Craig Thomas is best known for his work on TV. He co-created the sitcom “How I Met Your Mother” and has written for “American Dad” and more. He’s penned songs for “Sesame Street” and essays for “The New Yorker.” He’s less known for being a dad. For now, at least. He has a daughter, Celia, and a son, Elliot, who was born with Jacobsen syndrome, a genetic condition causing physical and developmental disabilities. When Elliot was born, Craig’s career was taking off with “How I Met Your Mother.” “I was living an hour drama show at home and then driving to work and doing a sitcom,” Craig says. His upcoming novel, “That’s Not How It Happened,” is based in part on his family’s experience. If you heard our series on the resurgence of the R-word, you’ll recognize Craig’s voice. The conversation with him was so good that we’re sharing more!
Craig Thomas is best known for his work on TV. He co-created the sitcom “How I Met Your Mother” and has written for “American Dad” and more. He’s penned songs for “Sesame Street” and essays for “The New Yorker.”
He’s less known for being a dad. For now, at least. He has a daughter, Celia, and a son, Elliot, who was born with Jacobsen syndrome, a genetic condition causing physical and developmental disabilities.
When Elliot was born, Craig’s career was taking off with “How I Met Your Mother.” “I was living an hour drama show at home and then driving to work and doing a sitcom,” Craig says. His upcoming novel, “That’s Not How It Happened,” is based in part on his family’s experience.
If you heard our series on the resurgence of the R-word, you’ll recognize Craig’s voice. The conversation with him was so good that we’re sharing more!
For more on this topic
Timestamps
(02:20) Craig’s backstory and current work
(09:45) How Craig relates to the disability community
(13:10) Disability and media depictions
(29:04) Comedy, the R-word, and why language matters
(39:10) On parenting a child with disabilities
For a transcript and more resources, visit the Hyperfocus page on Understood.org. We love hearing from our listeners! Email us at hyperfocus@understood.org.
Craig Thomas: It's strange how we as a society don't have more and better answers for what adult lives look like for people with disabilities. People with disabilities are human. They have parents and families who are humans and love them and deserve respect and decency and humanity, dignity.
Rae Jacobson: That's Craig Thomas. You might not know his name, but you definitely know his work. He co-created "How I Met Your Mother," and he's also been a writer on "American Dad," "The Late Show with David Letterman," made music for "Sesame Street," and even written for "The New Yorker."
Craig: There are really colorful, wonderful ways to describe something that is absurd, stupid, ridiculous, hypocritical, hapless. There are so many funny ways to talk about those things without resorting to this incredibly easy, punching-down, useless, like outdated way of calling something those things. Like, think, be more--
Rae: If you've been listening to the last two episodes of "Hyperfocus," you've already heard from Craig. As we looked at how language, and especially the R-word, echoes through comedy, culture, and everyday life. But this episode is about a lot more than that word. It's about Craig's journey as a father of a child with disabilities, because 18 years ago, while Craig was running a hit TV show, his son Elliot was born with a rare genetic condition called Jacobson syndrome, which causes physical and developmental disabilities. And his life and perspective changed forever.
It'll be no surprise to anybody that Craig is very funny. But he's also a really thoughtful person when it comes to parenting, disability, language, and media. And he has a unique perspective on what it feels like to look back at the culture that you helped shape and make the choice to do things differently.
And another reason we wanted to talk to Craig is because he recently tried his hand at something new: a novel. It's called "That's Not How It Happened." And it's inspired by his family's story, a story that, like this episode, is as much about music and humor as it is about fear and love.
Craig: He's not reducible to a WebMD page of symptoms. He is not reducible to the R-word. He is not reducible to anything because he is a beautiful human being.
Rae: I'm Rae Jacobson, and today on "Hyperfocus," a longer conversation with Craig Thomas.
(02:20) Craig’s backstory and current work
Craig Thomas: So "How I Met Your Mother" ended 10 years ago. I lived in Los Angeles. I'm from New York originally, and my wife and I and my writing partner, Carter, we all went to college together. And we moved out to LA and we lived there for like 12 years, about 10 of which were doing "How I Met Your Mother." But we moved back here when the show ended.
And part of what happened during the run of the show, we had our son. In between year two and three of "How I Met Your Mother," we had no idea what was going to happen. We had no idea in utero that he would be born with what turned out to be a very rare genetic syndrome with all of these challenges. We'll get into it. Um, health challenges. He needed open-heart surgery at two weeks old.
And then we only found out after the open-heart surgery that it was all part of this larger syndrome called Jacobsen syndrome. Not spelled exactly like your last name, Rae.
Rae: The Swedish spelling, right? It's a Swedish word.
Craig: Yes, he was discovered by a Swedish doctor. So well played. Yes, that's who discovered it, named after Dr. Jacobsen in Sweden, but we say Jacobson here.
And it's this really complicated, rare syndrome. It's a deletion of part of one of the 11th chromosomes, and it has medical ramifications and developmental, intellectual ramifications, all kinds of things. And we, and yet I still had to be running this comedy TV show every week. It was this really interesting balance because I always said I was sort of living, I was living an hour drama show at home and then driving to work and doing a sitcom. It was just the weirdest thing. I was like a full slate of content, dramatic and comedic content.
And so yeah, we moved. My wife and I really wanted to move back where we had family support, where we were from. So that's what we did at the end of "How I Met Your Mother." And professionally since then, I've, well, for one thing, we had another kid. And so I have my daughter, Celia, she's nine. Um, and she's neurotypical. She's a healthy, precocious little girl. She's very, she's different from her brother, and yet they connect quite beautifully, the two of them, despite this like nine-year age gap. My son just turned 18, which is a whole other conversation, right, with disabilities. And so my daughter's nine, my son is 18.
