Reading for pleasure is sharply down among schoolkids, report shows

https://www.nbcnews.com/data-graphics/kids-reading-less-lower-levels-department-education-study-rcna348987

by freejoe76 • 1 month ago

254 338 1 month ago

damnesian• 1 month ago

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.

fatnoah• 1 month ago

Possibly (probably?) a coincidence, but it did look like broad changes to how reading was taught started to land in 2010-2012: https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/common-standards-dr...

The real culprit is probably more in line with far more alternatives to reading for entertainment.

windows_hater_7• 1 month ago

Not a rigorous response, but Minecraft.

netsharc• 1 month ago

My guess is smartphones hitting a point of increased adoption. In the "good old days", phone games were honest and not addiction-inducing adware..

boombapoom2• 1 month ago

you kidding me? they were absolutely addicting. Just not casino style.

iaaan2• 1 month ago

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.

RattlesnakeJake• 1 month ago

...someone cute might see me reading and become interested in me.

Did it work? :)

bryanlarsen• 1 month ago

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.

soupfordummies2• 1 month ago

2012 is pretty much the year smartphone addiction began approaching critical mass

camgunz• 1 month ago

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.

darth_avocado• 1 month ago

So you need to look at complete data. This will give you that: https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/ltt/2025/reading/scores-pe...

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.

watwut11• 1 month ago

This is about pleasure reading, not about reading comprehenshion scores. Those are two different only somewhat related things.

DocTomoe3• 1 month ago

Late December 2010 was the last release of a Harry Potter movie, cutting off the movie -> book pipeline.

lukan2• 1 month ago

The mayan calendar ended/started a new. So apparently the doomsday did happen, we just did not really notice while being distracted with our new gadgets ...

general1465• 1 month ago

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.

lawn• 1 month ago

That difference is like comparing taking a piss and having sex. While you use the same body part the experiences are not at all alike.

05• 1 month ago

The thing with analogies, we can make them go either way.

It's like having sex after a whole day of sex work. Exhausting.

nickthegreek2• 1 month ago

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.

boombapoom2• 1 month ago

we have phones and tables to blame. The less of those, the more of reading.

prds_lost• 1 month ago

*proceeds to shake fist at table.

"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"

soupfordummies2• 1 month ago

Amen brother. I don't know how to hear anymore about tables.

chickensong3• 1 month ago

/tableflip

protocolture2• 1 month ago

I read books on my phone.

deadbabe• 1 month ago

Do internet comments count as reading?

doubled112• 1 month ago

I don't know if kids are even reading comments. There's another perfectly good video with just a quick swipe.

stephbook• 1 month ago

Thanks now I'm imagining HN as an endless torrent of TikTok videos, where it's an AI voice reading the comments.

socalgal2• 1 month ago

Recommendations? What are you reading?

I recently enjoyed a few books of the "We are Legion, We are Bob" series

ge96• 1 month ago

Legacy Fleet Trilogy

Fun easy read, Sourdough / 24 hr library (Robin Sloan)

2OEH8eoCRo02• 1 month ago

Ubik is one of my faves

losvedir2• 1 month ago

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).

AngryData3• 1 month ago

Really loved The Hyperion Cantos and The Forever War.

For a shorter classic I found Robur the Conqueror highly entertaining.

rapnie• 1 month ago

The Hyperion Cantos by Dan Simmons is great. It may also be nice to recommend books that have movie or streaming series to them. Books are most of the time better than the movie as your own fantasy and imagination just makes it so. Altered Carbon by Richard Morgan is a good example.

nickthegreek2• 1 month ago

Just did the bobiverse series after furiously consuming all the dungeon crawler carl and now I am starting Red Rising.

Hnrobert42• 1 month ago

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.

analog31• 1 month ago

I love history and biography. Robert Caro' biography of LBJ. I also loved Don Quixote. The Iliad.

therealdrag02• 1 month ago

This is a good sub for discussing sci-fi and finding recs. https://www.reddit.com/r/printSF/

nevster• 1 month ago

Another idea for you - search for "booktube" on youtube. Plenty of recommendations!

CableNinja2• 1 month ago

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.

jillesvangurp• 1 month ago

Same, mainstream book sites are a bit broken when it comes to surfacing anything outside the one size fits all notion of "best sellers". I rarely care about best sellers. Bland thrillers, chick lit, etc. Not my thing. And the whole all recommendations converge on Harry Potter as the best thing ever is a bit lame at this point.

