We recently had some behavior issues with our kids - they didn't want to do activities outside the house, they hated reading, they hated anything that required even the slightest discomfort or effort.
We decided to cut device usage way down - they get 1 hour in the morning to play whatever games they want on computer, tablet, console. Then they get 1 hour before bed to watch TV. The rest of the day, no devices. We are homeschooled so this is a LOT of free time.
After a few weeks, they're now: blasting through books daily (to the point where they forgot their own TV time, which used to be sacred), playing board games with us more frequently, asking to do things outside like learning to ride bikes (which they've previously shied away from), writing their own comic books and board games on paper, and overall just being creative through the day and entertaining themselves.
It's such a huge difference. It is the devices. It's 100% the devices.
It is the phones fault and it affects more than kids. You see too many parents and grandparents buried on the phones. At least with boomers the tech adoption isnt as high
We should recognize its not a generational issue but something that affects us all-young and old
I have kids in school. Our school system is one of the top in Connecticut, which is the quintessential "school" state (if any rich kid on TV goes away to school, it's probably to CT).
These kids (all of them, not mine) can't really read. Not like when I was young. (I'm not even old! I graduated in the 2000's!) They certainly can't write. They have no stamina to do an essay or a test like when I was a kid. They can't be bored or be creative.
We've talked to multiple teachers who just don't know what to do about it.
It was better before Covid (my oldest's grade isn't as bad), but those kids who were in early elementary or younger when covid hit? Completely incapable of what adults would consider basic school tasks. Even the smart ones who get good grades!
But it's not (just) smartphones and tablets, imo. It's chromebooks in the classroom. School is online now, even after covid, and it just doesn't work in my opinion.
Personally, I'd drop technology from the classroom entirely.
I read an Economist article a few years ago that mentioned a literature professor at Columbia who said that most his undergrad freshmen students have never read a book cover to cover. Of those that have, their favorites were young adult fiction. Most of his students couldn't even focus on a single sonnet.
Apparently kids nowadays are having difficulty focusing on individual sentences, and a lot of them are just effectively illiterate. This just blows me away. I'm roughly your age and sometimes as a kid, during the summer, I'd do nothing for days but read nonstop, sunrise to sunset if I liked the book, and I knew a bunch of kids who would do the same thing. They weren't even what you'd call huge readers. It's just what you did if you were bored, or had an okay book with nothing else to do.
Devil’s advocate: what’s the point? Is it important to have reading and writing skills if everything can be transcribed through AI? Or maybe it’s not directly important, but the ability to hold your attention on something for 30-60 minutes is? Is reading the best medium for education, or something more like Kahn Academy videos?
I also wonder how the Montessori schools are doing, since I believe they focus less on rote skill acquisition and more on creativity.
Reading/writing is a much more dense and navigable way of taking in and recording information than speech. Efficient use of AI requires being very good at reading quickly and having the comprehension skills to pick up on nuances that suggest a hole in the AI's work.
In a world where AI is empowering existing experts while risking junior hiring, the young should be aiming to be competitive with those experts, not aiming below even current juniors. If, as a human, you're just acting as a glorified harness around an LLM, you're more replaceable.
In my opinion it is. Reading can convey information faster than even sped up videos, is easier to skim, and has high precision.
Im not saying it is the best for everyone, but it has been proven repeatedly to beat out any other method in the majority of the population. Plus its time stability and storage is much easier and reliable.
It also could have other side benefits like focus or perhaps something like visual acuity, much like how writing by hand can develop good hand-eye coordination. If someone struggled to write with a pencil for example I would be very wary about handing them sharp tools or knives.
I am not sure what to make of this devils advocate comment. Are you just throwing opposites at the wall? I genuinely don't know how to interpret the query about attention span?
Are you suggesting that a lower attention span has no impact? I don't know how I would learn things if my attention span was shit, or even sit with difficult problems or emotions and resolve them. Even just general productivity, which, sure there are some arguments about good vs bad productivity, but in general, any form of productivity will benefit from better attention span I think?
When I used to read for pleasure, I did it because it was pleasurable. Not because it would be the hard thing. It was fun and easy.
What this particular chain of thoughts shows is that adults don't read for pleasure either, they associate it with an uncomfortable hard thing one should to do "build character".
This is conflating hard with unpleasant. A child just learning to read is going to find it hard to do, yet through adults pushing them to do the hard thing, they learn to read and sometimes begin to find it to be pleasurable. Building most skills is hard, yet that doesn't exclude taking pleasure in it. Many of us taught ourselves to code, the fact that we enjoyed it doesn't mean it wasn't also hard.
We've all learned the lesson that sometimes you have to struggle through something hard, to be able to access better pleasure.
I don't think this is accurate. In basically every single game or sport with measurable outcomes, doing things are relatively simple to you (and often enjoyable) endlessly - drives improvement.
If you want to make the argument that it's muscle memory in e.g. shooting freethrows in basketball, then you can see the exact same thing in doing chess tactical puzzles. There's even one successful learning method called the Woodpecker Method where you endlessly repeat over the same series of tactics working to get the time it takes you to do them down to essentially instantaneous. And it works excellently for improvement, and I obviously don't just mean improvement at doing that set of tactics.