And we moved back here, and part of my mission after moving back, well, one of my missions was to not be such a workaholic and be more available to say, have a second child and be with my children, because running a TV show is such a full-time job. So all-consuming. And then, like I said, we didn't know we were about to become the parents of a child with a disability. And then suddenly you are. And there were six more years of "How I Met Your Mother" to do, or however many more years, and it was a lot. It was a lot to juggle.
So since then, I have had part of my mission besides finding more balance has been finding ways to write about this, to finding ways to write about this experience of becoming the parent to my son, Elliot, and all of the challenges and fears that came with that and all of the massive, beautiful gifts that have come from being Elliot's dad.
And so I've been trying, I tried for a couple years, a few years in TV and film to do projects that incorporated aspects of that part of my life. And it's really hard to get Hollywood to greenlight TV shows or movies about those topics sometimes. Came very close on a couple things. There's still one that I'm still trying to push up the hill a little bit.
But this is a very long answer to “what am I doing now?” What am I doing now? The last two or three years, I've written my first novel, and it is very much about this. The book is called "That's Not How It Happened," and it is a, I hope, a funny and yet poignant look at a family kind of like mine. It's not exactly my family, but it's a family, it's a mom, a dad, and two kids.
There's a son who's about 24 with Down syndrome, and he's sort of entering into adult life, right? He's in that process of, what does adult life look like for somebody with a disability? And he has a younger sister who in the novel is 17 and coming up on graduating high school. And the mother and the father in their various ways are sort of standing on that, on a cliff.
Whenever I talk to somebody about another parent that has a child with a disability who is coming up on 18, 19, 20 years old, without fail, they use the metaphor of a cliff because that's what it feels like. Right? They go, "Well, we're coming up on that cliff." And I would say my novel is sort of about that cliff and about sort of what coming up on that cliff does for all of them and the little cliffs they're all kind of standing on of like these inflection points that will lead in different directions for all four lives in this family. So the book is told from four perspectives. All four of the narrators are those four characters.
It's such a huge part of my life. Writers write what they know a great deal of the time, and I thought, I need to write something and put something out in the world about this topic. And the best way to do it was for the final product to be words on a page rather than a script that a studio needs to greenlight and spend millions of dollars on, which just wasn't necessarily happening when I wrote those. So that's, that is a very long answer, Rae, forgive me, of what am I doing now. That's, that was the 10-year ramp-up to what am I doing now.
Rae: That's amazing. And first of all, I love a thorough answer. And secondly, you know, the idea of having an 18-year-old kid, period, let alone an 18-year-old kid who has disabilities, who is going into the world in this new way, like the cliff metaphor, I can feel it viscerally.
Craig: Yes. It's always the metaphor. And I wrote it into the book. I wrote it into the book that way because everyone says it that way because it feels that way. It's such an unknown. And we, it's strange how we as a society don't have more and better answers for what adult lives look like for people with disabilities, right? I mean, it's hard enough sort of navigating everything educationally, everything, all of your child's health needs, health insurance, all those things that are part of childhood, IEPs, all of that stuff.
But then you're, there is some sort of a road map, and then sort of right around 21 and getting into that age, you really, you start to feel like you are looking down on this cliff and you go, "I don't know what's down there. We got to take a leap of faith and see what happens." And it's really strange to me how little of a road map we seem to have to answer that question. It's fascinating.
Rae: You know, I keep hearing this from parents of kids with disabilities over and over and over that there is, there's sort of a map or there is no map that it feels like everyone's trying to tracing a different path and that path is sort of terrifyingly individual and also feels very communal in this way that is hard to explain to people who aren't part of the group.
Craig: Yes. It's very hard to explain it. That's true.
Rae: Yeah. And the idea that you wrote a book that like takes people into the experience is so beautiful to me. But I'm, I wonder if I can take you kind of back because you are in this world now and it sounds like you inhabit it so fully and are able to in a way that I think is really rare, because I keep hearing this from parents, to bring other people in. But before you had Elliot, before you were in this group, before you were on this map.
(09:45) How Craig relates to the disability community
Rae: What was your relationship with disability like? Like you started working in TV in your 20s, is that right?
Craig: Yeah, that's right. What did your relationship to the disability community look like then? Yeah, I mean, it's, I viewed it with, I didn't understand it. You know what I mean? I viewed it, I had so much naivete. I had so much ignorance. I, you know, I always felt, I always felt sort of a kinship with people who had disabilities. Like I was friends with people who had disabilities in school, but I didn't, you know, I didn't have some larger understanding of what it really was.
Like one of my closest friends had cerebral palsy, and he was just this awesome guy. He was very athletic. He had like, you know, he limped, he had different challenges, body challenges, but he was so good at like baseball and tennis. He was amazing. He was just my friend. But I noticed as we got into junior high school and high school that people would make fun of him sometimes. And I thought to myself, this guy, what are you, this guy's a better athlete than you are, you jerks. What are you talking about? And overcoming some certain challenges.
But it was funny with that friend who I was friends with all the way through high school, we never talked about his disability. It was the 1980s into the 1990s. We never really talked about it or his identity or what it meant or what it felt like. He was just my friend. And I grew up with two, I have a cousin who has Down syndrome, and he, you know, he was, we weren't close. He didn't live in the same town, but I always, I always loved him and he always had a great spirit. He's still with us and he, I don't know. When you have somebody in your family with a disability, I think it does make you less inclined to be a bully or to make fun of people with disabilities.