LLMs can be much better at recommendations. Honestly, Amazon needs to spank their recommendation teams into doing something productive with this. They clearly have the ability to run LLMs at scale. But their in house recommendation teams seem to be stuck in the pre LLM era and there hasn't been any material change in their very broken and underwhelming recommendations in well over a decade.

I actually dumped the list of books I've bought on Amazon over the last 15 years as a text file at some point and dumped that in ChatGPT. Quite interesting to see it pick up on my tastes. What works really well is taking a few books that you enjoy and asking it to find similar books. You need to set a few guard rails. Recommend new authors, don't recommend stuff I already have read, etc. But that's not a huge amount of context. Amazon seems incapable of doing this. It always funnels me to the same tired list of recommendations of shit I've declined to buy from them for years.

mnsc2• 1 month ago

What was the 'don't read the summaries' book?

PebblesRox3• 1 month ago

In high school I was at a friend’s house. Half of the bookshelf was filled with books I loved and the other half with books I’d never heard of! I felt like a prospector striking gold :) Cool to think that we have something similar on demand now!

Der_Einzige2• 1 month ago

Presently surprised by the lack of /lit/ meme recommendations like “infinite jest” or “gravities rainbow”.

I’ll throw a fun one in. Anything by De Sade.

I’m always fascinated by the idea that we should push kids to read as much as possible as fast as possible. Reading is a deeply subversive activity. Give the kid a copy of something like “the pedogogy of the oppressed” and soon enough you (the teacher) may find your back being put against the wall by the very same kids.

I think people would rather kids don’t read and stay tik tok addicts rather than the school system try to teach 14 year olds about literature through the book Lolita (and yes this does happen in public high schools all across the USA).

PebblesRox3• 1 month ago

Kings of the Wyld is a lot of fun. Plus it’s always refreshing to have a middle-aged protagonist instead of a teen or young adult.

interloxia• 1 month ago

Here are our top ~500 English picture books from Open Library that my kids liked enough that we've read at least twice.

The quality of the scans are usually poor and occasionally pages are missing and many have been removed. It's been great for us.

https://openlibrary.org/people/duiznwudidj/books/want-to-rea...

xpct5• 1 month ago

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.

nottorp2• 1 month ago

I hope this comment wasn't too off-topic from the main point of "pleasure"

It looks to me far away over there in the "what's my profit in reading" direction I'm afraid.

xpct5• 1 month ago

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.

camillomiller• 1 month ago

It is completely off in the opposite direction

forlorn_mammoth• 1 month ago

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.

xpct5• 1 month ago

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.

watwut11• 1 month ago

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.

protocolture2• 1 month ago

If your quality bar is 'better information retention' then reading is going to be hard to beat. Videos/podcasts don't measure up.

My memory is that the only things better than reading are doing it yourself, and writing about it.

bratwurst3000• 1 month ago

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.

CuriouslyC• 1 month ago

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.

customguy• 1 month ago

I think writing is needed to learn how to organize and express complex chains of thoughts. And to learn how to write well, you need to know how to read critically, too. It goes hand in hand. The same skills you apply to the words of others you can apply to your own, if you have them.

electroweak2• 1 month ago

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.

JoshTriplett• 1 month ago

Did you ask them how much they read as ebooks? Libby is very popular.

nemomarx• 1 month ago

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.

electroweak2• 1 month ago

That would have been a good follow up question - I'll ask next term.

Theodores• 1 month ago

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.

2OEH8eoCRo02• 1 month ago

Many people worry about children not reading enough but when you look at the parents they're all on their phones.

Monkey see monkey do. If you want kids to read habitually then you need to read habitually.

DocTomoe3• 1 month ago

parents could be heard telling their kids 'don't stay up too late reading', as if it could be a problem. F

Having lived on this planet for a while now, I am under the impression that anything non-adults do always is a problem, no matter what it is.

larrik3• 1 month ago

It's worse than this.

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.

an0malous2• 1 month ago

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.

larrik3• 1 month ago

The point is that "doing hard things" is required to be a successful adult. Meanwhile, the bar for what constitutes a "hard thing" is dropping fast.

AngryData3• 1 month ago

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.

hgoel2• 1 month ago

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.

seventytwo2• 1 month ago

What an asinine take.

teeray• 1 month ago

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.

stogot• 1 month ago

This has been tested: human instructor vs video, and the human instruction provides measurably better outcomes by an order of magnitude

snayan• 1 month ago

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?

kelnos2• 1 month ago

I think a world where people are just automatons who ask AIs to do things for them is a pretty bleak world.

