How to Raise a Kid Who Is Disgustingly Literate: No-Fuss Tips for Busy Parents
Last month, I was waiting in the 10-items-or-less line at the grocery store with my 10-year-old, Sam. I was fumbling for my coupons, trying to keep the bananas from rolling off the belt, when I noticed he wasn’t playing the silly car game on my phone like usual. He was leaning against the divider, completely absorbed, reading the back of the Heinz ketchup bottle I’d tossed on the belt. When the cashier finished ringing us up, she smiled and said, “He sure does love to read, doesn’t he?” I laughed and said, “Yeah, he’s disgustingly literate.”
Three years ago, I would’ve panicked to hear anyone say that, because I was convinced Sam was going to end up hating reading forever. When he was in first grade, the school sent home those little colored leveled readers every week, the ones with sentences like “See the dog run. Run, dog, run.” He’d bring them home, toss them on the coffee table, and refuse to touch them. One night I got so frustrated I made him sit down and read one out loud, and he threw it across the room hard enough to knock over my coffee mug. I sat there staring at the crumpled cover, wondering what I was doing wrong. I’d read to him every night since he was a baby, we had a whole bookshelf full of picture books, why wouldn’t he read on his own?
A week later, I was complaining about it to my great-aunt Marnie, who taught first grade for 32 years before she retired. She was sitting on our porch shelling peanuts, and she just shrugged and said, “He doesn’t care about reading about Pat the cat. He cares about how microwaves work, right? Last time I was here he spent half an hour reading the manual for yours.” She said the term “disgustingly literate” was a joke she and the other teachers used back in the day for kids who read anything and everything, not just the books adults told them to read. “You don’t need to make him read the right stuff,” she said. “You just need to stop hiding all the words from him.”
That stuck with me, so I started tweaking small, low-effort things around the house. First, I stopped telling him what counted as “real reading.” If he wanted to spend an hour reading cheat codes for his Zelda game on his tablet, that was fine. If he wanted to reread the same Minecraft graphic novel 12 times in a row, I didn’t bug him to try a chapter book. I used to throw out old instruction manuals after we built a Lego set, but I started stacking them in a basket by the couch. I stopped shoveling all the junk mail into the recycling before anyone else saw it. I left the cereal boxes on the breakfast table instead of putting them back in the pantry right after we pour. I even kept that beat-up old street map of the state we got at a rest stop on our last road trip, instead of throwing it out when we got home.
Last spring we went camping, and he forgot his book bag in the car, which was parked a mile down the road at the trailhead. It rained all Saturday, so we were stuck in the tiny tent. I expected him to mope and bug me for my phone the whole day, but instead he ended up going through our first aid kit and reading every word on every band-aid wrapper, every ointment tube, even the tiny 8-point font warning on the back of the emergency blanket. By the end of the day, he could recite the ingredients of insect repellent by heart. That’s when I realized it was working.
People hear “disgustingly literate” and think it means a kid who aces every reading test, or reads 50 chapter books a year, or sits quietly in the corner with a classic novel. But it’s not that. It’s a kid who doesn’t think of reading as something you only do for homework, or only do at certain times with certain books. It’s a kid who automatically looks at any words that are around them, because they’re curious about what they say. I used to force 20 minutes of “silent reading” every night after homework, and it felt like pulling teeth. Now I don’t have to force anything. He reads while he waits for dinner, he reads while we’re waiting in line, he reads when he’s supposed to be cleaning his room, even when he’s in the car. I still get the occasional note from school that he’s reading under his desk during math when he finishes his work early. I don’t argue with the teacher about it. If telling him to put it away means he stops reading when he’s bored, that’s a worse problem than him finishing his work two minutes early.
I also stopped making him finish every book he starts. I used to think that built discipline, but all it built was resentment. If he gets 10 pages into a book and thinks it’s boring, we put it in the donate box and move on. One month he quit four different chapter books in a row, and I was starting to worry again, until he pulled a beat-up 300-page book about prehistoric shark fossils out of the library bin and read it in two days.
Last week, we were at a friend’s house for dinner, and Sam disappeared for 15 minutes. When he came back, he told us all about the warning label on their toilet bowl cleaner that had a typo that said “use with ordinate ventilation” instead of “adequate.” Our friend laughed and asked me how I got him to be like that, how to raise a kid that reads everything, basically. I told her I didn’t do anything fancy. I didn’t buy a thousand dollar reading curriculum, I didn’t quiz him every night on what he read, I just got out of the way.
Some weeks he doesn’t touch anything that isn’t a TikTok caption or a text from his friend, and that’s okay. It’s not like we’re raising a perfect reading robot. It’s just that now he knows words are everywhere, and they’re always worth reading if you’re curious. I don’t know what he’ll be when he grows up, but I know he’ll never be bored waiting in a checkout line.
Please indicate: Thinking In Educating » How to Raise a Kid Who Is Disgustingly Literate: No-Fuss Tips for Busy Parents