WATG thanks Dr. Pamela J. Pine for her guest blog this month.
Somewhere in your school, there is a child with an IQ in the 99th percentile who has never been referred for gifted testing. There is a student whose analytical thinking would make your brightest peer group sit up straighter – who has instead been written up three times this month for behavior. There is a twice-exceptional learner whose inconsistent executive function has everyone puzzling over their diagnosis – when the missing piece isn't a diagnosis at all, but a history.
That history is what public health researchers call an adverse childhood experience – an ACE.
Three in four high school students reported experiencing at least one ACE in the CDC's most recent Youth Risk Behavior Survey. That is three out of every four students. It includes the gifted ones. It includes the twice-exceptional ones. It includes the ones you're worried about and the ones you think you understand. It includes the students you've already identified and, more significantly, the ones you haven't.
Adverse childhood experiences are defined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as potentially traumatic events that occur in childhood: abuse, neglect, exposure to domestic violence, substance use in the home, household dysfunction. They cause documented, measurable changes to children's brain development – affecting attention, decision-making, and learning in ways that educators observe every day without always having the name for what they're seeing.
For gifted learners, the consequences are compounded and specific. Toxic stress from ACEs negatively affects the same cognitive systems that allow gifted children to access and demonstrate their gifts. The child who is gifted and traumatized may present as the child who is simply difficult. Their emotional intensity – which a skilled gifted educator would recognize as a characteristic of asynchronous development – may instead look like dysregulation. Their perfectionism may look like rigidity. Their underachievement may look like laziness. The label lands. The gift stays hidden.
This is part of the story behind the gifted identification equity gap that the field has been grappling with for decades. ACEs disproportionately affect children from underrepresented populations – the same children who are consistently underrepresented in gifted programs. Understanding ACEs is not a tangential concern for gifted educators. It is a core equity tool.
The good news – and there is genuine good news – is that gifted educators are already extraordinarily well-positioned to change this. They know how to see potential that others miss. They know how to build the relationships that allow quiet brilliance to emerge. They know how to advocate for children who need something different from what the system is offering.
What they have not been given, until now, is the framework that allows them to see the ACE history that may be hiding the gift.
That framework is available. The research is clear. The connection between childhood adversity and gifted underidentification is documented.
The gifted child you're missing may be hiding behind an ACE. It's time to find them.
Dr. Pamela J. Pine, CFRE, is the Founder and Director of Stop the Silence®, a department of the Institute of Violence, Abuse and Trauma (IVAT), and an internationally recognized public health expert in childhood trauma prevention and community resilience.
Pamela J. Pine, PhD, MPH, MAIA, RCHES
Founder and Director, Stop the Silence®: A Department of the Institute on Violence, Abuse and Trauma (IVAT)
2025 Voices Of Courage Award® recipient
PamelaP@ivatcenters.org
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