Reading, writing, being able to focus on things... these are healthy things that healthy brains do. And I don't think that's just a case of it always being that way in the past, so any change to that is bad. I think humans as a species will die if we give this sort of thing up, and I don't think I'm exaggerating or engaging in AI doomerism here.

Not to mention that AI isn't that good. Maybe it will be, but I'm skeptical. Human progress will basically stop if we lose a generation of kids to this brainrot, with barely-capable AIs that can't even design their successors and move humanity forward. Who else will push humanity forward, if the next several generations of kids are intellectually incapable of doing so?

failbuffer• 1 month ago

Why learn arithmetic when we have calculators?

Reading, writing, and math are foundational skills that, aside from having enormous utility in their own right, are also crucial for developing sharp, creative, and analytical minds.

Take writing as an example: it challenges you to organize your thoughts, patch up the weaknesses of your arguments, and find effective means of connecting with your audience. In so doing, you restructure your own understanding of the world, deepening your expertise and mental schemas. That's something an LLM can't do.

sersi• 1 month ago

At the Montessori school my kid goes to, children read a lot. They have access to the Library, can ask the teacher to go there when they need/want to. The school has a no phone policy, children are not allowed to bring them to school. Computers are only in the computer room for children to access when they want to do research and there are no laptops in the class room.

It works well and the children are both happy and do well academically

GJim• 1 month ago

Those downvoting you appear unaware what 'Devils Advocate' means.

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/devil-s-...

How sad it has come to this.

helterskelter• 1 month ago

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.

kelnos2• 1 month ago

as a kid, during the summer, I'd do nothing for days but read nonstop

Same! Our local library had a thing where you'd keep a list of all the books you read over the summer, and the week before school started you could turn the list in for a prize. I don't at all remember anything about the prizes, but I remember all the fun and joy I had reading the books and imagining other lives and worlds than my own.

watwut11• 1 month ago

Young adult fiction being the fing young adults read the most makes 100% sense.

madaxe_again4• 1 month ago

Man, I literally never stopped as a kid - I always had a dogeared paperback on my person, in case a few spare minutes presented themselves to read.

And when I say “spare minutes” I mean… any time anyone wasn’t saying “put down that fucking book!” - I don’t know if the phenomenon of hiding a novel in a textbook and looking very very studious in class is even a thing any more.

These days I read almost exclusively on my phone, for much the same reason. If you flip open a paperback because you’re out for dinner and every other fucker isn’t talking but rather doomscrolling you look weird. If you give the appearance of also probably doing instragram or whatever, it’s socially acceptable.

Idk. I’m in my 40s now, I remember being mocked for being a bookworm when I was a kid, and I suppose this is just the same pattern - reading, knowing things, expanding your horizons - these things are not cool, and I don’t know if they ever were.

cucumber37328422• 1 month ago

"[as they grow up] these covid kids are gonna move like a wave through everything that requires literacy"

-some teacher from Brooklyn that I know

drob5182• 1 month ago

Yep, it’s a crisis. We’re raising kids that are illiterate and frankly just dumb. You ever watch those YouTube videos where they interview college kids (who were actually accepted to a college!) and they can’t correctly answer who fought in the US Civil War and other basic knowledge questions? They don’t know the difference between continents and countries (e.g. Europe and a country within Europe). They can’t tell you who the Vice President is, never mind their Senators or their state governor. Clearly the education establishment has failed in a big way. And clearly, technology in the classroom has not improved anything.

globular-toast3• 1 month ago

Personally, I'd drop technology from the classroom entirely.

Definitely. When I was in school we started to have projectors in classrooms but I honestly don't think they added much at all. Seeing a "modern" classroom with electronic whiteboards and tablets everywhere is horrifying.

I doubt any paedagogues were asking for this. What's more likely is Microsoft and Google realised there were education budgets all over the world they weren't yet harvesting.

fractallyte• 1 month ago

Projectors and electronic whiteboards elevated lessons for me. Ever see a science teacher try to draw a galaxy or nebula on a blackboard, and try to describe the awesomeness of it using just words?

Math concepts, especially visualizations, become so much more accessible.

One math teacher in my school used an analog overhead projector as part of his workflow: he would write math on a long transparency roll, sitting at his desk, facing the class, so every student could see exactly how their work should be reasoned-about and laid out properly. He could rewind (literally) to any previous point in the lesson.

As always, it comes down to one's ability to use the tools effectively.

dyauspitr5• 1 month ago

Drop technology entirely and start failing them. You’ll never find an Asian school taking mercy on their kids.

kakacik2• 1 month ago

FOMO at its best, fuck their personalities and development and having happy childhood as base layer of personality for rest of their lives, its grades at all costs!