The original donkey kong is pretty difficult compared to some of the wide-audience games that have been coming out. As far as I can tell, if the audience of a particular franchise includes younger generations as a majority or near-majority, the difficulty plummets. I don't think "plummets" is even that sensational. See pokemon, kingdom hearts, mario games, final fantasy games. Some franchises and genres have survived but not all of them.
I might be missing some other reasons why this could be happening, like increases in game balance and coordination.
Play Mario Odyssey for an hour or two then play Super Mario Bros 1, 2, or 3 as one startling example.
That's mostly the MBAification of games that I think is completely disconnected from what most kids want. But the MBA logic is about maximizing market reach. Relatively few people will choose not to play a game because it's too easy, but ostensibly the same isn't true of games that are seen as difficult. Of course Elden Ring, Dark Souls, et al completely proved this to be nonsense (to say nothing of pvp games), but who's gonna let a bit of reality get in the way of pie charts, bar graphs, and powerpoints?
In the world of games outside the big money AAA MBA stuff, there's plenty of highly challenging franchises that maintain true to themselves and thrive, even with plenty of kids playing. E.g. - I suspect the median age for Binding of Isaac is well below the age of consent.
Shifting to a position below where it previously was? I don't get your point... Is there's a new bar? What would you say the new expectation is that doesn't build on previous core skills?
My pen weighs in at 10g in my backpack and is capable of durably recording information for thousands of years. No battery to charge, cheap, and plentiful.
I use my fingers to interact with computers, and they don't have any extra weight at all, as they are already attached to me. You need to also count the weight of the paper.
And, no, your pen and paper are not able to durably record information for thousands of years. Unless you have some really bespoke setup.
I read for pleasure; ~100 books a year on average. When I go anywhere, I am reading.
My daughter informed me that the mothers of her teammates were outright making fun of me for having my 'nose buried in a book,' before every event. I asked her if they were making fun of everyone else for having their nose buried in their phones; she laughed and said they probably were not.
Why is reading for fun something that's worthy of negative attention these days but scrolling social feeds is somehow socially acceptable? I just don't get it.
Of course kids aren't reading for pleasure; their parents likely aren't and there's societal pressure to NOT do it and instead use your phone to pass the time.
I love the result of reading, and the occasional jolt I get when reading, but not the activity of reading. I need to consume the text word for word, scanning with my eyes. The thing that gets me most happened after I got into Hemmingway: everything in a book happens in the forefront. In a movie you can have things happening outside your span od attention. Not in a book. You can’t have a doorbell happening in the background - it’s explicit and relevant to the story (which has spawned a counter-culture of writers).
Bill Hicks, the standup comedian dead for over three decades already, had a now-classic bit about being challenged for reading by a waitress. Reading has always been uncool to some people.
Funnily enough, smart phones (and previous feature phones with their SMS) have probably gotten more people into reading and writing for leisure than any other technology since the printing press.
Granted, people are not doing any long form reading and writing on these devices, but they are reading and writing.
For a brief period before instagrams and youtube became mainstream and tiktoks came along to decimate whatever was left.
This is an exaggeration, but I wouldn't rule out your average smartphone user reading less in an average commute than they would do just reading store signs as they pass...
Herd mentality, anti-intellectual culture, poor reading skills, and ADHD are widespread issues. Those mothers sound lame, and ultimately the joke's on them. Reading is awesome, and making fun of someone for it just shows what basic bitches they are.
Apologies friend, neighbor comment has it right. Not trying to shade anyone with ADHD, just calling out as a widespread/modern challenge. Same with poor reading skills. Parents, schools, and culture have failed many people, who might otherwise have been avid readers, but instead they don't even know the joy of reading a good book.
I didn't read it that way, I thought the GP was listing it as one of the newer challenges to getting kids (and adults!) to read. IMO it doesn't prevent you from loving to read, but it does make it harder.
It always has been negative attention gathering - reading marks you as a nerd.
And yeah, by far the strongest predictor I've ever seen for "does the kid do X that everyone agrees is good for people to do" is always "do the parents do it?". You lead by example. Kids are great at picking up on whether you enjoy it or not.
For what it’s worth I think people have always been this way. I used to read during recess when I was in middle school. I usually could not wait to get back to my books. But the other kids saw this as profoundly antisocial. I wasn’t being antisocial exactly; I was pretty shy and had a very active imagination. Amusingly, the school bullies misinterpreted my bookishness as weakness. That changed when I (accidentally) knocked out a kid’s front teeth during a fight. I felt terrible about it but the bullying stopped immediately.
This undercurrent of anti-intellectualism has been around for a long time. I would just ignore the naysayers.
Well it’s just cope. It’s the same way in the UK where drinkers will sneer at non drinkers, or meat eaters at vegans. You will get criticised for losing weight or making dietary changes. People imagine that someone else may feel superior to them for making better choices, and they absolutely hate this.
This is a result of living in homes where parents neither read to children nor model reading for pleasure.
Thanks to the various waves of “education reform”, there is less literature on offer and less time for pleasure reading. However, if you’re reading them exciting things at home (and telling them about the exciting stuff you’re reading), they will love to read.
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
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.
It's not necessarily that simple. Both I and my wife read, almost every week I read my daughter passages I've come across in my books, we have bookshelves in every room. We read to our younger children and they enjoy being read to.