But it's not like it gives you, especially in the '80s and '90s when I was growing up, it's not like there was some really robust, nuanced understanding of it or discussions about it. So I wouldn't say that I had a particularly deep understanding of it beyond the people I happened to know who had disabilities.
Rae: And I'm curious about what that looked like when you started in media because I'm, I think we're in a similar age group and what I remember is that--
Craig: You're also 35? Great.
Rae: Yeah, I'm gonna be, I've been 35 for like maybe five to six years.
Craig: It's funny how you get there and you just stay there. I know I have an 18-year-old and I'm 35. It's so weird. Anyway, it's just weird.
Rae: I'm so glad that we're both 35. It's a great age to be.
Craig: We look amazing.
Rae: We do. Of course, no work done. But in the way that like when you become conscious of something--I have learning disabilities, but they're invisible. No one who would speak to me would necessarily know. And I was always able to mask pretty effectively. I'm a girl with ADHD, so I was not just masking but fully missed.
And in some ways that served me, but if I couldn't do something--I also have dyscalculia, I can't do math among other things. And if I was having a hard time doing something in my life, people have used the R-word towards me. Like, what are you? This, you know.
Craig: Right. Right. Oh, boy. Makes my blood boil. It's just makes my blood boil so much. Please keep going. I just need my blood to boil for a second.
Rae: No, allow the blood boiling and then bring it back down. Yeah. That's what we bring you here for is to get you really enraged.
(13:10) Disability and media depictions
Rae: But, you know, I feel like at the time it didn't, it was like upsetting, but I also, it was such a commonly used word and in my memory it was pretty commonly used on television and in movies and in film and the way people with disabilities were depicted wasn't always--I mean, and I say wasn't always, was basically never with thought or sensible.
Craig: Borderline never. Yes.
Rae: Frequently the butt of the joke. And when you started working in TV and film, like do you remember hearing it? I mean, I have like a picture of a writer's room in my mind and it's maybe not the kindest place to be.
Craig: There are those writers' rooms for sure. Um, there, yeah. So in reality, I'm going to be 50 in August, right? My writing partner, Carter, and I, we got hired at the age of 22 on "David Letterman." So we're these kids in the mid-late 1990s. And 100% people threw around that word at that point without thinking twice about it.
I even, I'll say this now because I've made such a crusade about this word. I wrote this essay in "The Boston Globe." I have published a short story in "The Iowa Review," and now I've written a novel, all of which touch upon this. More than the larger story and feeling and experience of being the parent of someone with a disability, but specifically within that, the words that are used and the diminishing, dehumanizing ways that people with disabilities continue to be talked about even in 2025 and sadly, there seems to be a real rise in the culture of talking about it that way, and I know we'll get into that, Rae, in a second.
But like to just turn it back on myself for a second so I don't sound preachy and holier than thou, I didn't scold anyone for making R-word jokes in 1997 or 2000.
Rae: I don't think anyone did. I mean, to my knowledge.
Craig: And to my great shame, I looked back not too long ago to a screenplay, unproduced, it didn't go anywhere, that Carter and I wrote that had that word in it. There was a joke where someone used that word. This is something that 25-year-old Craig thought it would be okay to put in that screenplay, not understanding anything at the time or however old I was when I was working on that.
Almost 50-year-old Craig looked at this the other, like recently, like a couple months ago, I was looking back through this old screenplay and I found that word and I sat with it. It was like a punch in the face. It was proof that I had used that word in the past and that I had committed it to paper and thought it was okay because in the late 1990s, it was a comedy word. It was an edgy comedy word. It's like a funny punch line to say.
And I hate to say it, it seems like it's coming back. There are people, there are people in the culture now and in politics now dedicated to bringing this word back.
Rae: They're celebrating it. They proclaim a victory around it.
Craig: Popping champagne. A victory. We've reclaimed this word like something has been achieved. Like some, like some great thing has happened by going back and finding this slur and saying, "Hey, no, we get to, we get to use a word that disparages the disability community to call anyone stupid and worthless by association saying the disability community is stupid and worthless." And the disconnect of seeing that those go hand in hand, they say, "No, it's just a funny word."
It's actually not. Words do actually matter.
Rae: Yeah, they mean something.
Craig: They mean something and they shape how we think about certain types of people, right? And the other thing is, if you talk to somebody in the disability community, like I've heard wonderfully eloquent anti-R-word speeches by people with Down syndrome, by people who say, "I do not like how this word diminishes me."
And yet, the people who defend this word seem to say, "No one cares. Everyone knows it's a word that's just cool and funny and comedic, and no one thinks it's related to the disability community." That's just yet another lie because people with disabilities absolutely will tell you, "No, that is a slur against my identity, like any other racial or religious epithet, slur, bigoted word, anything." It is right, the exact same as that. There is no difference between those things. And it's very hard to convince certain people of that fact for some reason. I'll never understand why.
But to bring it back on myself, there was a time where I thought as a young man, apparently, I didn't even remember thinking this was true or using this word particularly much. But there it was, staring me in the face in the screenplay, and it was, I really almost burst into tears when I saw it because my son's, you know, my son is now 18, and I've spent 18 years really reprogramming my mind and soul to and just seeing the world so differently.
So my son was born in 2007, which is still quite a while ago, and I don't think a lot has been learned about how to talk about disability since then and certainly since the late 1990s. But I remember going into my writer's room after my son was born and thinking, "I've got to tell people you cannot make jokes like this around me anymore." And I had to explain that.
