> Indeed, several people I spoke to mentioned that middle-graders’ lack of phones created a marketing problem in an era when no one at any publishing house has any idea how to make a book a bestseller other than to hope it blows up on TikTok. “BookTok is imperfect,” said Karen Jensen, a youth librarian and a blogger for School Library Journal, “but in teen publishing it’s generating huge bestsellers, bringing back things from the backlist. There’s not anything like that right now for the middle-grade age group.”
This part of the article is very off-putting to me. You don’t need TikTok to find good books for kids. Kids don’t need to see digital advertisements to make a decision. They need access to a library stocked with recently published books that kids will enjoy.
The author mentions later on that libraries are being defunded, and this is likely to be the root cause. Rather than spending so many words on speculation it would’ve been nice to see some hard numbers on the subject.
Anime is an extremely lucrative market, and Westerners spend an absurd amount of money on it, with Hollywood missing out. It's not because it's Japanese, or its weirder quirks, it's just because Japan is making it and Hollywood isn't, because Hollywood is institutionally incapable of believing people want (a) weird fantasy (b) that takes itself seriously (c) in quantity over quality, or even that adult media can be animated in the first place.
I really don't think it's that hard to imagine the same is true of manga vs books. The manga section at any serious bookstore is the size of 3-4 other sections put together, and it isn't for no reason. Even if you assume it's a graphic-novel-specific preference, for every one Western hit like Bone, there's fifty more equally massive hits out of Japan, because they simply try more often. Authors making weird stuff in the West are unable to enter traditional publishing (with the industry learning the exact wrong thing from the YA phenomenon) and frequently settle for a web serial + Patreon model, whereas if they were in Japan there's a well established light novel to manga to anime to movie pipeline.
My oldest daughter could read at age four. By second grade, in a Texas public school, she liked to read Nancy Drew mysteries on her own. One day she came home from school crying and told us she didn't want to go back -- she said she had got in trouble for reading her book. Her mom and I went to talk to the teacher. Our daughter had got "caught" reading a Nancy Drew book at her desk while the other kids -- many of whom couldn't read at age six -- struggled with their ABCs. The teacher took the book away from our daughter and shamed her in front of the other kids. The teacher told us that "policy" prohibited students reading "non-assigned" books at school. Our daughter was supposed to sit there bored waiting for the slowest kids to catch up.
Public schools have a bureaucracy you can't really fight. We didn't make our daughter go back, we withdrew her from school the next day and told the principal we had to move. We homeschooled her, and our two other kids when they came along. No regrets. All of my kids obtained high school diplomas (not GEDs) by passing the ludicrously dumb state tests. Two went on to university. They all have jobs and support themselves, and continue to read for fun.
John Taylor Gatto, a former teacher of the year, describes exactly how public school punishes and wipes out imagination and independent thinking, a process mostly completed by age nine when children give up on reading for fun.
https://www.cantrip.org/gatto.html
I'll add that I could also read at age four (thanks, dad!). I went to Catholic private school in the '60s. When the teachers found out I could already read in first grade they put me in a program with other kids who had got ahead of the curriculum. We would go to the school library for a couple of periods and choose our own books, then write up summaries. When I had to move to public school in 6th grade I almost immediately got punished the same way my daughter was -- told that I couldn't choose my own books and forced to read along the approved curriculum at the pace of the slowest kids in the class.
There's no good reason to think it's not phones.
The article kind of rejects this out of hand but I think it's mostly because that doesn't make for an article that touches on all the other topics the author wanted to write about.
>It might be screens, but it’s not only screens. It’s not like kids are suddenly getting their own phones at age 9; recent survey data from Common Sense Media reveals that phone ownership holds steady, at around 30 percent, among kids aged 8 and 9. (It isn’t until they reach 11 or 12 that the majority of American kids have their own phone.) Indeed, several people I spoke to mentioned that middle-graders’ lack of phones created a marketing problem in an era when no one at any publishing house has any idea how to make a book a bestseller other than to hope it blows up on TikTok.