I told my daughter that when I was her age I liked to read Animorphs, and girls were reading Babysitter's Club. She brought home these books from the school library and... they were graphic novels.
Apparently the school library is stocked with comic books and the kids can just read those instead of real books. And comic books don't have descriptions of scenes, they have almost no internal monologue or exposition, no symbolism or (literary) imagery, they really can't teach reading comprehension.
I was going to mention this as well. Everything is a graphic novel these days. Go to the bookstore, and at least half of the shelf space dedicated to children is for graphic novels (and that doesn’t include the manga section). Almost every book series has a graphic novel version. And some of these are just complete skip. Dav Pilkey (Captain Underpants from my days, now DogMan and others) just pumps out the most low effort stuff imaginable.
It’s no surprise kids are reading way behind what previous generations did when this is what they are bombarded with.
My wife is a school librarian and really dislikes graphic novels, in part because they are so expensive they eat all of her meager budget. But she recognizes they can be the hook that catches a future reader. Not always, but sometimes she can get a kid to transition to full books from graphic novels, so they do have their place. They seem very useful with her significant ESL population.
FWIW my son went through the same sort of thing during emerging literacy and it drove me kind of crazy. He started with simple texts, then started coming home with “graphic novels”. I just let him do it. He was stuck on those for a bit, started getting interested in World Record books (which, again, lots of pictures and not much writing), and then…read a Roald Dahl book a day for two weeks. For whatever reason, the switch flipped.
Throughout it I continued reading to him daily, mostly stuff that he comprehends just find but find too difficult to read on his own.
I think it just comes in its own time if nurtured.
Edit: I really like what John Gotto (I think…he wrote a book called Dumbing Us Down) observed about literacy; for a long time it just developed naturally without much formal instruction. I had that in mind for our kid and am glad I did.
> Throughout it I continued reading to him daily, mostly stuff that he comprehends just find but find too difficult to read on his own.
This reminds me of the father-son scenes in Zen and the Art and of Motorcycle Maintenance. The narrator—the father—reads Walden to his son, who is just at the edge of being able to understand it. That causes a lot of Q&A between father and son that the narrator initially finds annoying. But then he realizes that Walden reads better this way.
I logged in especially to second what lukewrites has said.
My kids both started on and enjoyed graphic novels, then progressed to reading chapter books without pictures etc, I'd say in part because of the graphic novels.
My first daughter I managed to flip the switch for reading through Tintin and other graphic novels. My younger daughter skipped that entirely. She started reading later than the first, but jumped right in to longer full length books that were captivating for her (they were series she had seen her sister read).
I completely agree that we can encourage but reading needs to come naturally to them. You can't force-feed curiosity and passion, which is what reading is all about for young people.
Anecdote: waiting for my childs parent-teacher interview in the library of a mid-range highschool in a large city, I casually asked the row of student facilitators how much they used the (pretty substantial) library. They all said, with emphasis, that they'd never used the library once, not even for a single book. Overhearing this a teacher looked at me and shook his head with resignation.
Is libby very popular among young school children? Based on surveys asking how often kids read per week I would figure ebook reading is also down. They don't usually ask about the format.
While this is probably bad, reading gets more credit than it should, especially when it gets to reading junk content, not engaging with the content, and escapism. A baseline level of reading is important, but beyond that, I'd rather kids go out and do things than just read about them.
Speaking for my own personal experience. I graduated from high school in the mid-2000s. I had any passion, joy and desire for reading crushed out of me through my school years. Between being forced to read books/topics at school I had zero interest in, my parents forcing me to read hours a day after school, writing and presenting book reports, Accelerated Reader tests and who knows what else, I haven't causally picked up a book to read in... a very long time. Thanks to a friend, I have just now picked up audiobooks as a way to potentially reintroduce books to my life.
As a parent of school aged kids today, I know that rubs off on my kids too. I happily read to them and share a joy in a book with them. But I don't set a role model of reading a book causally on my own.
I've wondered if some of this is the home life and some of the frustrations from our own school years running off a bit too.
There use to be very popular touchstone series that a large portion of school age children read. It was Harry Potter for me, but there are similar books both before and after. I think we might just need better fiction to prove to students that books are worth their attention.
My kids a bit young for reading HP on their own, but it’s our bedtime book series every night. Over the past year or so we’ve (I’ve) read HP before bed. We just started book the Order of the Phoenix.
Our school system has a reading log system (mandatory 15min/night), but I don’t think it’s very effective.
I don’t know that I’d put my kid down as an avid reader, but for his age range I can set him on a task to read and he’ll find something he enjoys enough to be immersed (albeit usually graphic novels akin to Minecraft, Godzilla and other mangas). But at 8 I’d rather that than an aversion to reading.
Anyway, I’m curious about the statistics around parents reading by example (solo), parents reading to children (bedtime or otherwise and until what age). I have memories of my mom reading with me when I was about his age.
I can say this, me and every other parent in my school district is sick of screen time.
They should ask the Ministry of Culture here in Spain, who claims that reading is on the up and up among 14-24 year olds [1].
Nothing points to that in our abysmal PISA reading results, general educational attainment and outcomes, or anecdotal observation, but hey! At least it might be worth asking them about the surveying methodology.
