jean Twenge and Christopher Lasch suggest narcissism has been increasing for 50+ years, and researcher Paul Piff has found that affluence and narcissism are positively correlated. But I doubt the majority are clinical narcissists.

However, I suspect far more nonetheless interact with their children in a way that mimics narcissism. This could be because the parent is on the autism spectrum, or it could be because of the influence of toxic parenting books, false ideas about child development and the importance of mothers, “bad therapy”, and ill-advised influencers. (I think in many cases these reasons all sort of bleed into each other, if that makes sense).

For example, many parents think they’re helping their children and preparing them for an increasingly competitive academic world when they buy flashcards, encourage their 10-month-old to learn how to identify numbers up to 10 and all the letters of the alphabet, and otherwise nudge them toward any kind of precocious achievement.

“In a society that values academic achievement as a barometer of a parents’ competence, it’s common for parents to worry about their children’s cognitive development […]

[…] When parents replace play and personal interaction with screen time like Baby Einstein and flash cards, they interfere with the kind of imaginative and creative play that ultimately helps children work through their fears and difficult feelings like anger and frustration.”

— Erica Komisar, Being There, pages 26-27

Furthermore, when parents push cognitive (left hemisphere) tasks too early, it sends a message to the children that their parents value them primarily for their achievements. The parents’ love might be unconditional but what matters is the child’s perception of that love, the story the child tells his or herself.

“It is when a parent’s love is experienced as conditional on achievement that children are at risk for serious emotional problems.”

— Madeline Levine, The Price of Privilege (2006), page 30

Here’s a second example—many parenting books and influencer posts encourage the use of various “scripts” when speaking to their child. The problem with this is that using a script is a form of masking; it’s acting, it’s a performance. It makes sense to me that excess use of scripts would disrupt the normal/healthy development of right hemisphere non-verbal communication in children. While the parents may think they are doing things “correctly”, i.e. by the book, the children will experience this as their parents as being inauthentic, as their parents “pretending” to care, “pretending” to love them.

And maybe they aren’t entirely off base—in Bad Therapy’s chapter on the pitfalls of “gentle parenting” (arguably “permissive” parenting), Abigail Shrier quotes “gentle parents” who confess to not enjoying time spent with their own children. She also writes:

“It’s inevitable, isn’t it? The people who make parenting look exhausting aren’t all that fond of the kids they’ve raised.”

— Bad Therapy, page 176

Children are sensitive. They know when you are being inauthentic. It’s not exactly easy to distinguish between the narcissistic “false self”, autistic masking and scripting, or a parent who simply trusts “experts” a little too much.

This is especially true of children who are highly sensitive for genetic reasons—the sort of children Alice Miller describes as becoming so attuned to their parents’ expectations they lose themselves trying to meet them.

For all his flaws and deceptions, it seems there was something to Bettelheim’s observation that autism arose when the parent(s) secretly wished their child did not exist. There are an awful lot of articles, social media posts, and interviews out there by mostly white, liberal parents stating that they “regret” having children, that they do not enjoy parenthood, and/or that they do not particularly like their children.

“A mother’s boredom with her nurturing role and/or her depression, disengagement, or absence can all lead to a disruption in a baby’s development.”

— Erica Komisar, Being There, page 42

Some Final Thoughts

I realize what I’ve written here will be upsetting to a lot of people. I would like to reiterate that I am not claiming that “trauma” (broadly speaking) is the only cause of giftedness, autism, or ADHD—there are well-established, known other causes for all of these. The right hemisphere dysfunction and abnormal brain lateralization associated with autism can be a result of early childhood stress, emotional neglect, and poor attachment, but it can also be caused by things such as malnutrition, toxins, and anything else that disrupts brain-gut development during the sensitive first years of life. Factors related to “Big Pharma” and “Big Food” are probably playing a much larger role in the skyrocketing rates of developmental disorders and mental health problems than daycare use or parenting.

I do suspect that gender dysphoria—in particular the rapid-onset variety, is almost always a result of trauma (and the culturally-supplied narrative / social contagion)—but I am open to the possibility that this is also not the case. A brain which favours mechanistic cognition over mentalistic, the left hemisphere over the right—that is, an autistic brain—is also more likely to think categorically, to be dissociated from the body, to see the body as an assemblage of parts instead of a whole, and less inclined to believe in or care about “God’s” or “nature’s” design; all of these traits lend themselves to pursuing cosmetic surgeries (of all types) and cross-sex hormones.

But at the same time, from my observation it seems that a major draw of a transgender identity is the community and promise of a chosen family that comes with it, which suggests an underlying loneliness and insecure attachment to family-of-origin is involved in many/most cases. And as Alice Miller describes throughout The Drama of the Gifted Child, a common trait of children neglected or abused by their parents is that they tend to reject their child self.

While I share the concerns of many observers that vulnerable young people are being ushered by irresponsible doctors and other bad actors into (dangerous) puberty blockers and surgeries without receiving adequate information about the risks (i.e. without informed consent), ultimately what I want for trans and gender dysphoric people is to be as happy and healthy as possible. It seems that despite the risks, hormones and surgeries really do help some people and I would not want to take that option away. I do, however, think that people have the right to be fully informed about the risks and possibility of regret, and that underlying mental health issues, traumas, and other factors that might be contributing to someone’s gender distress should be addressed prior to them committing to irreversible changes.

Regarding autism and ADHD, I believe that by identifying and addressing underlying causes, triggers, and traumas, one can improve their health and well-being. This doesn’t necessarily mean you will no longer be autistic / neurodivergent. I will return to this topic in future posts.

And for the former “gifted” kids; you’re more than good grades, high achievement, or an IQ score. You do not have to be famous or conventionally successful to make a meaningful contribution to this world.

And, please, always remember:

“Our achievements may make us interesting, but our darkness makes us loveable.”

— Douglas Coupland, Shampoo Planet (1992)

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Further Reading

Laura Becker is an excellent example of everything I talk about in this essay: she is autistic, highly cerebral, previously identified as agender (along with other trans identities), took testosterone and had top surgery, went through puberty early, and acknowledges childhood trauma and poor attachment to her parents. She authored an excellent profile of the “Archetypal FTM”, which aligns with my observations here.

I also highly recommend checking out Tao Lin’s essay on healing his autism; Lin is also a former “gifted” child, who, like me, found considerable healing through psychedelics. His essay focuses on causes of autism I am yet to address on this Substack, including nutritional deficiencies and toxins such as glyphosate.

In Conversations with Great Thinkers (1997), which is available in full online, LJ Hammond discusses some of the qualities found in “geniuses”. His observations are limited as he draws exclusively from the Western canon and focusses mostly on male geniuses, but many insights are relevant here.

Finally; I have no idea who this Larry Gowdy fellow is, but he’s written some interesting rants about IQ testing and child prodigies over on his personal blog.

Other Essays on The Cassandra Complex Related to this Topic

The Lost Girls and Boys

The Dangers of Reading Too Much (Part 1): Does excessive reading exacerbate autism and other psychiatric diagnoses?

The Dangers of Reading Too Much (Part 2): The Dark History of Parenting Books

Bad Journalism: The Problems with Abigail Shrier’s Bad Therapy

Down the Folic Acid Rabbit Hole