A Letter to the Parents Walking This Road With Us

Your child is not a problem to be solved.

I want to talk to you for a minute — parent to parent.

Not about my son's books. Not about anything you can buy. Just about the thing you and I both know, the thing people who don't have our kids don't quite understand.

You have a child the world tries to put in a box. Maybe there's a word on a form somewhere — a diagnosis, a label, a report from someone who met your kid for forty-five minutes and thought they had them figured out. My son is autistic. And I know what it's like to sit across from someone who talks about your child like a list of things that are wrong, when you're looking at the most right thing you've ever made.

So this letter is for you. Here's what I've learned, in case any of it helps.

Your kid is not the label.

The label can be useful — it opens doors, it gets you resources, it helps people understand. Use it for that. But don't ever let it become the whole story, and don't let anyone tell you it's a ceiling. My son struggled with math. There's a page in his book where he says, in his own words:

Nobody handed him that. He lived it. Your kid is doing hard things too, in their own way, on their own clock. See it. Say it out loud to them.

They understand more than people give them credit for.

One day I asked my son what being brave means. He told me:

He was scared of a zip line on his birthday, and he did it anyway. He's smarter about fear than most grown adults I know. Your kid has wisdom in them that doesn't always come out the way the world expects it to. Slow down enough to hear it. It's in there.

Let them lead sometimes.

The whole reason my son has a book is that I stopped trying to write his story for him and started asking him what he had to say. I asked him what he wanted to be, and he said, without a second of doubt, "I could be a firefighter." That confidence — that certainty about himself — became a whole book of things he believes he can do. I didn't teach him to believe in himself like that. My job was just to get out of the way and let the world hear it.

And take care of yourself, too.

This road is heavy some days. I know. There are days the fight for your kid takes everything you've got and there's nothing left over for you. My son's mother and I know those days. If nobody has told you lately: you're doing a good job. The fact that you're the kind of parent who reads something like this means your kid already has more than a lot of people ever get. You are enough for them. On the hard days, hold onto that.

We hold onto an old blessing in our family, from Numbers 6. I'll pass the whole of it to you tonight:

Whatever's coming this week, I hope you feel a little of that peace.

Your child is not a problem to be solved. They are a whole person — smart, brave, important — already the king or queen they were made to be. Our whole family is built around one simple idea, the one my son put on the cover of his own book: I can.

So can your kid. And so can you.

We're walking this road too. You're not walking it alone.

— Titan's dad, Titan's World