PISA does not measure reading for pleasure, it measures reading for factual information. There are questions about reading graphs, figuring out information only indirectly mentioned, that sort of thing. It does not care whether you get emotionally invested in this or that character or story.
Reading for pleasure is only loosely related to that.
This is something i actually found chatgpt useful for. I gave it a list of books ive read and why i liked them, it gave me a list, some minimal summaries. I went and did some searches, read the back, told chatgpt my thoughts and it refined the list once more.
It was able to turn me to an author of a number of scifi books that really piqued my interest. One of them it prefaced with "dont read tue summaries" which i thought strange, but i listend, and ultimately bought the book just from reading a single line summary of it.
LotR is an oldie but goodie! I finally dug it out and read it this past month and it was quite enjoyable. I had tried back in high school but was kind of bored with the frilly language and songs and gave up. But this time around in my 40s, having read lots more books since then and developed a stronger vocabulary and reading stamina (e.g. I've read and enjoyed Stormlight Archive twice, which is 4x the length), it was actually pretty quick and easy, and I regret not having done it earlier. I paid a lot of attention to the journey and all the cardinal directions and feel like my sense of direction improved actually. And I'd always liked the movies but the books are so much better! It feels like a book from a strange almost-on-the-spectrum nerd who also spend time on the front lines in World War 1. I think these days the nerdy authors I like and the people who are grunts in the military are almost distinct circles, so maybe unlikely to get quite the same book in terms of the lore but also the realistic emotional punches.
Beyond that, I just started Captive's War, written by the people behind The Expanse, which I adore, and it's looking similarly good (similar to The Expanse; not LotR. I think it will be hard for things to match LotR for me).
I read the Wheel of Time series. It's all I read. It took about 18 months. It's great, though. I'm sad it's over, and I'm going to miss the characters.
The acceleration point for both age groups studied is 2012. What happened that year? The article doesn't try to answer this. Might be mentioned in the study I suppose.
What you see is that before the anomaly year that was 2020, the scores were slightly lower as compared to 2012, but they were still not as low as early 2000s or before.
Another thing to notice is that the higher percentile performance largely remains flat but lower percentiles seem to be suffering from a drop.
While social media and phones could be a part of it, if they were the only factors, we wouldn’t see such a disparity between different percentiles. I suspect educational policy. No Child Left Behind (NCLB), no matter how controversial, coincided with the improvements in the scores. In 2012, a bunch of states were allowed to have more flexibility from NCLB. In 2015, it was replaced with Every Student Succeeds Act which allowed states to set their own standards. I think this was the single biggest contributor to the declining scores.
Instagram/Android was 2012. (Instagram iOS was late 2010). But not just Instagram; 2012 was about the time that social media really started adopting the dark patterns.
Up until the 2010s I think it was still a lot less socially normal to play a lot of games. We reached a tipping point somewhere that went from gaming being a sometimes activity for kids to basically every kid plays games
Most of the people in my high school in the 2000s didn't play games as a primary hobby. Only a few of my friends had a PC for games or a console. It wasn't nearly as ubiquitous as it is now.
The release of the Xbox coincided with what I viewed as a big jump in video game players. Even the biggest athletic jocks played a ton of Halo. And then not long after that saw much older people start playing games like CoD:MW as after work entertainment instead of just tv.
Kinda, the measurement points are 2012 and 2020, so the decline is somewhere in that eight year period (birth years 1999-2007 and 2003-2011). My guess is phones/tablets strike again.
Anecdotally, 2012 is when I got back in to reading for pleasure, as a 16-year-old. I had no friends though, and thought someone cute might see me reading and become interested in me.
Prior to that, I stopped reading because video games were easy to get lost in endlessly. At the time, I recall I was probably playing a lot of League of Legends, TF2, Minecraft, and probably some others -- all of which I felt I could pretty much sink an infinite amount of time into, at the time.
Why is reading for pleasure always placed on some sort of pedestal? I would argue that what is being consumed is more important than the medium of consumption.
I am not trying to say there is little value in reading, but I have always found it odd that some forms of consumption are more coveted than others.
Quality of what's produced in that medium might be one thing. People reading for pleasure are usually reading works published by authors that have gone through some sort of filtering process for quality. Sure, it might be "trashy" novels relative to literature, but at least there's a floor to the quality level or else it just doesn't get published.
But with the advent of other forms of media, more easily produced and consumed, the quality of what is being consumed is lower than the quality of pleasure reading. Combine that with the firehose rate at which it's being consumed and pleasure reading seems better than it might once have.
> published by authors that have gone through some sort of filtering process for quality
You can say the same for movies and tv if you filter by IMDB score (which i do). Heck even podcasts get millions of views before I ever hear about them.
Similarly, I listen to a lot of podcasts, but whenever I listen to The Guardian Long Reads (read articles) I’m kinda surprised every time how much higher quality they are than typical podcasts, since they’re based on well written articles.
Because it is exercise for the imaginative mind. Reading can force a reader to build worlds. Some readers are good at this, others need practice. To call reading “consumptive” is severely minimizing literature’s impact on communication throughout human history.
Even looking back at my mother reading Stephen King and romance novels … her reading undoubtedly shaped her and helped her understand the world and her experiences within it.
Note: this comment written from the bathtub after putting down “The Stand” by Stephen King, you know, one of those “little value” books.