Famously most of asian kids wear glasses from studying all the time, well we need up up that up! What if they overtake us in some rat race. Not the best parenting but some folks are like that and then it shows on kids, thats true.

mensetmanusman• 1 month ago

This is why Asian countries are dying faster though.

Schlagbohrer8• 1 month ago

At the risk of a flamewar I want to say that I still don't accept audiobooks as a 100% drop in replacement for actually reading. I know a lot of millenials my age who insist that listening to an audiobook while <driving/cleaning/walking/biking/cooking> is completely the same as actually sitting down and focusing without distractions on a paper book for hours. But it isn't! Firstly, much is lost without seeing the formatting of the page, and without being able to flip back to an earlier page easily to re-read something. Secondly, sitting down and reading develops concentration and focus.

I'm interested in hearing the opinions of people who agree or disagree with my take. I'm not saying audiobooks are bad, but, they are not at all equivalent to real reading.

alt187• 1 month ago

I agree with the sitting down and focusing part. For me, I've always been extremely inclined to audio processing, so I can sometimes just lay in bed or in a chair, or on the train, and... listen to an audio book. I really don't think it makes a big difference, at least for me. I used to be attached to the sensory experience of flicking pages, but there's also a big factor in letting the book (or, the narrator) take you to their own pace. A good narrator really completes a story.

All that stuff about listening to an audiobook while working out, or cooking, driving, or anything is crystallized bravado from people who think it makes them look clever that they can do two things badly at the same time.

dmpk2k• 1 month ago

You're right that a lot of material really does require a physical book. Anything even remotely technical.

That said, I would argue that a voice actor is far more significant than page formatting when it comes to novels. A good voice actor can turn a good story great, and sometimes a poor story to... acceptable.

I've read thousands of novels over the decades, both with and without audio, so I'm reasonably confident about the above.

Silamoth• 1 month ago

This should be entirely non-controversial. Listening is much more passive. You can zone out more easily without re-reading. You don’t have to work your brain to figure out pacing or anything like that.

I think the only people who claim audiobooks are the same as actual reading are people who have never bothered to do much actual reading.

pbalau• 1 month ago

I disagree. I don't read because I like to read books, I don't listen to audiobooks because I like listening to audiobooks, I don't talk to people because I like talking with people, heck, I don't take pictures because I like taking pictures.

I like stories and all of the above are simply ways of hoarding more stories. The way I'm getting the story is not important, the story is.

bashmelek• 1 month ago

I exclusively read physical books, but not as a matter of principle, simply practice. I very much agree that they are different. The bigger thing, of course, is that no matter the medium, that the individual pay attention.

It is okay to listen to audiobooks, but there are other things going on with reading, and more with a physical book. When I read, I choose what to emphasize, and how to pace. I parse out the clauses, the phrasing, the pronunciation, enunciation. If I read Tolkien I give the songs tunes. I give voices to the characters. I remember where on the page something happened, and may go back for it, especially in nonfiction. I pause to digest.

Audiobooks are a different experience. And I, personally, am prone to breaks in concentration. But I think any adult should be capable and should actively practice all forms: silently reading books, listening to a book being read to you, and reading aloud to another. Consuming books is not just a matter of downloading information. It also is to be actively digested and felt. For TV shows, for example, some people watch on high speed, or play it in the background, but I feel that even if they get the plot points they miss a lot. So too with books when not given proper attention.

Edit: I’ll add, some works are meant to be listened to, they may have some tone or rhythm, trope or cantillation. Maybe even gestures. If I said “Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair,” you know how how it sounds. And I think practice in recitation lets us preserve this in the art.

larrik3• 1 month ago

I personally can't stand audiobooks (or podcasts, or videos), so I'm with you there. I just read way too fast, and they feel so slow.

On the other hand, one of my kids has a pretty severe eye problem mixed with dyslexia, so audiobooks are basically his only real option (large print is hard to find, especially for books aimed at younger readers, and tablet reading is tiring). So, I'm glad they exist, at least.

NickC253• 1 month ago

fellow Fairfield County native here. Likely around the same age as you. I went to a great public school (I was a terrible student, crippling ADHD but that's another story for another day) in the southern half of the county. I'll let you guess which one. Also spent a few years in another of the top districts (west of the capital, again, easy to guess ;P) before making the move south.

