[julienchastang]

Parent here with school-aged kids. I think this sub-thread blaming the parents is particularly depressing and not founded in reality. Here is the way I see it. The social media companies with quasi infinite resources have won. They hired the best and the brightest engineers to hack our minds and steal our attention and they have succeeded beyond expectations. As evidence look that the market capitalization of Meta, etc. The data showing that children are reading way less compared to when I was growing up is consistent with what I see, but I did not an infinite ocean of distractions available via device that has become indispensable for modern living (i.e., the smart phone). By the time I was thirteen, I had read the Lord of the Rings to completion, but if I had grown up in present times I doubt that would be the case.

[MisterTea]

My friend has kids, 8 and 10, who run around outside and play with neighborhood kids as well as read books. They are very active in their kids lives and constantly bring them to events and other social gatherings. This keeps them active physically and socially making things like screen time seem boring.

The shitty parents are the ones who let meta and the like hack them to the point where their children are just following by example - if you stare at the screen all day, so will they.

[nathan_compton]

If the system is such that you have to be an exceptional parent not to fuck up your kids, the system is the problem. Like I applaud your friend with kids, but I think its worth considering that their might be an issue if you need to be working very hard to give your kids a stimulating, healthy, childhood.

[MisterTea]

> if you need to be working very hard to give your kids a stimulating, healthy, childhood.

They don't work hard, they enjoy themselves.

They also have hobbies and my friend is always working on some hobby/home project. His wife is very social and is always planning something and he has no issues following along as he likes going out and doing things. They take the kids because they enjoy being with them and the kids also enjoy going out too.

The big issue today is the fact that parents are distracted by phones so their kids follow that example. It used to be everyone sat around, watching TV or talking to a friend on the phone. Those were limited activities as eventually you got tired of talking or nothing good on the few channels of TV so you found other things to do. Now its phones constantly pumping out attention stealing content 24/7. It's a prison.

[nathan_compton]

Yes. Phones are part of the system and they are part of the problem.

[watwut]

Of course kids are reading less. When I was growing, there was frequently not much else to do. Reading was replaced by movies and shows on demand and wont come back no matter what educators or parents do.

It is cheaper, easily available and more fun.

Sure kids also use social networks. But the role reading had was mostly taken over by Netflix, youtube, disney and such.

[jjulius]

>Reading was replaced by movies and shows on demand and wont come back no matter what educators or parents do.

... huh?

I'm a parent and this just isn't true. My wife and I have phones, our young children do not. We do not own a tablet. Our children have never known what it's like to have the option of resorting to a screen to keep them busy when we're out of the house. TV time is limited on the weekends, extra limited on the weeknights.

My oldest absolutely loves reading, and I watched her sit in the corner for 90 minutes on Sunday with a pile of books and a massive grin on her face the whole time. My youngest is still too young to read, but I'm hoping for results within the same realm.

Your comment about there frequently not being much else to do? It's up to parents to, for lack of a better phrase, teach kids how to be bored.

Edit:

>It's cheaper, easily available and more fun.

What's super fun, easily available and free for us is going to a park on the weekend to play and have lunch, and then driving around to a bunch of Little Free Libraries in the area. Drop off books we don't want, see if the kids or parents find anything that strikes our fancy. Our kiddos love it and so do we, it's great family time.

[TheOtherHobbes]

I wish people would understand that their personal experience doesn't automatically generalise to collective trends.

It's great that your kids are reading, but clearly a lot of kids, and even more adults, aren't.

It's not just "up to parents" because the media, in all its forms, sets collective values.

And the strategic problem in the US is that reading - and culture in general - is caught between a number of competing ideologies, most of which are destructive to what's usually understood as education both in and out of school.

What individual parents do is downstream of all of those cultural influences. It's heavily dependent on socioeconomics, opportunity, and status, with error bars that depend on a random range of individual values.

The US is a competing patchwork of wildly incompatible cultures and traditions, some of which are directly opposed to each other, and all of which - in practice - are suspicious of traditional educational goals.

Put simply, no one is driving the bus. So it's stuck in a ditch, with its wheels spinning. And it's about to burst into flames.

There's only so much individual parents can do to fix that. The problems are strategic and political, not individual, and they're much harder to fix than they seem.

[jjulius]

>I wish people would understand that their personal experience doesn't automatically generalise to collective trends.

And I wish people wouldn't make assumptions and then respond based on those assumptions.

[watwut]

Your kids are small. They wont have other kids in school to talk about books with and to show them different books. The discovery of books and social aspect of it ends with you. It is completely different social environment compared to what I had. There used to be cheap junk book stories, journals about books, things like that. These do not really exist anymore, but similar structures exist for movies.

Assuming they will social, they will have friends to talk with them about anime shows and they will go visit them to watch those shows in their house. The kids in school will talk about anime, about netflix shows, but not about books.

> It's up to parents to, for lack of a better phrase, teach kids how to be bored.

You have full control while they are small. That goes away quickly and obviously even should go away.

