Every elder millennial mom will recognize Chrissy Teigen’s reading story
The mom of four on Pizza Hut's BOOK IT! program, bedtime chaos, and why reading in her house is a lifestyle, not a bribe.
I can still picture my prized holographic BOOK IT! pin, the one with pages that turned as you tilted it. It filled up with stars I earned through a full Baby-Sitters Club obsession and anything even remotely ghost-related, then kicked around various jewelry boxes and bins of ephemera for years. As a kid I proudly identified as a voracious reader, and the pin was the proof. The Pizza Hut pizza was simply a bonus.
Recently, I sat down to talk with Chrissy Teigen about her partnership with Pizza Hut’s BOOK IT! program, and it quickly turned into a delightful nostalgia-fest. What doubly delighted me was how authentically excited she is about reading and about passing that love down to her kids. “The little exclamation point is like what excited me the most,” she told me about her own childhood pin, and we were off.
There’s real substance behind the nostalgia. Pizza Hut created BOOK IT! in 1984 with a simple mission, to turn “have to read” into “want to read” for kids everywhere, and it worked. It’s now the longest-running corporate-supported reading program in the country, and by Pizza Hut’s own count it has encouraged more than 70 million children to read since it launched, handing out an estimated 1.5 billion pizzas along the way.
Teigen, who turned 40 this year, has spent the past few years reconnecting with her childhood friends from Snohomish, Washington. The things that got them excited as kids are the same things they text each other about now, which is exactly why a reading program wrapped in 90s vibes and pizza was an immediate yes. As a senior millennial, I understood the impulse completely.
Her four kids read in four completely different ways, which any parent of more than one totally understands. Miles (8), her biggest reader, goes nonstop, plowing through Dog Man and the I Survived series in the car and on the way to camp because he loves facts more than almost anything. Luna (10), her oldest, is aging into book reports, summer reading lists, and the very specific social world of tween reading, where friends race through the same book so they can all watch the adaptation together. Then there are the littles. Esti (3) is deep in Madeline and The Very Impatient Caterpillar, which Teigen reads aloud in full character voices while the caterpillar keeps asking “am I a butterfly yet?” and everyone shouts back, no. Wren (3), whom she affectionately calls “a much simpler man,” wants Little Blue Truck and a “beep beep” on every page.
She’s also refreshingly firm that reading isn’t just something kids do to earn a prize. When I asked about the tension between reward and enrichment for enrichment’s sake, she didn’t hesitate. The program is a fun summer add-on, but reading is the whole point. “Being a reader is such a fun thing to be for life,” she said. In her house, books work like a love language, the literary version of sending a friend a meme that made you think of them. A book someone chose and passed along is a small, specific kind of gift, and she wants her kids to feel that early.
Bedtime, she admits, is chaos. Miles stays up reading until nearly 10. The younger two take a bath, pick two or three books, and often “read” one to her from memory because they’ve loved it so many times they know it by heart. She can recite The Giving Tree, Goodnight Moon, and any number of Llama Llama books without opening them, which, same.
Teigen reads for herself, too, and her nightstand is gloriously all over the place. She traces her true crime streak straight back to childhood Encyclopedia Brown mysteries, hunting for the one small detail that cracked the case, which is a pipeline I identify with 100%. These days she’s a self-help devotee working through Prince Harry’s Spare, with a side fixation on aviation history and air disasters that goes back to running flight simulators with her dad.
I’d told her about my recent system for getting through more books, one on audio and one on paper, and admitted I still lose focus by day and fade out by night. Her answer was to collapse the two into one, playing the audiobook while reading the same physical copy, for the moments you can’t stay locked in. A friend taught her the trick, and she says hearing and seeing the words together is what makes them stick.
And because this is Pizza Hut, we had to settle the important question. Teigen orders pepperoni, pineapple, and jalapeño, a combination her whole family can spot on sight. “If that pizza arrives at home, everybody knows that’s mommy’s pizza,” she said. She’s a proud member of the pineapple-on-pizza defense, ideally with ranch and garlic sauce, and she’s converting her cheese-only kids one pepperoni slice at a time.
Star on a pin or slice of pizza, the goal is the same one Teigen has clearly already met at home. Raise kids who reach for a book because they want to, not because anyone told them to.
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