Our child is a six year old male. We are wondering if anyone knows if a child be gifted and have the disorder ODD at the same time? We are not sure he has ODD. We are trying to find the best guidance for our child. We are in touch with our doctor and other health professionals. We are just beginning to try and help our son with his difficulties. He is very bright and relates well in some things and terribly in others. We are searching for answers and support from others out there that may have the same situation. Any help is appreciated.
ODD is
Oppositional Defiant Disorder- and it is just what it sounds like.
There is some debate about the etiology of this disorder- whether it is rooted behaviorally more than emotionally or as a chemical brain dysfunction.
And the answer is yes- absolutely- why couldn’t they coexist?
Robin
Re: Can a child be gifted and have ODD?
If it is, indeed, Oppositional Defiant Disorder you’re talking about, get hold of a book called, “The Explosive Child” by Ross W. Greene, PhD. It’s the best one I know for working with children with unpredictable, explosive or defiant behavior. It doesn’t really matter what the cause - the way of relating to the individual is the same regardless.
ODD can have many causes and as RobinG states below, it can be physiological or behavioral. I grew up with a relative who clearly had serious problems controlling her temper. I wish that book had been available to my family. As it is, once she reached adulthood, practically every member of the household had worked with a therapist to learn how to talk to our explosive sibling. It all boiled down to the recommendations in Greene’s book.
There’s some interesting studies going on concerning the laying down of myelin, the fatty covering for our nerves. Myelin continues to be laid down all the way to the end of adolescence. And in some people, the myelin isn’t being produced as quickly as in others. This may cause developmental delays and/or behavioral outbursts. Issues like regulation of emotions and impulsivity can be linked with a delay of production of myelin.
First, what is ODD? I know ADD and OCD, but is this a misprint or another addition to the alphabet soup?
Second, the *definition* of learning disability is uneven development — that’s the whole point of the matter. A learning disabled person of any age is a person who is of average or above-average intelligence in general or in several fields, is not physically handicapped with regards to vision or hearing, but has a difficulty learning in some field or fields of knowledge that cannot be accounted for by any other reason. (In other words, besides ruling out vision and hearing deficits and general low development, the trouble is not due to second language, lousy teaching, neglect, etc.)
For example, a child might be extremely bright verbally and have vocabulary of a person twice his age, have had acceptable teaching and tutoring, but still have trouble reading a pre-primer at age 7.
Another child (mine, or myself) might be able to pick up the newspaper and read it aloud to you, in two languages, but barely be able to write a sentence laboriously and barely legibly in half an hour.
In other words, yes, absolutely, giftedness can be combined with almost any learning disability (of course with the exception of mental retardation, which would be a contradiction.)