But even more importantly, my parents and parents of my peers did not had to put that much work into us reading. They did not had to make the one big family project, they could have spend their weekends working in garden or going to play golf ... and generally speaking kids ended up reading a lot more anyway. They would read, because it was easily available and only fun thing to do.

> What's super fun, easily available and free for us is going to a park on the weekend to play and have lunch, and then driving around to a bunch of Little Free Libraries in the area.

It is not fun except for small kids. All these stats are about kids with agency which yours do not have yet.

[GeoAtreides]

>Fewer than 1 in 5 (18.7%) 8- to 18-year-olds told us that they read something daily in their free time in 2025, again, the lowest levels we've recorded, with daily reading levels decreasing by nearly 20 percentage points since 2005.

[1] https://literacytrust.org.uk/research-services/research-repo...

Seems like the kids just don't read anymore, yours being exception of course

[rixed]

Alas, the evolution of societies is dictated by rules that no individual cases, however inspirational, can radically influence.

You can teach your kids how to fly a plane, yet gravity is not up to parents.

[araes]

Add a couple thoughts to that general idea:

- There's also a reward issue, in that reading, especially long form is "soft punished." It's not directly punished, yet there's very little reward, mostly a lot of struggle, not much of the candy feedback of TV, movies, and video games. It requires personal imagination and visualization of often difficult concepts rather than simply taking what someone else has "imagined correctly" for you. If you've never seen the Lord of the Rings movies, imaging what Frodo, Aragorn, and the rest are actually doing, where they're going, and the struggling through Tolkien's complicated prose is quite challenging. And socially, there's also significant peer pressure issues involved, that evoke “epidemic” or “contagion” comparisons. Once large numbers of peers discount reading, then the population on average starts receiving negative feedback. Notably, if peers are high achievers, then students who interact with these peers may also adopt those habits. [1]

[1] https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/jameskim/files/jep-peer_in...

- Part that's less nefarious, like a teen highlights about the difficulties of reading in this paper [2] (pg 34.) "You can’t ask a book to explain what it means right now. I go to people because of their interactive nature."

[2] https://alair.ala.org/server/api/core/bitstreams/0051cf84-91...

- The social media companies and the world wide web culture in general have also implemented a form of reading detriment. There's little reward to blogging, writing, or reading long form writing. Incendiary writing and rage-farming was long ago found to be an extremely effective tactic compared to informative discussion. And a lot of the time, almost all you can look forward to with your informative post is your contribution being aggressively scraped, while being compensated nothing, and then churned out to make someone else money.

- There's actually a few positive though, apparently teen and juvenile literature is actually increasing in sales somewhat from [2] compared with adult literature sales. Young adult books have been the fastest-growing category over the last 5 years, with print unit sales jumping by 48.2% since 2018. 35.03 million print copies of young adult (YA) books are sold each year as of 2022. [3]

[3] https://wordsrated.com/young-adult-book-sales/#:~:text=Compa...

- You may be slightly down biasing how much people read Lord of the Rings. The Hobbit edition from 2007 has 76,000 ratings and 12,000 reviews on Amazon. [4]

[4] https://www.amazon.com/Hobbit-J-R-R-Tolkien/dp/0618968636/re...

[GrinningFool]

I wonder how much of the YA uptick is driven by adults who prefer less-challenging reading. If that's the case it just makes the picture appear even more bleak.

[yepitwas]

It’s mostly that. Basically the only genres that still sell meaningful numbers are YA (with lots of adult readers, and if we want to count that as its own genre) and romance (99.9% of which isn’t more challenging than average YA, and usually has even less going on as far as ideas and theme—not to knock it, I mean hell, it’s no worse a use of time than tons of other things).

Adult genre fic, even, is dying, and lit-fic has long been in decline and has pretty much just been for a few nerds since roughly the turn of the millennium.

I think the decline of reading is exactly what’s pushed publishers and agents to favor easier and easier books: you have to pursue as much of the market as possible to make money now because the whole market’s not that big, so you can’t afford to exclude readers. That means favoring ever-easier books as readership declines.

The only other route to make a living is aiming straight at film/TV adaptation, which is very hard to break into but a handful of authors have successfully specialized in that. Their books do OK but they’re watched, as it were, way, way more than they’re read.

[wing-_-nuts]

Man don't gate keep reading. I don't care if an adult is reading 'see spot run' so long as they're reading and enjoying it. Reading begets reading. It's a muscle that must be exercised.

[araes]

That kind of issue is very much "eh" for me personally. They're reading. Not everybody's motivated to read "Ulysses" or "War and Peace". Probably a significant percentage move to reading more challenging material with time.

The issue a lot of people are talking about is the decline in reading comprehension, lowered reading scholastic scores, the overall lack of reading, and the consumption of entertainment that requires little reading.

Stuff like the "Treasure Island" (#34), "Oliver Twist" (#56), and "The Hound of the Baskervilles" (#66) still rates rather high up on Young Adult literature sales by Amazon's reported numbers, even if romance and such is the top 5-10. They're reading.