So there's an uptick in reading for fun when the majority of 12 year olds have phones, allowing publishers to learn how to market to them? I really doubt it. Couldn't find anything supporting that in the Scholastic report where "decline by 9" comes from: https://www.scholastic.com/readingreport/navigate-the-world....
I think they're misinterpreting the Common Sense Media info they cite: https://www.commonsensemedia.org/sites/default/files/researc...
Age 8 is as far back as that data goes. If phone ownership started shooting up by 8, for example, it would make sense that it would take about a year for the reading habit to die off as much as it does.
My daughter is 12 now, and reading tons more than when she was 9. The difference is now she has twice daily access to the high school library versus once a week access to an elementary library.
Not sure how much it generalizes, but what would have had her reading more then would have been a well stocked manga section in the elementary library and daily access.
Manga really is an accessible way to get used to reading, and a gateway. She just finished Lord of the Rings.
I was turned off to reading in 7th grade by a teacher that required mandatory books that were her favorites but the topics consisted of 1800s gilded age parties, gossip amongst the upper class of people at that time and absolutely no fantasy or adventure.
Before that I was the top reader in the summer reading program going back to first grade highest in the school for each grade level. After that class I kind of fell out of the practice of reading to enjoy books until I was out of college.
I picked up the habit of reading and listening to audiobooks in 2014 3 years after college because I was doing a lot of 6-8 hour drives between my home town and a vendor for a project.
If I could say one thing to that teacher, just because you like a book, forcing someone else to read that book doesn't make it a good book for that person.
As the parent of a 16 year old, I find this discussion fascinating. My son used to love reading books, from when we started with the "Bob Books" in Kindergarten, through somewhere around 5th or 6th grade.
He still loves reading, but mostly for items of topical interest. He does it for fun, to entertain himself, and to learn new things...but it's not books! He scarfs up online content like it's going out of style.
TBH, I had no idea just how much he was reading until I paid attention to how much mispronounced advanced vocabulary he was using, which was a sign of seeing and not hearing the words. The other evidence is just how well he does on crosswords, Wordle, etc. The vocabulary is definitely there.
All of this is to say that the article seems to focus on "books" rather than "content." Are kids not reading for fun, or are they not reading _books_ for fun?
Another issue is books are too long. Especially non-fiction books. Book publishers know no one is going to buy a 50 page book, so there has to be filler and excessive detail to make a book long enough to be sellable.
It ends up just being the same thing over and over again. The author explaining minute details about the day they interviewed someone, what the weather was like, extreme details of the interviewee's facial expressions. The author somehow managing to fit the Stanford Prison Experiment in the book. The author going into excruciating detail about the scientific method. The author giving an unnecessary history of the topic back to when humans were hunter gatherers.
It has been a very long time since I came across a non-fiction book that didn't feel like it could've been 50 pages long. I end up giving up a few chapters in.
I can only speak to my own personal experience, but I was a voracious reader as a child and then sorta just... stopped. The longer life went on, the more I was instructed to ignore or hide my personal feelings and so I just didn't find the characters in the books for my age group, who were largely written by women, to be relatable. There was as large a stretch between the main characters' behavior and what I was taught to do as there was between the real world and Mount Doom. I devoured the entire non-fiction section at my library in the historical and scientific sections by the time I was 10, and then just stopped going because there wasn't a point. None of the books were for me.
I've made attempts to get back into reading from time to time, but I always go into the more rigorous non-fiction areas. I picked up a Brandon Sanderson book and wanted to throw the damned thing against a wall because of how juvenile the narration was. It felt like a very poor apeing of HHTG or Discworld narration without any of the wit.
I think it helps if the parents set an example. I grew up in the 90's in a house full of readers, reading was normalized.