Now, the "How I Met Your Mother" writer's room was full of all big-hearted, wonderful people. I don't know that we, that that word was ever tossed around in that way in that writer's room. It was a really wonderful writer's room. They're not all like that. But just because I know comedy writers do play it fast and loose and throw around terms, I just didn't even want to risk that anyone would think it was okay to say that word around me, starting from my son's birth. And I guess it's one of those you don't know till you know kind of things.
Rae: You know, I think a lot when you say that "How I Met Your Mother's" writer's room was a kind and like loving place. In large part, it sounds like because you made it that way. And I can only assume that's why that show resonated with so many people.
Craig: No, I think these are all marks of its success. I think that's what the show, that's what was special and unique about the show. You've got to find what's your thing, what do you do better than other shows, and you say this is our thing. And you commit to it. As a result, it is mostly not edgy comedy, but I will say this, we're only like 10, 12 episodes into the rewatch. I've already caught a few moments from 2005 where there's some joke where I go, "I wouldn't do that joke today." You know what I mean? I wouldn't do exactly that joke. Maybe I wouldn't say that word.
There's just a couple of times where like the word "transvestite" is used to describe like, "Oh, there's a transvestite hooker out on the street," like painting a picture of a crazy scene at three in the morning in New York. It wasn't meant to be insulting to that community, but it's singling out that word. It was using that word in a way to say like, "How crazy is New York at three in the morning," or whatever it is. Yeah. And I look at it, it's like that's sort of cheap and edgy. You're just saying that word because that word feels edgy. This is me, I don't know why this podcast is, my, I'm just doing mea culpas on this podcast now.
Rae: But I think it's important.
Craig: I guess what the point I'm trying to make is you don't know, you do have to evolve, you do have to learn as you go. Even this open-hearted show that is full of love, "How I Met Your Mother," we had a few moments as younger comedy writers, 30 years old when we launched the show, where we didn't realize some of those words, maybe you don't need to say those words as a part of a punch line of a joke. Even if it wasn't your intention to insult somebody with that identity, it's still, you're name-checking this word in this comedic way that isn't actually comedic. The point I'm trying to make here is the couple of moments like that I've found so far rewatching the show, the jokes are not worth it. They're not funny. There was a better joke to say there. But it's just, that's my biggest thing. It's not actually funny.
Rae: Yeah.
Craig: It's some stunt double of what people mistake to be funny and it's not. And these guys like Joe Rogan and Elon Musk and these guys championing, bringing back from nearly dead the word, the R-word, as if they've, as if that has achieved anything.
Rae: The R-word and measles.
Craig: As if that has achieved anything. And they are both very contagious, both of the two things you just named are contagious. And people hear it and all their little followers hear it and they think this is an okay thing to say now and that anyone that tells you different, that says, "Don't use the R-word," is woke and stupid and sensitive. When I, when I very mistakenly sometimes engage with people online about this topic, you better believe that their second or third move they have is to call you the R-word right back. "You're the R-word for saying I can't use the R-word." And you're like, "Buddy, I, this is, I don't know how to, I don't know how to continue this," because from here...
Rae: Guess we're at an impasse, my friend.
Craig: I guess you win in your mind, but sure, whatever. You know?
Rae: Well, this is like a thing I think about a lot, and it's, it's kind of the thing that made me want to have these conversations in the first place, which is like, how do we take people who think this is funny or feel like it's just like, you know, people say they can't do it, they want to do it even more. And they're just sort of divorced from what it actually means, what the impact really is. And this thing, it's a question that keeps coming back to me, which is like, you'll hear people be like, "Well, it's free speech, you know, like I just want to use free speech and like say what I feel." And it's like, to me, of course, you have free speech, but that is lazy speech.
Craig: Yes.
Rae: You could find another word. Like you're saying, you could come up, you could evolve even if you said it before. You don't have to cleave to the thing you've always been. You can change.
Craig: There are really colorful, wonderful ways to describe something that is absurd, stupid, ridiculous, hypocritical, hapless. There are so many funny ways to talk about those things without resorting to this incredibly easy, punching-down, useless, like outdated way of calling something those things. Be more, I would say, challenge yourself to be more specific. What do you mean? What do you think that word even means?
Like, and also like, I think how do you get someone to stop saying this word? I don't know because I engage with people sometimes on social media and it, once or twice, maybe a handful of times, people have said, "You made me think twice about this. I hear what you're saying." Okay, I'll share why those exchanges worked. I think because I said, "This is very hurtful to me." Because sometimes it would be with like fans of "How I Met Your Mother" even, or people that were engaging with me on some other issue. And I'd say, "Look, if you like any of the work I've done, I just want you to know I am a human being. I love my son more than anything in the world, and this word is a slur against an aspect of his humanity and his identity and a journey he's on."
Think about it, he didn't ask for extra learning challenges in life. He didn't want that, but he has that. And he has to overcome that. And he deserves respect for that. And to use words, these lazy pre-packaged words that equate having a disability with the abstract concept of just stupidity, worthlessness, haplessness, if you're saying those two things are the same, they're not. You're, you're really hurting my feelings because my son is so important to me. So the times I've made it personal are the times when I've, when I've had it work.
But then if you make it personal and the person still says, "F-you, you're the R-word," it hurts even more because now you feel like you kind of opened your heart to that person and like it didn't work and they just sort of stabbed the dagger in a little deeper. But the times it's worked are the times I've made it personal. I see this word coming up a lot online, on social media, and, you know, it's thrown around in political discussions a lot.
There is, I see it a lot in that sort of way where people say, "libtard," you know what I mean? Equating, there's sort of this like, let me take your, what I perceive to be your political beliefs and equate it with that. I see all these different ways people are trying to bring it back. And I think to myself, if they had somebody in their life that they loved who had a disability and said to them, "It really hurts my feelings when you use this, it really diminishes me and disparages me," that might be the only way to get through to somebody like that. I think there's a lot, I noticed this phenomenon a lot where people only understand something abstract when it comes into their life in reality and specifically.