Reading connotes all sorts of hard-to-measure advantages and growth that nothing else even comes close to. And while there are works that are better and worse, no matter how lowly the thing is that is being read, that growth still accrues. You could have a child who read nothing but cereal boxes and truck stop restroom graffiti, and he'll be ahead of his classmates on every single thing you can score.
It's not the work, but the medium. Bad dimestore romance novels are therefor superior to someone watching one of those drivel tiktok soap opera things (no idea what they're called). The audio book might be the exact same story as the paperback, but the effect is not equivalent.
When I first got a portable computer I basically immediately stopped reading. Like twelve years back. It only got worse when I got sufficient smart phone. I read basically daily before.
I get back to it few years back when I suddenly got an urge to read some robust fantasy, Storm light archive it is for now. I'm again hooked since on reading.
Problem is that I was aware what I'm missing which someone who never tried it could not. Something like reading Lord of the rings and The Hobbit again and again.
In the olden days you could not stop some children from reading, and parents could be heard telling their kids 'don't stay up too late reading', as if it could be a problem. For many, school holidays was when a lot of reading happened. Lord of the Rings would need a summer, and much literature was required to be part of the 'in group'. This would start at a young age, much like how eight year old kids need Roblox to be part of the 'in group', there was a time when it would be something such as reading everything by Roald Dahl, C.S. Lewis, Tolkien or, more recently, J K Rowling was important, with each age group reading their own thing, not prescribed by adults.
Parents also used to read books, not because it was what you were supposed to do, but because books were not competing against Netflix, computer games and general doom scrolling.
As well as reading novels there were books and magazines crammed full of information. For me it was the atlas that could be studied for hours, nowadays, why would a child with a geography obsession do that when they have Google Street View on their tablet?
In the former times there were two types of houses, those with books and those without. That was the true class divide. Not everyone was reading for pleasure, plenty didn't read anything more than the newspaper, which was near-universal in every home.
We also had books sold for a penny that were the AI slop of the times.
All considered, I think it is a bit silly worrying about the kids not reading books when so few adults are reading books themselves.
I am not reading either for pleasure. I am reading so much during my daily life (Documentation, coding, manuals, logs) that reading for pleasure sounds like a bad joke.
This is why I prefer audibooks piped through my whole house sonos. It allows me to consume long form while walking around the house completing various projects. Reading isn't a chore, but the thing I engage in while doing chores.
I can empathize with the commenter you're replying to. I still read for pleasure and have to read constantly for work of course. On some days, I feel like I can't. It is like exercising the same muscle every day which will lead to injury in a short amount of time. Switching to audiobooks or just taking a break does resolve that.
From what I am seeing around me though, reading for pleasure or even to gain knowledge has decreased a lot. I noticed it in adults first and this is being reflected in their children.
Question: do you think reading is fundamentally worthwhile in terms of practicality, or is there some other medium that would achieve both pleasure and better information retention?
I think it's undeniable that a lot of good comes from reading, and many here would probably agree it's better than scrolling Instagram reels or even watching YouTube videos. Still, reading by itself is just one medium that we found useful over the many years of human history: it's a way to learn about the world that surrounds us, or immerse ourselves in fantasy worlds. We as humans found text on paper to be a convenient way to share ideas relatively cheaply, while also being expressive.
I'm mentioning this only because I feel like "reading for pleasure" is the wrong framing for moral judgement, I imagine it's something more fundamental like what we perceive to be cultural activities that have lasting impact on our day-to-day. I imagine young parents nowadays are less strict on prioritizing their children's reading habits, because they themselves grew up in an environment where that wasn't strictly necessary to have relatively good career options.
The digital age opened up a few venues to cheat book reading, since there are now plentiful Reddit discussions on any classical book you're interested in, which were present even before the advent of LLMs. To play devil's advocate, is it truly worse to read a thread of people discussing an idea (i.e. HN), or read the book itself, and how do we know that? Perhaps it's the act itself of exploring the idea that's useful, not necessarily the action by which you do it? I imagine I'm not the only one who's dropped a book half-read because they felt satisfied by the author's answer halfway through.
I hope this comment wasn't too off-topic from the main point of "pleasure", it's just something I've been mulling over recently.
> Question: do you think reading is fundamentally worthwhile in terms of practicality, or is there some other medium that would achieve both pleasure and better information retention?
If your quality bar is 'better information retention' then reading is going to be hard to beat. Videos/podcasts don't measure up.
'pleasure' is hard to measure, and gets confounded because reading takes more effort than watching a video/listening to a podcast.
My personal assumption has been that 'pleasure', at least partially, includes expected practical returns. I'd also guess that's at least partially true for kids: "my parents told me if I read a lot, I'll be smart when I grow up", etc.
We generally worry less if we see utility in it, and if we have people to share our hobby with. I think it's reasonable to say there's few hobbies out there without real world utility.
Listening to podcast is not easier then reading. It requires constant attention and does not really allow you to take a break without loosing on. In a lot of ways it is harder and more tiresome. You are free to do some other easy thing while doing it, it can be more engaging due to voices and sounds, but it does not take less effort then reading.
I suppose this varies depending on what type of material is covered in the podcast. We typically assume it contains surface-level content, as their primary purpose is entertainment, but the answer would probably change if we were talking about a lecture.