Until about age 10 my parents would read to my sisters and I every night. It was part of the bedtime routine. We would gather in my youngest sister's bedroom and my Dad would read a chapter from the book of the week to us before bed. It was mostly stuff like Enid Blighton and Roald Dahl, but I can also remember 'Treasure Island' and '20,000 Leagues under the Sea'.
As we got older it evolved into us reading for ourselves, all of us had a reading light beside our beds and it was normal to read in bed before going to sleep. It essentially became a habit I formed, to this day I still read in bed as an adult.
At least here is Australia, you used to be able to get a lot of things from the local newsagent. I was really interested in computers as a teenager. When my parents would send me to the corner store to grab bread or milk I'd buy a PC Magazine with the spare change and read it cover to cover, some of them would come with neat demo cds etc.
> “I’m hoping that the tent expands. I’ve always kind of hated it when there’s only one tentpole, like Harry Potter or whatever. I want there to be more tentpoles with room for more people underneath.”
There already are? Deltora Quest, The Old Kingdom, The Chronicles of Narnia, Goosebumps, Percy Jackson, Keys to the Kingdom, Artemis Fowl, Tamora Pierce, David Eddings, Robin Hobb (depending on reading level and expectations) ... And there are plenty of non-series books for that age group as well - Kiki's Delivery Service, Howl's Moving Castle - they mentioned Bridge to Terabithia too...
The idea that reading isn't possible for young kids without the next black swan publishing/cinematic/theme-park experience, or that there just isn't anything other than Harry Potter to read seems crazy to me.
But I guess I'm not 9 anymore. Interesting that they didn't actually ask any 9-year-olds either it seems.
I think the big problem with reading is that it's much slower compared to other media.
Add in the fact that you can also only read for so long before your eyes get tired and then people just naturally veer away from it.
Idk about anyone else but my school had a program called Accelerated Reader where you could read a book and take a test about it to score points. Harder books were worth more points, at the time I think Anna Karenina was the "hardest" book on the list. Anyway the drive to win was what initially got me reading a lot.
> crisis point for publishers
Now there is something to care about: whether your kid reading or not is good for publishers.
People reading old second-hand books, even if voraciously, is also bad for publishers.
I think there are perhaps trends, but at the end of the day this phenomenon ends up being individual. I have three kids - 7, 13, and 15 - and they're all different. The older two read voraciously from 2nd grade (when they first picked up Harry Potter after finishing the Magic Treehouse series) through middle school. My oldest doesn't read as much anymore, but it's largely because he's too busy and ends up too tired to concentrate on books when he does have downtime. My middle (7th grade) still reads constantly and we've run out of bookshelf space for all the series we've purchased over the past couple of years. My youngest is in 1st grade and just started her chapter book reading journey this school year. Now she reads while she eats her meals and reads to herself every day. We take her to the public library every couple of weeks to refresh.
Two things to bear in mind: my wife & I also love reading and we have a house full of books. We've also prioritized reading to, and around, our children from the time they were infants. Even today I frequently wake my kids by reading aloud to them.
I had a teacher in school who decided the best thing for people to read is to simply have the students choose the book they wanted to read for the month.
She'd then read the book and make a short quiz about it. She had several classes so she'd have to read a lot of books every month. But after a while books start to repeat, after all, kids will mostly get together and form groups to read certain novels they're interested in. And most of my classmates would all choose a sort of "minimal effort" book.
All in all, this is an experience I still remember to this day; even though it's been 15 years.
If we want children to read then you need a similar approach, a big part of the fun in reading is actually finding a book to read. The children should be motivated to find books they want to read and then share it with their peers; then perhaps the class can decide which of the books they will be reading together.
Maybe the books that they're trying to market aren't books that kids want to read. There are a couple of quotes that point to that:
> Connor was more blunt: “Maybe you think a book about a school shooting is really important,” she said, “but kids want to read a fun book. That’s what kids want today—they want to have fun.”