And so the challenge seems to be, if somebody doesn't have that in their life, you have to talk about it in a way that makes it visceral, emotional, and real to them. And that takes a lot of trust because you're opening something up in your heart. If I talk about my son to somebody and they still insult me with the R-word and say, "You're just woke and screw off," that hurts more because I shared something of myself with that person. But I, you know, I think you have to have an open heart and you have to try to talk to people about how it feels and that we are all human beings. We all have value. This is a word that devalues, this is a way of talking about disability that devalues people. People with disabilities are human. They have parents and families who are humans and love them and deserve respect and decency and humanity, dignity.
And it's, I just think my, the only times I have felt a level of success in engaging with people is when I make it personal to them in some way. And of course, I've now written a whole novel that I hope does that. And I hope it does it in a funny way. It's actually a, it's mostly a comedic novel and I find that comedy, the right kind of comedy, can disarm people and open them up and it, I hope that I found a way of writing about it in my book that that might open a few minds and might make people realize, "Oh, I see why this matters. I see what this is."
(29:04) Comedy, the R-word, and why language matters
Rae: This makes so much sort of sense to me as a constellation of things, where it's like if the comedy that punches down and is shock value and it, that's isolating, right? You're pushing people out. The kind of things that you create pull people in. And it also, like when you say, cause I can relate very much to the feeling of having to make the thing that hurts personal in order to have other people care. Like one of the questions that comes to me over and over and over as I do this work is, how do you get people to care about things that don't affect them?
Craig: Yeah.
Rae: And one of the only ways that I've seen that happen is through media, is through art, TV, books. You become intimately acquainted with characters that are not, you know, real people, but they feel very real to you.
Craig: Yeah.
Rae: And when you talk about writing the book, it's almost like, cause I do feel like as people in the disability community, we do what you're saying. We have to kind of lay ourselves bare over and over and over and say like, "Please care. Please care about this. Please, please--"
Craig: And it's exhausting, right? It's emotionally depleting to do it sometimes, but there's almost no other way. Right?
Rae: So it's like you have to like kind of like throw open your chest and be like, "Look, I'm a person. Just give, give, give some amount of a, give a care," as the Southerners say, "give a care." And you know, but like that wears you out. It's tiring and you have to do it on a lot of fronts and in a lot of ways. And for me, when I see something like your book or like that piece, which was so beautiful in "The Globe."
Craig: Oh, thanks.
Rae: You know, there's this beautiful level of removal. You know, you're making people care, you're making it personal, you're making it personal through art. So it's almost like you have a screen in front of you. You're still, but you're still bringing people in.
Craig: Yeah.
Rae: Which, I don't know, what do you think about that? Like what responsibility do media, do art have in this world? Because it feels to me like that's the biggest stage you can do this on.
Craig: Huge, huge responsibility. That's, that's why I feel like we have to be out there. That's why I'm so glad you're doing this podcast. That's why I'm trying to write stuff about it. I think it's a huge responsibility. I think when people can be engaged on a human level, the way that an honest conversation in this podcast space could do, the way that I hope my book can do, the way I hope that piece I wrote for "The Boston Globe" did.
It has to be on a human level, I think. I think when it's abstract, people can swat it away and it remains abstract. So much of our, so much of human life now in 2025 is abstract. It's digital. It feels at a remove, right? It doesn't feel real. And so it's how do you make it human? How do you make it visceral? How do you give it a beating heart? And I think that's the huge challenge.
When that "Boston Globe" piece I wrote was kind of kind of, um, admitted to my own ignorance a bit in ways that I've done on this, in this interview too, where it sort of takes you through this journey of like, I became the parent of a kid with disabilities and I was in Hollywood and I was trying to figure out how to make the disability parenthood part of my life fit the Hollywood part of my life.
And I wrote about the ways that it didn't fit, right? I wrote about ways that I felt very lonely and unseen in Hollywood. I felt, and I didn't know how to talk about it myself. And then retrospectively, I think about if I could go back in time, I would have put people, I would have cast roles on "How I Met Your Mother" more often with people with disabilities. I would have made that visible on my show. I was so young, I was in my 30s. I didn't, I didn't know how to be the parent of a kid with a disability, right? I had no knowledge. And I was trying to run that TV show and raise my son.
And I wasn't coming at it with this higher level of awareness and like realizing I should try to incorporate this into my work and make this a visible and emotional, palpable, real in my work. I thought they were two separate things. And now I realize that's not true. And I'm trying to make art and writing about this now, about this topic. But when I was doing "How I Met Your Mother," I didn't know how. And so I, that "Boston Globe" essay, I sort of call myself out a little bit and say, "I wish I could go back in time and hire writers with disabilities and cast roles," but I didn't. I just, I was not doing 3D thinking. I was so day-to-day just trying to like be there for my son and run this TV show. And it was, I'll admit, it was like all too hard for me to think on that higher level.
But now I'm trying more to think on that higher level and say, "How can you put things out there in the world that humanize this? How can you use whatever your little talents or skill sets are, whatever your ability to communicate is? Like, how do we do that? How do we make it human? How do we make it a felt experience for people?" Cause if it stays abstract, people can insult and diminish and swat away things in the abstract that when they are face to face with it and it feels real, even if it's a novel, even if it's fictional, but if it feels real and these feel like real people, you can't dismiss it and disparage it so easily.
Rae: You have to see the whole person.
