Well, you know it took me, this is off topic too but it took me a long time to discover that with my own children because when our first son, the reason that I agreed to write these books with Henry Winkler was when he told me, we were introduced by a friend who’s an agent, someone we both knew from working in television. And he was the one who suggested that Henry write about his experience growing up dyslexic.
And so when we met to talk about it and he told me his story of how he had been kind of thwarted all through school, I resonated with that because our oldest son, isn’t dyslexic, he doesn’t have a learning challenge, but he’s probably ADD, I’m not sure we ever even had him diagnosed but he was just a kid who wanted to do what he wanted to do, he was kind of a dreamy kid and he was all, you know the teachers were always calling you know.
Theo is making frog noises in class, and I would say well he’s three, you know, he likes frogs, I don’t know what to tell you. So, but I as a new parent would punish him, I would say well you can’t play Nintendo because you made frog noises in class, so it took me a long time to understand that he was different than me, that he wasn’t going to, that his student path wasn’t going to look like mind.
I did everything right, you know. And so I think as a parent it takes, it’s not something that you can, someone can tell you. You know you have, you have to learn by failure, I failed with him, the poor child had, had, I kept buying him calendars, you know day at a glance calendars to write down his homework assignments. And when he was maybe 15, after I had been doing this for twelve years, I looked in the drawer of his desk and there they all were, not one of them was even unwrapped you know.
And there were probably 50 of them, it was such a sad, such a sad thing to see but this was my attempt to say get organized, you know. But he couldn’t, he couldn’t get, it was the most ridiculous assumption that that was going to help him because that’s exactly what he couldn’t do. Believe me if he could have filled out those calendars he would have just to get me off his back. So it’s something you have to learn about in parenting or in teaching.
That, you haven’t created a second self that here’s this person and they have their own way, they have their own needs. And it is not your job to make them like you. That’s a mantra that you have to say over and over again, this is not my job description to make them like me, this is for me to see them. And it’s, I don’t, you know it took me, I made a lot of mistakes in raising my own kids until I sort of got that. So, people are different, people are very unique you know. And part of the thrill of being a writer is that you get to explore that uniqueness and not try and make everyone, not try and even it out, but to celebrate differences in character, that’s what character is.
That’s what writing an original character is writing one that you haven’t seen before that isn’t a type, that isn’t an archetype but that’s a real honest to goodness authentic human being. And we’re weird as human beings, we have infinite weirdness.