> But if you’re a new author who’s written a quiet, issue-oriented debut, “you might have to think about adapting, in a way.”
> Eberly, the book agent, doesn’t think the supply of serious, “award-winning” books will dry up. “Knowing the editors that I sell to, those are the types of books they want to shepherd into the world.”
Maybe kids would rather read fun adventure stories rather than the issue-driven stories that adults are pushing on them.
How many people here are commenting based on their kids' experiences and not based on their own? Nothing in a 4 year-old trend (or whatever it is at this point) is going to be anticipated by people who were that age 10, 20, 30 years ago. (Sorry folks.)
My kids are just short of this age, so this article is very topical for me. I'm trying to encourage them to read, and they do, but it's also been difficult (in my experience) to make the transition to "big" books (i.e., anything other than a graphic novel). Books that I am 99% sure I read by their age, they don't seem to be responding to---and not just those books specifically, but anything in that class. And my kids have very low screen time.
The industry can’t depend on Captain Underpants forever, even though, as [Brenna Connor, an industry analyst at Circana, the market research company that runs Bookscan] noted, “The devil works hard, but Dav Pilkey works harder.”
"Book people" know why 9-year-olds stop reading. "We have met the enemy and he is us.” [0] (which my child read from the reissue [1]).
0. https://www.thisdayinquotes.com/2022/04/we-have-met-the-enem...
I was never very keen of non-fiction books. The reason is because I could usually just watch it in movie format which is a lot less time-consuming.
The last fiction book I read (over a decade ago) was Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows and the reason I read it is because I had watched all the previous Harry Potter films and wanted to know what happens but the movie didn't exist yet at the time. I was hooked and there was literally no other option. I'm sure this effect worked very well in J.K. Rowling's favor.
Some people claim that they prefer fiction in book format because they can fill in the gaps and imagine the worlds and characters however they like... But personally, I prefer getting as much information as possible; visual information is part of it. If I had to choose between watching a film in color or black-and-white, I'd choose color for the same reason... With black and white, I could let my mind wander and assume that the person's clothing is made of gold yarn but I'd rather not as it mostly distracts from the story and those aren't details that interest me.
When I consume fiction, I'm looking for narratives, external perspectives, messages, lessons, principles and insights in a format that is as objective as possible. In book format, there's too much that comes from me, I end up projecting my pre-existing biases into the story and it doesn't feel as satisfying or mind-expanding.
> Yet I can’t help but be worried that the kinds of books that changed my life between ages 8 and 12 are falling by the wayside. Is there room for the thoughtful, serious, beautiful young-person’s novel in 2024? Can you publish Bridge to Terabithia in the age of Captain Underpants?
...Uh, come the 90s, Bridge to Terabithia was a required reading book that I don't think anyone my age cared about. The popular series I remember were, in no particular order: Animorphs, Goosebumps, Nancy Drew, Harry Potter, and Redwall.
I think it's much simpler, adults don't know what kids are interested in. For example, just before that age I was interested in animals and the solar system. Read anything I could find on them, and had no interest in anything being pushed by school or parents. At age 9, I just happened to see Animorphs #11 The Forgotten in the impulse-buy section of our local drugstore and begged my parents for it - for anyone unaware, the Animorphs covers showed kids turning into animals, which was how it drew my attention. That set me onto sci-fi in general, then fantasy - and I've kept reading since.
Throughout grade school, I had several different environments. Most of them were unsupervised and not regimented. Before class, class, after school, home, out of the house, exploring away from the house, time with friends.
My kids had class and home and sometimes activities. None were unsupervised or non-regimented.
Coming home from exploring and popping open a book is nice. Opening a book and hoping it provides some escape from the 160th hour in a box with adults is desperation.
I remember Scholastic would put on a big book fair twice a school year in our school's library. There would be tons of new/upcoming book series marketed that kids could buy (with their parent's money), along with the obligatory custom bookmarks and kid-oriented stationary. It targeted 8 to 12 year olds--maybe that was the practice pre-covid and booksellers have moved away from that sort of thing?