Fair enough :-) Do you have a theory for why we view reading, even in terms of pleasure, as favorable? I imagine it's because we see some utility in it over other activities.
I used to read a ton of fiction as a kid, and continued into my late 30s. My reading for pleasure has dropped precipitously of late though, in large part because it gives less dopamine than other things I can do that also make the "productivity" centers of my brain light up. I still read a lot, but it's skewed towards geopolitics, economics and analyses, and most if it is short-form.
imho its the screen vs no screen that is the problem. Its better to have one thing for a task . for example one notebook one alarm one instrument one book etc. Our brain aint made to have so many thing cramped in one device. I think when i open a screen my brain sees all the functions of the device and cant focus well. But if I read a book my brain knowes this is the book about this and that and nothing else.
Books were entertainment when that's all the world offered. Now whenever reading gets mentioned online, it's a "smarter way" to consume entertainment. Readers always give off a smug aura.
Technology has come along and with that visuals, audio, engagement.
The Tiktok Algorithm is this generation's Shakespeare. This isn't a bad thing.
This isn’t a bad thing? Kids nowadays have the attention span of puppies. It’s been shown extensively that doomscrolling, switching context every 30s isn’t good for the brain.
Books were already losing the fight on road trips once the gameboy came out - I can't imagine what having every movie, tv show, and song in a flashing touchscreen connected to the internet, why would I pick up a book that takes so much work to deliver fun when I can play AstroBlasters and watch tiktoks of war crimes
We decided to cut device usage way down - they get 1 hour in the morning to play whatever games they want on computer, tablet, console. Then they get 1 hour before bed to watch TV. The rest of the day, no devices. We are homeschooled so this is a LOT of free time.
After a few weeks, they're now: blasting through books daily (to the point where they forgot their own TV time, which used to be sacred), playing board games with us more frequently, asking to do things outside like learning to ride bikes (which they've previously shied away from), writing their own comic books and board games on paper, and overall just being creative through the day and entertaining themselves.
It's such a huge difference. It is the devices. It's 100% the devices.
We should recognize its not a generational issue but something that affects us all-young and old
I have kids in school. Our school system is one of the top in Connecticut, which is the quintessential "school" state (if any rich kid on TV goes away to school, it's probably to CT).
These kids (all of them, not mine) can't really read. Not like when I was young. (I'm not even old! I graduated in the 2000's!) They certainly can't write. They have no stamina to do an essay or a test like when I was a kid. They can't be bored or be creative.
We've talked to multiple teachers who just don't know what to do about it.
It was better before Covid (my oldest's grade isn't as bad), but those kids who were in early elementary or younger when covid hit? Completely incapable of what adults would consider basic school tasks. Even the smart ones who get good grades!
But it's not (just) smartphones and tablets, imo. It's chromebooks in the classroom. School is online now, even after covid, and it just doesn't work in my opinion.
Personally, I'd drop technology from the classroom entirely.
Apparently kids nowadays are having difficulty focusing on individual sentences, and a lot of them are just effectively illiterate. This just blows me away. I'm roughly your age and sometimes as a kid, during the summer, I'd do nothing for days but read nonstop, sunrise to sunset if I liked the book, and I knew a bunch of kids who would do the same thing. They weren't even what you'd call huge readers. It's just what you did if you were bored, or had an okay book with nothing else to do.
I also wonder how the Montessori schools are doing, since I believe they focus less on rote skill acquisition and more on creativity.
In a world where AI is empowering existing experts while risking junior hiring, the young should be aiming to be competitive with those experts, not aiming below even current juniors. If, as a human, you're just acting as a glorified harness around an LLM, you're more replaceable.
Im not saying it is the best for everyone, but it has been proven repeatedly to beat out any other method in the majority of the population. Plus its time stability and storage is much easier and reliable.
It also could have other side benefits like focus or perhaps something like visual acuity, much like how writing by hand can develop good hand-eye coordination. If someone struggled to write with a pencil for example I would be very wary about handing them sharp tools or knives.
Are you suggesting that a lower attention span has no impact? I don't know how I would learn things if my attention span was shit, or even sit with difficult problems or emotions and resolve them. Even just general productivity, which, sure there are some arguments about good vs bad productivity, but in general, any form of productivity will benefit from better attention span I think?
What this particular chain of thoughts shows is that adults don't read for pleasure either, they associate it with an uncomfortable hard thing one should to do "build character".
We've all learned the lesson that sometimes you have to struggle through something hard, to be able to access better pleasure.
If you want to make the argument that it's muscle memory in e.g. shooting freethrows in basketball, then you can see the exact same thing in doing chess tactical puzzles. There's even one successful learning method called the Woodpecker Method where you endlessly repeat over the same series of tactics working to get the time it takes you to do them down to essentially instantaneous. And it works excellently for improvement, and I obviously don't just mean improvement at doing that set of tactics.
I might be missing some other reasons why this could be happening, like increases in game balance and coordination.
Play Mario Odyssey for an hour or two then play Super Mario Bros 1, 2, or 3 as one startling example.
In the world of games outside the big money AAA MBA stuff, there's plenty of highly challenging franchises that maintain true to themselves and thrive, even with plenty of kids playing. E.g. - I suspect the median age for Binding of Isaac is well below the age of consent.
