Is My Kid’s Constant Use of ‘Like’ Normal? What Teachers Want You To Know
The last parent-teacher conference of the fall semester ran 15 minutes late, and I was brushing granola bar crumbs off my desk when Milo’s mom walked in. She folded her coat over the back of the chair, pulled out a crumpled notebook from her tote bag, and got straight to the point before I even got to the part about Milo’s great work on our recent dinosaur project. “Is this like ok? Or like normal?” she said, huffing a little laugh. “All he does is talk in likes. Every other word is like. My mom said he sounds uneducated, that people will think he’s not smart if he talks like this. Is this something I should be working on with him?”
I nodded, because I’d noticed it too. Two weeks earlier, Milo had stood in front of the class to present his beaver dam diorama, and the opening of his speech went something like: “Like, I went camping with my dad last summer, and like we saw this actual dam that was like bigger than our car, and like the twigs I collected for this got moldy in my closet so I had to use popsicle sticks instead.” The class didn’t care, they all thought the dam was cool, but I’d counted seven likes in 30 seconds. It’s hard to miss when you’re listening to kids talk all day.
I also get the worry, because my sister spent three months panicking about this same thing with my 12-year-old nephew two years ago. She’d correct him mid-sentence every time he said it, nag him at dinner, even wrote a little tally on the fridge to show him how often he said it. By the end of the month, he barely said anything at the dinner table at all. That’s the first thing I told Milo’s mom: correcting it constantly doesn’t work, and it just makes kids shut down.
Most of the time, constant “like” use is just a normal developmental blip for kids between 8 and 14. They’re moving from talking about concrete stuff—what they want for snack, what game they played at recess—to talking about ideas, feelings, and stories that require them to organize their thoughts on the fly. “Like” acts as a little stopgap, a split second to figure out what to say next, before they get good at thinking and talking at the same time. It’s also social: right now, “like” is the casual filler that helps kids fit in with their peers, just like “totally” was for my generation and “you know” was for my mom’s. It’s not a sign of bad speech or lazy thinking. It’s just how kids talk right now.
That said, I don’t tell parents it’s never something to pay attention to. I give them one concrete thing to do first: pull out your phone when your kid is rambling excitedly about something they care about (not when they know you’re listening for “likes”) and record 60 seconds of their speech. Count how many times they say “like.” If it’s more than one “like” for every five words, that can be a sign they’re unusually anxious—constant fillers can be a nervous habit when kids are stressed all the time, and that’s something worth digging into. But 9 times out of 10, it falls between 2 and 6 “likes” a minute, which is totally average for this age group.
If you still want to help them cut back a little, especially for things like presentations or family gatherings where people might judge, there are low-friction ways to do that without nagging. First, model clearer pacing when you talk. When you tell a story, instead of filling gaps with your own fillers (we all do it), slow down and pause instead of grabbing for a quick word. Kids pick up that rhythm without you pointing it out. Second, if it’s really a sore spot for your family, turn it into a low-stakes game instead of a correction. My sister started doing a $5 bet with my nephew: if he can get through a whole dinner without saying “like,” he gets the money. He almost never wins, but they laugh about it, and he notices when he says it without getting defensive. Third, if you want him to be able to turn it off for formal situations, practice once a month. Do a pretend job interview or a pretend presentation for grandma, and point out that when you’re talking to people who don’t use “like” much, you can slow down and leave it out, but it’s totally fine to use it with your friends.
A month after the conference, Milo’s mom sent me a quick text. She stopped correcting him mid-sentence at dinner, and last week he rambled for 10 minutes about building a Lego Death Star with his cousin, and she counted only 8 likes the whole time. They do a silly like count once a week now, and it’s a running joke instead of a source of fights. She still worries that her mom will nag him about it when they go to Christmas dinner this year, but she’s started just shrugging it off when her mom brings it up, saying “all the kids talk like that now.”
I still hear Milo say “like” a dozen times a day in class. When he explains how he solved a tricky math problem, when he argues that we should have extra recess, when he tells me about his new puppy. It doesn’t make him any less clear, any less smart, or any less prepared for what comes next. Most of the time when parents ask me if this or that quirk is ok, if it’s normal, the answer isn’t that it needs fixing. It’s just that it’s what kids do right now. We don’t have to solve every little thing that sounds odd to our ears.
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