Anecdotal (from NL): I had access to a library end of 80s/90s. Everything mandatory wasn't fun, but had to be done. Providing a small, meaningful choice would've been more fun. Comics and non-fiction for kids was available, but if you did not like fiction then you are kind of hosed. I 'never' (esp in early youth) liked fiction because I could not easily imagine the story, or it just did not interest me. It wasn't real, so I couldn't see the point of it. My weakness for sure, but if I had access to more/better informational non-fiction I would've read it like the info sponge I was. And having fun while doing so.
I remember very well when I was about 8 or 9, I always lost the trail when we did group reading at school (each kid one sentence). And then I got punished for that. Also not very... let us say encouraging.
Nowadays, I'm still not much of a fiction sucker, but I've come to enjoy quite some fiction. Just not in time for high school, and even then I liked books which weren't for my age or my gender or whatever.
If my kids don't like certain fiction, I won't force it upon them. I want them to read, and will try with suggestions and what not but if they really do not like fiction, forcing it upon them won't help.
I just hope they won't waste their time on something as useless and nefarious as TikTok. One could argue that is the comics or TV series of the 21th century. Well, even if TikTok were harmless to health and a great application, comics or TV series didn't profile you for an authoritarian state.
EDIT:
> Yet, somehow, reading persists; more books are sold today than were sold before the pandemic
This does not mean, at all, that [all] these books are read. Terrible assumption.
Whenever I was about 9-10, I used to love reading books, and I read about 1-3 full novels a month. Whenever I graduated elementary school and went into middle school, the required reading that was assigned left me to have no more time reading what I found interesting, which eventually led to me just losing my interest in books.
Personal experience: when I was a kid, I instinctively knew when a book tried to "teach" me something or instill some world view and I immediately know the intention and found that boring. The really exciting books were those that either didn't try to teach anything or those that didn't make it so obvious. Might it be that the contemporary literature for children is constantly trying to push an educational agenda and kids instinctively despise that (as I did)?
The situation with kids is an issue. However, about the mean attacks online mentioned in the article, the American Library Association president, unfortunately made a rather poorly chosen quote at almost the inflection point they're describing, in April 2022. Arizona, Idaho, Illinois, Georgia, Louisiana, South Carolina and Wyoming pushed to withdraw from the ALA after the quote. Per [1], on being elected, Drabinski wrote:
> “I just cannot believe that a Marxist lesbian who believes that collective power is possible to build and can be wielded for a better world is the president-elect of @ALALibrary”
Sure, it's a single tweet. It mentions a better world. However, I also suspect most normal Americans with slight sense of political winds right now (Ukraine, Feb, 2024?? 2 months?) might comprehend why labeling yourself as a "Marxist lesbian" who "wields collective power" might be taken wrong by some of America on being elected to lead all American libraries.
I used to work for/with the Feds, and I think they would have been justifiably mad if I had very publicly announced I was a Marxist who wields power in the Feds on election.
[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/american-library-associ...
> But others also pointed to the way reading is being taught to young children in an educational environment that gets more and more test-focused all the time.
Seems like there would be an easy way to test this - do we see the same decline in other countries with different educational systems?
As adult people get sucked into reading forum posts or twitter. And it's often very addictive since you feel you're getting closer to some truth being revealed, or your views/opinion being validated. Better use of time might be to read books, but then there's nothing to suck you in the way online networks do with some headline. Maybe books should have AI post about them the way of news articles, with some catchy headline, that would get people to start reading them.
As a kid I loved mysteries, and revenge books like "The Count of Monte Cristo", that were recommended. But as an adult I don't know what I don't know. And there's nothing to get me to start reading something.
