[ingvay7]

One thing that helped in our house was making books unavoidable. We keep paperbacks lying around in every room. It sounds silly, but there’s a kind of “cover gravity” and guilt that pulls the kids ( and me) back into a book when a book is just sitting there gathering dust.

[raddan]

My parents had a rule where the default answer when I asked them to buy me things was no—except for books. Combined with the fact that we lived in the middle of nowhere and did not have cable TV, books were by far the most appealing thing around.

[andrew_lettuce]

Isn't this the problem though, books are no longer attractive with all the other options? How can we make books cool without pretending all this tech didn't exist?

[lukewrites]

I think the content of many books is much cooler than the crap on my timelines. There’s just higher entropy (or activation energy?) to get the book picked up and opened vs the serotonin lever in our pockets.

I’ve just strived to read like hell to my kids and make reading one of their most fun things around. Pretty much all we read is stuff they like, even if I hate it (I’m looking at you, Pokemon novels). If they like an author (in our house we love Daniel Pinkwater) I will go out of my way to find that authors books. We write to authors, we talk about what we read (somehow I serialised a retelling of Killing Commendatore), my 8 yo listens to my audiobooks in the car with me, we are frickin bookworms.

And of course they still play Minecraft and animal crossing. It’s just that picking up a book is one of their default go-tos, and I think that’s enough. They’re building the habit and the understanding of what reading is about, and if we keep that up they will be ok.

[quadrifoliate]

> How can we make books cool without pretending all this tech didn't exist?

You don't need to pretend it didn't exist, you need to legislate and ensure that access to it is cut off uniformly for developing minds. We already see the emergence of this kind of legislation with Australia enforcing a ban for social media under 16s; and other countries in the process of legislating ones.

I happen to favor this approach because "pretend it doesn't exist" strategy doesn't work for addictive things that are left lying around the house for kids to access. If society in general can prevent children from getting access to alcohol before 21, there's no particular reason the same can't be done for addictive "social" media algorithms.

[solumunus]

We can’t, it’s simply too addictive in comparison. It produces more dopamine, more quickly and consistently and there’s no way books will ever compete. Really it’s not even technology that is the problem, it’s specifically just algorithmic driven social media. We have to actively avoid the addictive algorithms and it’s really difficult.