Meet a Child Entrepreneur With Dyslexia and His Mom

Hi, I'm Max, the chief creator behind Max's Creations. Two of my favorite things are basketball and hot chocolate, so I invented a mug with a basketball hoop for tossing marshmallows into hot chocolate. I'm Jen Ashe, Max's mom. When Max was first diagnosed with dyslexia and a language processing disorder, we were worried about how he would do in a world where he would be defined by test scores that may not reflect kind of his full abilities. When he made this mug, what it taught us is that Max is going to have a different path, and that there are many children out there who may not do well on standardized tests or who may have struggled with writing essays, but they have a lot of wonderful ideas. So this started out and we thought this was a great opportunity for Max, the entrepreneur. We did not realize that it would get to this level, but to be honest, we're no longer doing this just for Max. What we realize is that one in five children have a language-based learning issue or an attention issue, and there are one in five wonderful ideas out there that might never make it into the world. So what I would say to parents who learn of their children having a learning disability is as much as there will be challenges and the path ahead will not follow typical routes, that there's an advantage to thinking differently and to realize that there may be new ways that they may contribute to the world. And the way to do that, I think, is to stop focusing so much on what we're doing and trying to solve our children's problem and to stop and listen to them and to look at what is coming from them. Every child is special and every child has an opportunity to create in this world, and we think there's an opportunity to change our system so that those ideas make it out there.