When I was in high school, I was a voracious reader of Star Trek novels. I'm now 47 years old, and as a birthday treat, I decided to go into Barnes and Nobel to find one to read (I haven't read anything other than technology books in many years, and rarely even then, since most good information is online)
I found like 2 or 3 (back in the day, there were at least a dozen or two to pick from at any time). The sci-fi section was a bit smaller, to replace the huge manga and other graphic novels section, which was absolutely huge. Many of the sci-fi titles that were there were taken up by novels that have been made into movies.
Age 9 is about time to get into "The Hobbit". That might save some people ;). Or Terry Pratchet''s "Truckers" ? So much utterly fantastic kids literature out there, most of it not at all new.
I'm 40 but I think I know, from personal experience, why kids stop reading.
A video game in the 90s was 10x more exciting and immersive than most books, to me.
Today it's at insane levels of over-stimulation.
A 30 second tiktok clip can give you the same type of knowledge that a 300 page book can, but it cuts to the chase, and doesn't bury the lead.
Not only life-lessons or hacks either, teenagers are producing entire short stories that follow classical formats of drama and comedy.
What we thought was insightful and revolutionary knowledge is now conveyed to a 9 year old at breakfast.
I don't particularly buy any of the explanations given in the article, or ITT for that matter. I had tons of screen time as a child, that didn't stop me from reading a ton then or now. Schools (and I) were just as test-focused back then. I wasn't getting book recs from my peers so that doesn't make sense to me either.
Maybe I'm an anomaly here but I never found the books targeted at children/teens especially interesting. Around 8-9 my mom gave me a book, a couple hundred pages long, intended solely for adults, but it was about something I was passionate about. I loved it and never stopped reading after that.
My advice: if you want your kid to read, give them books they'd be interested in. Not 'age appropriate books', just books. Read books yourself and talk to your children about them. Build a personal library and lend books liberally, to children, friends, family, everyone. A culture of reading and enjoying books is your best bet for instilling a love of reading in your chilld.
I'm in my 50s and I used to read a lot for pleasure when I was a kid. I still remember reading Lord of the Rings or Watership Down over an entire weekend, with my mom yelling at me to stop reading and eat dinner, etc. Books like To Kill a Mockingbird and Catcher in the Rye changed my life as a youth.
I stopped reading fiction after I graduated college because I simply didn't care anymore, it was like an off switch. Unless it was a computer or finance textbook, I simply didn't care to read. There was a brief hiatus after reading Moneyball and Blind Side which fascinated me for some reason, and I haven't read non-textbooks since then either. I think part of it was that I read so many bad fiction books I didn't want to waste my time taking a chance when I could be programming or learning more directly.
They need to bring back the scholastic book fair! Or is that still a thing? We also had Pizza Hut giving us free pizza for reading books.
I read a lot as a kid, to the point where I got in trouble in class for reading a book instead of paying attention. I’m trying to think about why, but I don’t think it was any outside push. I don’t remember most of my peers reading so much.
I remember lugging along a copy of The Idiot by Dostoyevsky with me to read on the subway and feeling like it made me an intellectual badass. I still treasure the memory of the classic lit I read but I very rarely get any pleasure reading in now. This trend among youth is worrying but seems part of an accelerated mutation of our culture
My idea of reading for fun as a kid, and even now, included(s) reading technical manuals, research papers, encyclopedia, or other materials where I am gaining knowledge.
I have always hated reading fiction and never saw the point in wasting time on it. I would prefer to waste that same time on watching a movie.
My older son is 8 and is finishing Harry Potter #5. I hope he'll still enjoy reading after he turns 9.
Reading is a solitary activity. I stopped reading when I was in a relationship, so I have to spend some leisure time together. It was terrible at first, then I found Lars Von Trier films and the burden was a bit better, so... that was it.
Also, society has changed so much.