It's NOT the schools. They are well funded and as you say, pretty helpless because teachers, even younger ones, just aren't able to deal with kids whose parents shoved a smartphone into their hands at age 3.

It's NOT the parents - in order to keep up with the jonses in those towns, you have to work like a dog and most likely, both parents are in high stress demanding environments in order to make enough to live there. I was fortunate that my dad did quite well for our family, but there's no way I could raise a kid in that environment.

It's the fucking devices, and the drive to put tech everywhere in the classroom. When I was a kid we had a single Mac in the classroom (besides the teacher's computer), mainly to dick around with Oregon Trail, Math Blaster, or some typing app. We wanted to play games? We went outside and played sports, or stayed inside and played games like scrabble or chess.

In high school we had to do genuine research 15-20+ page papers as early as Sophomore year. There was zero Wikipedia, much less ChatGPT or Claude.

Of course, a book, which requires attention, effort, and has no distractions, is not going to capture the attention and imagination of someone who has had the world and all of its distractions at their fingertips since they gained consciousness, and weren't made to socialize without devices.

And no, we cannot allow people to pass to the next grade without mastering the skills required of their current grade. This needs to be completely iron clad and not up for debate. I was nearly held back 3-4 times. I am an idiot. I was miles ahead of where elementary school and middle school kids are today. I don't care if a wealthy Ivy grad and his management consultant wife donate a bunch of money to make sure their kid can pass - if their kid can't read or write, their kid can't pass.

garciasn2• 1 month ago

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.

slibhb• 1 month ago

It's not that there's social pressure specifically against reading. Just that there's social pressure to conform, and most people aren't reading.

chickensong3• 1 month ago

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.

encrypted_bird3• 1 month ago

Hey, come on... I have ADHD and love reading. No need to use that as a bludgeon. It's unnecessary...

ojbyrne• 1 month ago

I’m 65. I’m pretty sure I heard plenty of snide “nose buried in a book” cracks when i was growing up.

m-hodges• 1 month ago

I think this is how Beauty And The Beast opens.

raddan3• 1 month ago

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.

hylaride3• 1 month ago

It's funny how that works.

I (90s high schooler) was made fun of merely for being on the internet or being able to fix electronics. The early days of Facebook were amusing (when everybody was friending everybody), seeing the same people that bullied me spending hours on end playing FarmVille.

While I never physically fought back, but one of my friends (who had a LOT of success almost immediately after high school) did pass on of our tormentors working construction in the street and made eye contact...in his very expensive SLK Mercedes. Not to degenerate construction work, but there was a lot of satisfaction for him in that moment.

It still surprises me how the peking order in schools so poorly represents real life. A few years ago at a previous job, we had an HR woman who was almost certainly a "popular" kid in school, comment how much fun being around us "nerds" was.

TFNA• 1 month ago

these days

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.

eru2• 1 month ago

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.

rglover• 1 month ago

Not what am I reading...but what am I reading for? Well, shit! You stumped me!

solumunus3• 1 month ago

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.

chicken-stew2• 1 month ago

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).

Schlagbohrer8• 1 month ago

My apologies for over-commenting in this page but, uh, is there a way to read without reading the words? WTF does "I need to consume the text word for word, scanning with my eyes." mean? Are people reading with their eyes closed or using braille or listening to the paper or something?

Groxx• 1 month ago

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.

frankohn2• 1 month ago

Having all the time the nose in a book is a disfunctional behavior just like being on the phone all the time is disfunctional.

Of course other people are applying the conformity rule and they're pretending that their phone addiction is normal but both behavior are disfunctional.

However there are still people that are able to function normally and they do whatever they are doing being present to their activity and to the things around them, for example noticing people, speaking to them, greeting them, listening to them etcetera.

I too love reading but I know recognize that there is a moment to read and have pleasure and moments we need to do something else and take pleasure just in the activity we are doing, even if it is just eating or washing the dishes. It also important to accord our attention to people around us and that will give us joy as well.

Don't get defensive saying: you too has a problem, mind your business. Life your life fully being present in each moment and do not try to seek the "pleasure" at every moment, otherwise a book addiction is not any different than a phone addiction.