Craig: You have to see the whole person. And I, you know, I wanted to ask you, Rae, like, what did it feel like to you getting that word thrown at? What did that feel like? Did that feel like you, did you know you, I don't know when you got your diagnosis or when you like to what extent you felt you were like hiding and then people would say something to you. It must have been like really shocking and horrible to have someone say something like that to you.
Rae: It felt like getting caught. It felt like getting caught.
Craig: Wow.
Rae: And you would just kind of, but you also kind of do the thing, you know? Like, and I think everybody at a young age does this when somebody says something that hurts you, right? You just kind of like, "Oh, yeah, you know," this kind of like shambling, brush it off, wiggle away from it.
Craig: Yeah.
Rae: But for me, like I, because I knew that I wasn't, I've used this phrase a lot on this, and I keep saying that because I keep using it, but like, I knew that I was like not like the others. I was one of these things that was not like the others. I have ADHD, I have dyscalculia, as a kid, I also had dysgraphia. I couldn't write. My spatial awareness is not great.
Um, but I could always cover. And so when somebody would say like, "What are you, that?" you know, I would think like, "Oh my God, I didn't do it well enough." You know, I would, I would freeze and feel like I had been seen in a, in a way that was not the way I wanted to be noticed. Like, so, but also--
Craig: Did you have, did you literally have those diagnoses or those sort of like categories or labels upon that time? No, right? You were just, you knew that you had challenges. Maybe your parents knew, but you felt like you're just gonna have to fit in because I'm assuming if we're contemporary ages that there was not much support or much recognition or much conversation on the levels that you would have needed it or that you would hopefully get today if you were a teenager today. I'm assuming you felt very lonely and like hiding in that moment.
Rae: I felt very lonely. Yes. And also, I mean, I was lucky enough, I have enough privilege to have, um, been diagnosed at 21, which for a woman is frankly pretty early. Right. Um, and but I failed out of school. I mean, I like crashed and burned in every conceivable way. And, you know, if you were to look at like, what are the negative consequences of having learning disabilities on paper and being undiagnosed, like you could basically read my story up to about age 21. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. But that word, for me, and one of the things that I struggle with even in this conversation is when I'm like, "I'm part of the disability community," because I was able to pass, because it wasn't something that I had to wear all the time, I feel sometimes like I'm like an imposter within that space. Like, you know, I could hide it so, do I really get to call myself disabled in this like, to me, that feels like an inclusive word. I'm part of this wonderful community that is like a privilege to be part of.
Craig: Right.
Rae: But I worry sometimes that when I use it, I, I'm like, my friend used to call it, for other things, "fake the funk." Like I'm, you know, like… So it was, it's a tricky word in that way of if you have an invisible disability, you both relate to it and experience it, but in a way that I think also when we hear from people with Down syndrome or we hear from people who have clear disabilities that are like physically obvious, most of them say they've never had that word said to them.
Craig: Yeah.
Rae: Because of what you're talking about. Right. People don't, most people don't think of themselves as the kind of person who would show up and call someone who had a visible disability the R-word, but they're perfectly happy to use it online or use it towards somebody who they don't realize is in the club.
Craig: Yes. Yes. Oh man, that's all, that is all so fascinating. You saying you felt caught in that moment is just like so heartbreaking. I mean, it's, and in terms of like your identity, I mean, to me, I'm the parent of a child with a disability and I write about this sometimes. I sometimes feel that way too. Like, you know, do I have a right to write about this topic? I'm only the parent of somebody with a disability. It's somebody who I love more than anything in the world, but, you know, it's, I think we all have that, that imposter syndrome, Rae, of like, what is our, what, what authority or authenticity do we have to talk about these things? But to me, for what it's worth, you, you are doing a beautiful thing by talking about all of this and your journey, and you are a part of that community, and you're using, you are like using your talents and your voice to talk about it.
And that makes you a part of the community, and you already were too. So it's like, it's, you know, you should not overthink that, right? We all need each other in this conversation. And we are up against a culture that, um, views people with disabilities in a, in really ignorant, dismissive ways sometimes. And in ways that are invisible to them. Like, I think the argument for the R-word is sometimes like, "It's just a funny word. I don't, I'm not thinking of a person with a disability when I say that." The problem is it does hurt the feelings of people with disabilities.
Like, you're not running around saying a racial epithet in public because you know somebody's gonna take huge issue with it and say, "Why did you just say that word?" And so if that community says it hurts them, which they do say that, then the argument that it's just this word that's been abstracted and now it's just a funny word and nobody cares. People care. Guess what? People do care. So that argument holds no water, I think.
(39:10) On parenting a child with disabilities
Rae: Um, yeah. Can I ask you, because you did, were so kind and validating just then, and I want to return it a little bit. As a parent, you said, "I wish I'd known more” when you were doing the show and you just had Elliot and you were trying to figure out how you could bring those two things together. That is a wildly intense experience to go through for anyone, even if there's nothing going on with your kid, even if your job is a simple job, it's a lot to have a baby and then a growing child and a job. So I just want to validate that that was, I don't think you need to be like, "God, I wish I had been better," because although we always and always do, right, as parents, as people.
But I do want to like ask, as a parent now, like, you have all this perspective, and Elliot's 18, and what are you excited about for him? Like, and, you know, the flip side of that, like what's keeping you up at night as the parent of a child who's going out into this world?
Craig: Yeah. Great question. Thank you for that comment. I do still, for that supportive comment, I mean, I love, I do still look back on it. I'll try not to beat myself up too much, but I do, I regret that I had a certain kind of platform that I probably could have used to talk about it more. Do you know the truth, Rae? I think I was masking a little bit, right? I was, I was like, "Well, we'll see what happens." You know, I wasn't like fully embracing it because it's a rare syndrome. I don't know exactly which way it's gonna go. There was some level of like denial or not fully embracing what was happening or not being able to compute it well enough to know how to write about it or talk about it. I was sort of slowly sharing it in my personal life with people.