I grew up in a time when there was no such thing as "children's books". My first reading was some pulp fiction, then some bestsellers, then Dracula. I got to Wuthering Heights when I was n. I found it gripping, but I understood almost nothing. Luckily - crazy luckily - I have a friend, a n-year-old girl, who also read Wuthering and introduced me to it. So I read it again.
Growing up - we had a lot of programs externally to encourage us to read. I wonder if kids still have the same kind of things
For example, we had things like a Six Flags reading program, Pizza Hut Book It for free pizza, and hand picked Texas Bluebonnet Books. We also had book fairs.
There aren’t any spaces left to take your kid to look at books. Without access to internet the only option is the public library but books there are often not displayed in a way that would draw new readers in
Not sure about exact timing but isn't it just the time when school orders kids to read boring books until every last bit of enjoyment is squeezed out of the activity of reading?
Before I looked at the article I guessed it was because schools are making reading as un-fun as possible
That's why I stopped reading for fun, probably when I was 15 or so. Seems they've just accelerated it
Sure enough, that seems to be their guess too. Maybe our school systems kinda suck
Part of the solution should be going to every free library near a school or playground and filling them with a bunch of first books in a series. I know my kids got hooked on looks of books that way
I don't like mandatory reading. Reading should be a joyous activity, where I choose the books I like to read, not something where others tell me what I should read.
people give up reading the same reason they give up anything "hard". The combination of "prescribed texts" and "bad pedagogy". When i self teach...i start a book...downloaded immediately from libgen, if it sucks, i trash it, and download another immediately...if the author is not a time wasting hack, guess what? I'll buy that book immediately, having found the correct resource. It pains me to read what the most recommended books are for learning most hard subjects - they are generally on the poor side...they are generally not written as simply as possible. Yes - this is a hugely opinionated response.
Onto method - If the method in which it's taught is garbage/pedagogically horseshit...of course they will hate it. Learn maths with Paul Lockhart, or computer science from the ground up playing Turing Complete (on Steam)...or learning ANYTHING from someone like Brett Victor..and you'll see precisely the issue is with not just reading for fun, but doing any socially uncool thing like exercising the intellect.
I wonder how many kids would read more if Taylor Swift or Mr Beast or 'Insert favourite youtuber/celebrity here' started promoting book reading.
You can’t discount things like Roblox and online video as being part to blame.
But overall I do think kids have too much homework and projects to have time for leisure reading.
If I had to make kids read, I would make reading forbidden. There is something about reading as a duty that kills the joy, and others already described it better than I could. I loved reading as I kid, and I was lucky I had read most of the books I love before they were assigned, but I especially loved reading the forbidden books - I grew up in communist Czechoslovakia and reading the "Hedgehog in the Cage" series secretly borrowed from a friendly neighbor was magical. That series is unfortunately totally unknown in the West, but for Czech kids of my generation, that was our Harry Potter.
I stopped reading because it became a larger part of school. I strongly disliked school, so reading was a part of the thing I strongly disliked. Really, anything they tried to force was soured on me for a long time.
My disdain for school started around 9 or 10
There's also an epidemic of kids not listening to the radio, but nobody has questions about why.
From what I observed with my own kids, the books that were either mandatory or on the selection list to read for assignments were shockingly bad, and on top of that 100% targetted at the girl half of the class. Wether this is the result of teaching having become almost exclusively female or other cultural drives is hard to say.
When you can read for fun, it's fun.
When your teacher criticizes you for not reading the boring book he/she ordered you to read, you stop enjoying reading and stop reading.
It's the teachers' faults.
I read a lot when I was young and a big motivating factor for me was the natural progression to reading grown up books and works of literature with more interesting plots and subject matter. Nowadays, there seems to be more commercially-driven infantilization of entertainment where comics and books for kids are no longer a stepping stone but an end destination. My teenager only reads manga and comics which can be very deep and cover mature topics (unlike anything I could get my hands on in the 90s) but are still, ultimately, not novels. I haven't decided if this is a good or bad thing - it probably just 'is what it is' and I'm getting old.
