How to Raise a Disgustingly Literate Kid: Simple Tips From a 4th Grade Teacher
The October parent-teacher conference slot ran 10 minutes over, and Mia’s mom leaned across my cluttered desk, crumpling the edge of her printed progress report between her fingers. “I don’t care about the test scores,” she said, blowing on steam from her gas station pumpkin spice latte. “I just want her to be… disgustingly literate, you know? Not just able to sound out words. Actually get them, use them, not panic when she sees something longer than a text.” I twisted the dinosaur keychain on my lanyard – a birthday gift from my 10-year-old – and nodded. I hear this all the time, but that phrase stuck: disgustingly literate. It means the kind of literacy that’s not just for school, that’s second nature, that oozes into every part of your day. Not the kind that gets you a 100 on a reading quiz, but the kind that makes you stop to read a random billboard, look up a word you don’t know, write a dumb joke in the margin of your notebook, because you can.
A lot of parents I talk to think this requires a big investment: fancy phonics programs, an hour of scheduled reading every night, a shelf full of award-winning chapter books they force their kid to finish. But the most disgustingly literate kid I know is my 14-year-old nephew Jax, and he didn’t get that way from any of that. I spent three days at my sister’s house last summer, and I watched exactly how it happened, no fancy tools required.
It was taco night, and Jax was leaning against the counter scrolling his phone while my sister seasoned the meat. He wasn’t ignoring us – he was deep in a thread about weird ocean creatures. “Guys, what the hell is a bryozoan?” he said, not looking up. Instead of telling him to put his phone down and set the table, like I probably would have when I first started teaching, my sister wiped her hand on her jeans and leaned over. “No clue. Let’s check.” They pulled up a 30-second TikTok of bryozoans, blobby colonies that pulse slowly in cold water, and spent 10 minutes arguing about whether they’d eat one if they had to, what they’d taste like (Jax said undercooked jello, my sister said wet foam, I said boring, which started a whole other tangent about what “boring” would taste like). That wasn’t a planned vocabulary lesson. It was just a conversation, and that’s where literacy sticks.
When Jax was 8, he was labeled a reluctant reader. He’d drag his feet through the 20 minutes of required nightly reading his school assigned, and his teacher sent notes home saying he needed more practice. My sister didn’t hire a tutor. She stopped making him finish every book he started. One month, he checked out the first book of a popular graphic novel series all his friends loved, got 45 pages in, and said it was the most boring thing he’d ever read. She didn’t say “You started it, you finish it.” She drove him back to the library that same day and let him check out a 200-page nonfiction book about the history of garbage trucks. He read the whole thing in three days. That’s the first time I ever saw him stay up past his bedtime reading on purpose.
A lot of parents tell me they worry that letting their kid quit books or read “silly” stuff makes them lazy. But what I’ve seen in 12 years of teaching is that turning reading into a chore kills any curiosity kids have about words. If you force a kid to slog through 100 pages of a book they hate just to check a box, they start to think all reading is a slog. The first concrete shift I tell parents to make is simple: if your kid quits a book, just say “That’s fair, lots of books aren’t for everyone. What do you want to pick next?” If they only want to read Minecraft fan wikis, or TikTok comments, or comic strips about talking dogs, that’s still reading. That builds the muscle memory of following text, of being curious about what comes next, that turns into reading bigger, longer stuff later. I’d rather a kid read 10 pages of a wiki about their favorite video game every night than force 30 pages of a classic they don’t care about.
Another small shift I recommend is to model messy literacy. Don’t pretend you know every word. If you’re reading a recipe and you don’t know what “zest” means, say that out loud. If your kid asks you what a word means and you don’t know, look it up together, don’t brush it off for later. That teaches them that not knowing a word isn’t embarrassing – it’s just a chance to learn something new. My own kid pointed out a billboard for a new diabetes medication last week and asked what “glycemic” meant. We pulled over at the next gas station and looked it up on my phone, and now he makes jokes about his cereal having a low glycemic index at breakfast. That’s literacy.
I told all this to Mia’s mom at that conference. She blinked and said “That’s it? No flashcards, no extra homework?” I nodded. I told her Mia already stops to read every sign on the walk to school, that she writes little fan stories on the back of her worksheets, that she loves reading TikTok comments about her favorite K-pop group. All she has to do is lean into that. Ask her what the comments say, let her explain the slang to you, don’t make her put the phone away just because it’s not a “real book.”
I saw Mia in the hallway last week, and she ran over to me holding a crumpled piece of paper. It was a 4-page story she wrote about her favorite K-pop idol getting lost on the moon. There were spelling mistakes scattered through it, and she drew little rocket ships in the margins. She read the first page out loud to me, grinning the whole time. That’s what disgustingly literate looks like, I think. It’s not perfect. It’s not fancy. It’s just wanting to use words, because they matter to you. We’re still figuring it out, with my own kid, with all the kids I teach. But so far, the small, messy stuff works way better than any big plan I’ve ever tried.
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