But, you know, it's, it is an unknown road, a rare genetic syndrome. There aren't that many people with Jacobsen syndrome in the world, and even within that population, there's a lot of different manifestations of it. 50% of people with Jacobsen syndrome have some sort of heart problem. The other 50% don't. That is a testament to the complicated cocktail of the human genome. Why missing basically the same parts of the 11th chromosome, there's just more or less, do some people's hearts not sort of form correctly, but others do? It's sort of incredibly fascinating. That's why there's this amazing doctor that studies Jacobsen syndrome, Dr. Paul Grossfeld, that is like the beacon of light to that community and like he's the reason for so much of the published medical literature, his research. I do a lot of fundraising to support his research. Um, and he's amazing.
But at that time, I didn't know, I like didn't know exactly what it was gonna be, right? And I didn't talk about it that much. And I think that was my way of being a little bit like, "I'm just sailing under the radar. I don't want people to see me or see my son this certain way." Like as if there's some kind of hiding from it or some kind of need to hide from it. There was something resisting it in my mind, like resisting sharing it wider than my, than the small handful of people on "How I Met Your Mother" and my friends. And I think that's, I don't know, it just, it reminded me of that feeling like when you said you got caught or something, you're like the moment where like you have to sort of embrace this hard thing, right? that that's hard to share with the world and you feel vulnerable doing it. But you sort of grow into that role, I guess.
Um, hopefully, I guess I'm trying to. But yeah, so that's me when Elliot's a baby. Here I am, he's 18. In between, I feel like I've learned so much, so much. He's amazing. He has taught me everything important to know. He is the most musical person I've ever met. He is this wonderfully musical soul. So imagine that this is a guy who has a lot of fine and gross motor skill delays and spatial delays, like problems with spatial relationships and and safety issues around that. This is a guy who can't button a button. He can't really do handwriting, but he can play Led Zeppelin on the drums. He can play Radiohead on the drums. He can play the Pixies on the drums. Basically, I've indoctrinated him to think it's 1996.
Rae: I was gonna say that's pretty good, pretty good music choices across the board.
Craig: Pearl Jam is his biggest one, I should say. Pearl Jam. He's basically like a dad rocker at age 18. He's like...
Rae: Can you do the Eddie Vedder voice to like back it up though?
Craig: Uh, not in public I can't. Uh, if you walk by my house at the wrong moment, you might hear it and go, "What is happening inside there? What's that address?"
But he, so I taught him, I'm a drummer, I taught him drums. He got so good at the drums, I got kicked off the drums, and now I just play guitar and sing and pretend to be Eddie Vedder at times. And we probably play like 50, 70 songs together. We have this catalog. And so he, this is a guy drumming his heart. You have four different limbs doing four different things.
Rae: Yeah, I can't do it at all.
Craig: He can do that. But he can't button a button, zippering a zipper was in the last couple of years he got that. And this is all to say one wonderful word, I think, to describe, or one, not wonderful, an accurate word to describe him when people say, "Well, what word would I--"
The atypical learner idea is fairly applicable to him. He just has these different challenges and these different huge strengths. And it is so interesting to watch that journey. Um, he's funny, he's sweet, he's musical. And he just played drums in the pit band for his school musical. And I think, you know, I'm basically in a band with my son. And we do, so we do this, we do a "How I Met Your Mother"-based fundraiser concert for that amazing doctor I just talked about who's, who's research. So we've done it three times now. If anyone's in New York, please follow me on social media and check this out because we do it once a year and we have actors from the cast of "How I Met Your Mother" come, we have musicians whose music we use on "How I Met Your Mother." At this past one, we had Josh Radnor and Will Forte and the lead singer of Nada Surf and all and an amazing lineup of people.
Of all those stars and celebrities, Elliot was the star of the night because I got him out and he played drums on four songs with us in front of 650 people. We packed the Bowery Ballroom. But that, if you're asking, where, what are those moments of joy? What are those moments I wish I could go back in time? "How I Met Your Mother" was a very time-jumpy show, right? We jumped to flashback, flash forward, blah, blah, blah. If I could flashback to when my son was just born and I thought, "How am I gonna do this? How are we gonna do this? How is my wife gonna do this? How are we all gonna do this?"
Um, if I could have had a crystal ball and gone back now, I'm 50 basically, and I go back with a crystal ball and I just get to give like 30-year-old Craig or whatever, 32-year-old Craig, just one glimpse in a crystal ball, it might be Elliot playing drums in front of 650 people at Bowery Ballroom with a full band, including professional musicians, and honestly killing it, honestly nailing it. He is so rock steady. He was so great. I was up on guitar singing those songs. We did a few comedy songs from "How I Met Your Mother" that Carter and I wrote. And I messed up the lyrics at one point and he was rock steady. I totally blanked on some lyrics. I had to like vamp for a second.
Rae: Oh my god.
Craig: And he was rock steady and just so, I was so proud of him. And it's one of those things you're like, "I just wish I could have seen that moment or, and that could be any number of moments for any number of people." But those gifts you can't imagine when you're, when you're catastrophizing and you're worst case scenario-ing and you're reading the, you know, Google page about the genetic syndrome and and reading every worst thing and going, "All of those are gonna be my son." And then you, what you realize, again, coming back to humanizing people, then you look at the human being that is your child and you realize this is a human being.