And, no, your pen and paper are not able to durably record information for thousands of years. Unless you have some really bespoke setup.
My daughter informed me that the mothers of her teammates were outright making fun of me for having my 'nose buried in a book,' before every event. I asked her if they were making fun of everyone else for having their nose buried in their phones; she laughed and said they probably were not.
Why is reading for fun something that's worthy of negative attention these days but scrolling social feeds is somehow socially acceptable? I just don't get it.
Of course kids aren't reading for pleasure; their parents likely aren't and there's societal pressure to NOT do it and instead use your phone to pass the time.
Bill Hicks, the standup comedian dead for over three decades already, had a now-classic bit about being challenged for reading by a waitress. Reading has always been uncool to some people.
Granted, people are not doing any long form reading and writing on these devices, but they are reading and writing.
This is an exaggeration, but I wouldn't rule out your average smartphone user reading less in an average commute than they would do just reading store signs as they pass...
And yeah, by far the strongest predictor I've ever seen for "does the kid do X that everyone agrees is good for people to do" is always "do the parents do it?". You lead by example. Kids are great at picking up on whether you enjoy it or not.
This undercurrent of anti-intellectualism has been around for a long time. I would just ignore the naysayers.
Thanks to the various waves of “education reform”, there is less literature on offer and less time for pleasure reading. However, if you’re reading them exciting things at home (and telling them about the exciting stuff you’re reading), they will love to read.
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.
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.
I told my daughter that when I was her age I liked to read Animorphs, and girls were reading Babysitter's Club. She brought home these books from the school library and... they were graphic novels.
Apparently the school library is stocked with comic books and the kids can just read those instead of real books. And comic books don't have descriptions of scenes, they have almost no internal monologue or exposition, no symbolism or (literary) imagery, they really can't teach reading comprehension.
It’s no surprise kids are reading way behind what previous generations did when this is what they are bombarded with.
Throughout it I continued reading to him daily, mostly stuff that he comprehends just find but find too difficult to read on his own.
I think it just comes in its own time if nurtured.
Edit: I really like what John Gotto (I think…he wrote a book called Dumbing Us Down) observed about literacy; for a long time it just developed naturally without much formal instruction. I had that in mind for our kid and am glad I did.
This reminds me of the father-son scenes in Zen and the Art and of Motorcycle Maintenance. The narrator—the father—reads Walden to his son, who is just at the edge of being able to understand it. That causes a lot of Q&A between father and son that the narrator initially finds annoying. But then he realizes that Walden reads better this way.
My kids both started on and enjoyed graphic novels, then progressed to reading chapter books without pictures etc, I'd say in part because of the graphic novels.
I completely agree that we can encourage but reading needs to come naturally to them. You can't force-feed curiosity and passion, which is what reading is all about for young people.
0. https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/ltt/2025/
As a parent of school aged kids today, I know that rubs off on my kids too. I happily read to them and share a joy in a book with them. But I don't set a role model of reading a book causally on my own.
I've wondered if some of this is the home life and some of the frustrations from our own school years running off a bit too.
Modern kids / YA fiction seems so blah.
There use to be very popular touchstone series that a large portion of school age children read. It was Harry Potter for me, but there are similar books both before and after. I think we might just need better fiction to prove to students that books are worth their attention.
Our school system has a reading log system (mandatory 15min/night), but I don’t think it’s very effective.
I don’t know that I’d put my kid down as an avid reader, but for his age range I can set him on a task to read and he’ll find something he enjoys enough to be immersed (albeit usually graphic novels akin to Minecraft, Godzilla and other mangas). But at 8 I’d rather that than an aversion to reading.
Anyway, I’m curious about the statistics around parents reading by example (solo), parents reading to children (bedtime or otherwise and until what age). I have memories of my mom reading with me when I was about his age.
I can say this, me and every other parent in my school district is sick of screen time.
Nothing points to that in our abysmal PISA reading results, general educational attainment and outcomes, or anecdotal observation, but hey! At least it might be worth asking them about the surveying methodology.
[1] https://www.cultura.gob.es/ca/actualidad/2026/01/260122-baro...
Reading for pleasure is only loosely related to that.
I recently enjoyed a few books of the "We are Legion, We are Bob" series
It was able to turn me to an author of a number of scifi books that really piqued my interest. One of them it prefaced with "dont read tue summaries" which i thought strange, but i listend, and ultimately bought the book just from reading a single line summary of it.
Beyond that, I just started Captive's War, written by the people behind The Expanse, which I adore, and it's looking similarly good (similar to The Expanse; not LotR. I think it will be hard for things to match LotR for me).
For a shorter classic I found Robur the Conqueror highly entertaining.
Fun easy read, Sourdough / 24 hr library (Robin Sloan)
What you see is that before the anomaly year that was 2020, the scores were slightly lower as compared to 2012, but they were still not as low as early 2000s or before.
Another thing to notice is that the higher percentile performance largely remains flat but lower percentiles seem to be suffering from a drop.
