And that’s the final theme, that each of us has, each of us is unique and has our own path and that there are a lot of ways to get where you’re going, not just one way. And so what I hope in my books is that children will read them and understand that part of their job is to let the adult world know that they’re going about their lives.
But they’re doing it in their own way and that the purpose of the adults in your life is to help you navigate that, not to make you get on their road but for them to see what your road is and to help clear the way. So that’s a really important theme and certainly in the Hank Zipzer books, that’s the predominant theme of a kid who is dyslexic who is not successful in school but is smart and resourceful and resilient and knows what he wants to do.
He just has to clear the adults out of the way and let them, so that they can see him, so that he can be successful in his own path. And in fact, with writing with Henry Winkler, that’s what he had to do. He was, he was dyslexic and he didn’t know it so he was a bad student. But he’s real smart, and real talented, and real charming and real resilient and committed to what he wanted to do so he found a way to do it but had resistance at every single step.
That’s why I wanted to write these books with him, because that journey really resonates with me, that our job as parents and our job as teachers and as adults in the world of children is to help, is to see, to truly see who that child is and then to help make their way easier, not to put up roadblocks.
And that way may not look like everyone else’s way but everybody has, everybody has a dream and everybody has a talent and everybody has a purpose and so what we’re here in the world to try and do is to clear the way so people can reach, can fulfill their purpose without having to look like everybody else around them.