There are a lot of factors here. Yes, he's missing a little piece of one of his 11th chromosomes, but he's him. He is him. He is not reducible to a WebMD page of symptoms. He is not reducible to the R-word. He is not reducible to anything because he is a beautiful human being. And he's got, sorry. He's gonna be more than anybody could ever imagine. He's gonna be himself. And he cannot be reduced to any one thing. And I think that's the gift of it. The challenge of it is wanting the world to see him that way. And now that he's 18, I, you know, I want him to go out in the world and be seen with that sort of robust, generous, open-minded approach rather than something reductive. And that, how his next few years will go and what his education will be and how that will all work is, is that's stuff that keeps me up at night and it's a lot of problems to solve. And like I said at the beginning of the conversation, it's strange how much it is in the wilderness. And it's each person you talk to who's gone through it, the parents who've gone through it trying to devise sort of next steps for their child collaboratively with their child.
Everyone is doing an improv game. There's just everyone's like, "Well, we did this for a couple of years and we figured this out. Then we found this thing where it's this company that has people who have disabilities and they welcome them and then he did that for a couple." It's all like this constant game of improvisation.
Rae: We did the path with no path on it.
Craig: Yeah, sorry, sorry I got emotional there. It's funny that you can tell there's just so much in this conversation.
Rae: No, first of all, never apologize for that.
Craig: Um, there's a lot, right? There's a lot. We're looking ahead at a lot and all of this is in my book and this is like, I'm trying to channel all of those fears that keep you up at night and find how can I make this funny? How can I make this human? How can I write about this in a way that people will relate to whether or not they're in this experience? Because I think the experience of being a parent and being in a family--my book is about being a parent and being in a family. It's not, it's not, it is a family with one of the members has a disability, but I think every parent--there's this great quote that I love that like--
Rae: I'll get wrong now.
Craig: But parenthood is letting your heart come out of your body and walk around on its own.
Rae: It's when your heart lives outside of you.
Craig: When your heart lives, yeah, yeah, and it's like, that's parenthood. That's all parenthood. That's not disability-based parenthood. That is all parenthood.
Rae: That's so accurate.
Craig: And what is the future for your child? How can you make the best future for your child? That is just universal. All of our parents wanted that for us, and we, when we, if and when we become parents, we want that for our children. That is universal. Yeah, that's what my book's about and that's what keeps me up at night, but it's also, you know, there, my son has shown me time and again that I don't have to be so afraid and that he can do so much and, yeah, there's a lot of gifts in this journey. There's a lot of gifts in this journey.
Rae: I love that he sounds like just an amazing guy.
Craig: He's a really good guy.
Rae: And I love that you just want him to be seen. I don't know, this is how we all feel, right? We want our kids to be seen as whole people just for the wonder that they are.
Craig: Yes. Yes. And I'll say this one other thing about that idea of passing or masking. In the last couple of, in the last year or so, my son has lost all his hair. It's a very rare syndrome of Jacobsen, a very rare symptom of Jacobsen syndrome. Like almost to the point where you're like, is it a symptom? We know a couple other people with Jacobsen syndrome this happened to.
And so he's completely bald. His eyebrows are mostly gone. He looks different than he used to, right? And he instantly looks more different than he ever did, if that makes sense. Um, he's more recognizable instantly as someone that has something medical going on or something disability based going on. More instantly, like I think people see him differently than they did a year ago, right? And it's so interesting that idea of masking or being caught or whatever it is, because I miss him having his hair because his hair was beautiful. And every now and again he goes, "I wish I still had my hair."
Other times he goes, "I'm just like the drummer of Radiohead. Phil Selway, he's bald and he's awesome." And I'm like, "Yes, he is bald and he's awesome." And it's just really interesting. Um, it's interesting now to go through the world with him and people look at him differently than they used to. But also there's, I think it's good because it's like, let me embrace that new piece, right? Each new piece, each new chapter, each new part of this, you've got to wrap your arms around it and go like, "This is what it is, and we will, we will figure out life like this now. And it's not really gonna change that much. Um, and maybe it'll make everything more honest, maybe it'll make everything, maybe we'll discover gifts in that we didn't, that we didn't know about."
So it's just interesting. That idea that there should ever be any masking or shaming or hiding or passing is so unfortunate that we're that anybody ever has to feel that way. And I think that circles all the way back to the way we talk about and think about disability in America, in the world, what words we use, the space we make to be either inclusive or exclusive, disinclusive, just including people, diminishing people, using derogatory terms. There's, no one would feel the need to hide or pass or feel shame if we were in a society that didn't use things like the R-word and that instead said, "How do we--"
Rae: That just let us be people.
Craig: How do we include? How do we open up the world? How do we, how do we make a space in our society for everybody?
Rae: Craig's upcoming novel is called "That's Not How It Happened." It comes out this fall and is available for pre-order now. You can find a link to that and Craig's podcast, "How We Made Your Mother," in the show notes.
"Hyperfocus" is made by me, Rae Jacobson, and Cody Nelson.
Our music comes from Blue Dot Sessions. Our research correspondent is Dr. KJ Wynne. Video is produced by Calvin Knie and edited by Alyssa Shea.
Briana Berry is our production director. Neil Drumming is our editorial director. Production support provided by Andrew Rector.
If you have any questions for us or ideas for future episodes, write me an email or send a voice memo to hyperfocus@understood.org.
This show is brought to you by Understood.org. Our executive directors are Laura Key, Scott Cocchiere, and Jordan Davidson.
Understood is a nonprofit organization dedicated to empowering people with learning and thinking differences, like ADHD and dyslexia. If you want to help us continue this work, donate at understood.org/give.