> Traditionally, middle-grade book discovery happens via parents, librarians, and—most crucially—peers. At recess, your best friend tells you that you have got to read the Baby-Sitters Club, and boom, you’re hooked
I've never experienced this in my school life. Used to be the one guy who spends all of his time helping out and reading at the school library back in elementary school. Later in high-school, I stopped reading as much due to the appearance of the computer in my life, which had great things like the Internet and such.
If you spend all your time on TikTok, I feel like it's unlikely you'd read too much.
My daughter stopped reading when her school forced an ipad on us with no way for us to administer our own screen time controls. Now I never know if she's doing homework or trapped down some YouTube shorts rabbit hole.
Don't know why this is on HN but anyways.
My youngest will be 9 soon. Finding books for him is pain. I started trying more in the last few weeks, grabbing more or less random things from my local library (beginning chapter books, chapter books). Most of them are series, he liked a few (Galaxy Zack, Time Jumpers, Desmond Cole books), did not like others (Magic Tree House, something called Byte, Code Breakers, and really anything else I gave him). He mostly outgrew Geronimo Stilton books.
They do have book fairs at school and we always go, but we rarely buy anything as it's mostly gifts. We're trying to get book from libraries as opposed to buy them.
They do have an awesome library at school and he spends a few hours per week there and I see that he's taking some books from there, but it's mostly Captain Underpants, Stick Dog, and other comics.
I absolutely DESPISE Dan Pilkey's books (Captain Underpants and Stick Dog) as well as My Weird School (and other Dan Gutman's products), they really dumb things down and basically lead kids away from "regular" (ie long-form) books. I my opinion they can lead to behavior issues in kids, however it's possible that kids simply start reading them during that period when hormones start kicking in.
I have a bunch of books from DK Publishing (coffee table encyclopedias) and leave them an frequented areas of the house, and notice that kids check them up every once in a while, at least that's something. They are designed for people with decreased attention span, if you want to learn about a subject, you read a page or two and you're good.
My older kids stopped reading a lot around that time (~10yo), mostly after reading My Weird School and Captain Underpants and similar crap.
Older kids did go through the entire Lemony Snicket series though (way before NetFlix series came up) so that's something.
My 8yo has an iPad from school (we were forced to get one from school when he did kindergarten remote) but his time is very strictly controlled, and it's only for studying (no games). He does have access to an old XBox but only on weekends and for a limited time. He will not have a smart phone for a long time, that's where we lost our older kids (around 13).
So yeah, it's a major problem...
I love how condescending this headline is, lol.
When I was in elementary we had a program where you could read a book and then take a test on that book. If you passed the test you would get a prize from snacks to coupons at restaurants. There were no limits and the book choice was large.
I ravenously read through books at first and would take the test asap. I was gaming the system, but through this I found books I became enthralled with. This was the foundation of my love for reading.
Not sure what my point was, but I wonder if any programs like that exist anymore.
If you want your kids to read books then they should see you reading books.
[dead]
Obtaining information through books is like trying to put out a fire by sucking water out through a straw. The printing press was great but it's a slow and constrained way to get into from the greatest minds. I read voraciously as a child but when I came to university I pretty much stopped reading when the experts were there to teach in real life using all the senses.
If I were a 9 year old today I'd probably pick YouTube over reading. When I built my house I found myself learning way faster watching tradesmen and listening to them on YouTube than having to suck that information through a tiny straw that is reading a book . I find myself truly hating reading now, far too inefficient.
[flagged]
Take a closer look at how much homework children have, and how much assigned, mandatory reading children have.
I went to a private "college prep" high school, and the amount of assigned, mandatory reading was insane. I spent so much time reading assigned novels that I just didn't have time to read for pleasure. (And why read for pleasure if I already spent 30+ minutes reading a boring / awful novel as part of my homework?)
Once I was out of college, I rediscovered reading.