While social media and phones could be a part of it, if they were the only factors, we wouldn’t see such a disparity between different percentiles. I suspect educational policy. No Child Left Behind (NCLB), no matter how controversial, coincided with the improvements in the scores. In 2012, a bunch of states were allowed to have more flexibility from NCLB. In 2015, it was replaced with Every Student Succeeds Act which allowed states to set their own standards. I think this was the single biggest contributor to the declining scores.
The real culprit is probably more in line with far more alternatives to reading for entertainment.
Up until the 2010s I think it was still a lot less socially normal to play a lot of games. We reached a tipping point somewhere that went from gaming being a sometimes activity for kids to basically every kid plays games
Most of the people in my high school in the 2000s didn't play games as a primary hobby. Only a few of my friends had a PC for games or a console. It wasn't nearly as ubiquitous as it is now.
Halo 2 was when many people started gaming
Prior to that, I stopped reading because video games were easy to get lost in endlessly. At the time, I recall I was probably playing a lot of League of Legends, TF2, Minecraft, and probably some others -- all of which I felt I could pretty much sink an infinite amount of time into, at the time.
Did it work? :)
"Damn you four legged abomination; to the last I grapple with thee; from hell's heart I stab at thee; for hate's sake I spit my last breath at thee"
I am not trying to say there is little value in reading, but I have always found it odd that some forms of consumption are more coveted than others.
But with the advent of other forms of media, more easily produced and consumed, the quality of what is being consumed is lower than the quality of pleasure reading. Combine that with the firehose rate at which it's being consumed and pleasure reading seems better than it might once have.
You can say the same for movies and tv if you filter by IMDB score (which i do). Heck even podcasts get millions of views before I ever hear about them.
Even looking back at my mother reading Stephen King and romance novels … her reading undoubtedly shaped her and helped her understand the world and her experiences within it.
Note: this comment written from the bathtub after putting down “The Stand” by Stephen King, you know, one of those “little value” books.
It's not the work, but the medium. Bad dimestore romance novels are therefor superior to someone watching one of those drivel tiktok soap opera things (no idea what they're called). The audio book might be the exact same story as the paperback, but the effect is not equivalent.
I get back to it few years back when I suddenly got an urge to read some robust fantasy, Storm light archive it is for now. I'm again hooked since on reading.
Problem is that I was aware what I'm missing which someone who never tried it could not. Something like reading Lord of the rings and The Hobbit again and again.
It's the damn phone.
Parents also used to read books, not because it was what you were supposed to do, but because books were not competing against Netflix, computer games and general doom scrolling.
As well as reading novels there were books and magazines crammed full of information. For me it was the atlas that could be studied for hours, nowadays, why would a child with a geography obsession do that when they have Google Street View on their tablet?
In the former times there were two types of houses, those with books and those without. That was the true class divide. Not everyone was reading for pleasure, plenty didn't read anything more than the newspaper, which was near-universal in every home.
We also had books sold for a penny that were the AI slop of the times.
All considered, I think it is a bit silly worrying about the kids not reading books when so few adults are reading books themselves.
Monkey see monkey do. If you want kids to read habitually then you need to read habitually.
It's like having sex after a whole day of sex work. Exhausting.
From what I am seeing around me though, reading for pleasure or even to gain knowledge has decreased a lot. I noticed it in adults first and this is being reflected in their children.
I think it's undeniable that a lot of good comes from reading, and many here would probably agree it's better than scrolling Instagram reels or even watching YouTube videos. Still, reading by itself is just one medium that we found useful over the many years of human history: it's a way to learn about the world that surrounds us, or immerse ourselves in fantasy worlds. We as humans found text on paper to be a convenient way to share ideas relatively cheaply, while also being expressive.
I'm mentioning this only because I feel like "reading for pleasure" is the wrong framing for moral judgement, I imagine it's something more fundamental like what we perceive to be cultural activities that have lasting impact on our day-to-day. I imagine young parents nowadays are less strict on prioritizing their children's reading habits, because they themselves grew up in an environment where that wasn't strictly necessary to have relatively good career options.
The digital age opened up a few venues to cheat book reading, since there are now plentiful Reddit discussions on any classical book you're interested in, which were present even before the advent of LLMs. To play devil's advocate, is it truly worse to read a thread of people discussing an idea (i.e. HN), or read the book itself, and how do we know that? Perhaps it's the act itself of exploring the idea that's useful, not necessarily the action by which you do it? I imagine I'm not the only one who's dropped a book half-read because they felt satisfied by the author's answer halfway through.
I hope this comment wasn't too off-topic from the main point of "pleasure", it's just something I've been mulling over recently.
If your quality bar is 'better information retention' then reading is going to be hard to beat. Videos/podcasts don't measure up.
'pleasure' is hard to measure, and gets confounded because reading takes more effort than watching a video/listening to a podcast.
My memory is that the only things better than reading are doing it yourself, and writing about it.
We generally worry less if we see utility in it, and if we have people to share our hobby with. I think it's reasonable to say there's few hobbies out there without real world utility.
Both reading and podcasts cover range of difficulties and topics.
It looks to me far away over there in the "what's my profit in reading" direction I'm afraid.
Books were entertainment when that's all the world offered. Now whenever reading gets mentioned online, it's a "smarter way" to consume entertainment. Readers always give off a smug aura.
Technology has come along and with that visuals, audio, engagement.
The Tiktok Algorithm is this generation's Shakespeare. This isn't a bad thing.