Unexpected Lessons from Professor Higgins: A Joyful Memoir of a Mother Raising a Son with Down Syndrome - Hardcover

Smith, Patti

Hardcover

ISBN 13: 9798988982340

Publisher: Smith Productions, 2025

Synopsis

She thought she would spend her life teaching her son with Down syndrome. Instead, he became her greatest teacher.

When Patti Smith’s first child, Christopher, was born with Down syndrome in 1978, a doctor advised her to place him in an institution.

She looked at her baby and knew she never could.

Patti expected a lifetime of teaching and caring for Christopher. But over the next forty-plus years, something unexpected happened: Christopher became the teacher.

Affectionately known as “Professor Higgins,” he would challenge his driven, perfectionist mother’s ideas about success, happiness, patience, acceptance, and what it means to live a meaningful life.

Told through 24 unforgettable lessons, this joyful and candid memoir follows Patti and Christopher through the heartbreaks, triumphs, absurdities, surprises, and laugh-out-loud moments of an extraordinary mother-son relationship.

Along the way, Christopher sings and dances onstage, surprises people with his gift for languages, charms almost everyone he meets, and repeatedly reminds his mother that life doesn’t always have to go according to plan to turn out beautifully.

Funny, moving, and deeply human, Unexpected Lessons from Professor Higgins is a celebration of family, Down syndrome, and the unexpected teachers who change the way we see the world.

Perfect for parents and families of people with Down syndrome, caregivers, educators, and anyone who has discovered that some of life’s greatest lessons arrive in ways we never expected.

Edition details

• Publisher: Smith Productions
• Publication date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 13: 9798988982340
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 292