Der_Einzige2• 1 month ago

Child raised with this mentality will throw you in a retirement home and disown you. I don’t blame them one bit.

globular-toast3• 1 month ago

It's not about the reading. It's about: a) being different, and b) making them feel guilty for not reading themselves. I used to get the same for being vegetarian, for much the same reasons. These days it's less weird and, oddly, I feel like people are almost envious that I get to have a "cool" label and they don't. It's strange because it's quite easy to get the label yourself if you want it, but it's hard to change habits.

dyauspitr5• 1 month ago

I read a lot too, but it’s somewhere around 50 a year. How on earth are you getting through two books a week? What sort of books are these? I confess I read a lot of sci-fi and fantasy that are between 500 and 800 pages each. That’s not all of my reading, but I’d say at least 50% is.

garciasn2• 1 month ago

On vacation, for example, I'll read 1-2 books a day. I would say most books I read are in the 300-350p range; just because that's what most books are, it seems.

Schlagbohrer8• 1 month ago

Similarly, people are socially allowed to be buried in their phones while at work and this doesn't get critized by managers much, but god help you if you had a magazine or book open when taking a short break.

criddell• 1 month ago

If you don't pay attention to the NFL, you might have missed Philadelphia Eagles player AJ Brown reading a book on the sidelines:

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/koyNVSD2vyU

There were many performative hot takes at the time. The best part though, for me, was coach Nick Sirianni defending him when asked about it after the game. Sirianni said:

Some guys pray in between, some guys mediate in between. A.J. reads in between. Whatever these guys need to do to put their mind in a place where they can play with great detail and great effort, I fully encourage them to do that

Schlagbohrer8• 1 month ago

Is this in the united states? The usa has a shockingly anti-intellectual culture and has been so for my whole life.

aerhardt2• 1 month ago

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.

[1] https://www.cultura.gob.es/ca/actualidad/2026/01/260122-baro...

watwut11• 1 month ago

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.

aerhardt2• 1 month ago

It tests general reading comprehension. Is it possible that a generation with abysmal reading comprehension and attention copiously reads for pleasure? Yes, but I’m very doubtful.

wafflerewire• 1 month ago

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.

hirvi743• 1 month ago

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.

djeastm• 1 month ago

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.

therealdrag02• 1 month ago

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.

TurdF3rguson• 1 month ago

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.

semireg• 1 month ago

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.

hirvi743• 1 month ago

Because it is exercise for the imaginative mind.

So is playing, daydreaming, acting/theater, various visual arts, etc..

To call reading “consumptive” is severely minimizing literature’s impact on communication throughout human history.

The topic is centered around reading for pleasure, not for all facets and purposes that reading serves, e.g., documentation, communication, etc..

her reading undoubtedly shaped her and helped her understand the world and her experiences within it.

But why does the medium have to be reading to get this benefit? Would listening to a storyteller or an audiobook not confer the same benefits?

NoMoreNicksLeft• 1 month ago

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.

hirvi743• 1 month ago

Reading connotes all sorts of hard-to-measure advantages and growth that nothing else even comes close to.

For example..?

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.

What growth and based on what evidence?

The audio book might be the exact same story as the paperback, but the effect is not equivalent.

Again, what is this 'effect?' You keep repeating some ethereal benefit that has yet to be named. While audiobooks and paperback are not perfectly equivalent, the two are not meaningfully different.

https://news.berkeley.edu/2019/08/19/readingbrainmap/

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.3102/003465432110608...

emmelaich• 1 month ago

I wonder how much of the problem is the books they're given to read.

Modern kids / YA fiction seems so blah.

lukewrites4• 1 month ago

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.

hahajk• 1 month ago

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.

lukewrites4• 1 month ago

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.

cwbaker400• 1 month ago

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.

andrew_lettuce5• 1 month ago

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.

NeutralCrane2• 1 month ago

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.

ingvay7• 1 month ago

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.

raddan3• 1 month ago

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.

talon8635• 1 month ago

Less literature on offer? It seems to me the easiest time in human history to access any information whatsoever, including any and all literature.

The quality of modern literature may well be declining, but the is literally endless reading material everywhere

riffraff2• 1 month ago

I think GP meant it's not just "laying around", you have to actively look for books.

When I was a kid I had a ton of books from my parents in the house and when bored I could pick one up.

That's not the same as having a computer, tablet or phone, cause kids will gravitate towards non-reading activities.

(If everyone in the family owns an e-reader this obviously would be a different situation)

lukewrites4• 1 month ago

Sorry, I edited out some context there. What I meant is that _at school_ there's less literature on offer; instead, kids are burdened with reading "instructional texts" that are as terrible and lifeless as the name sounds.

I think parents have to counteract the negative effects of this by exposing their kids to the joys of words and reading. I agree with you 100% that there's an amazing diversity of texts out there now! Every so often when I grab an ereader I think about how blown away I would have been as a kid to think that I could take HUNDREDS of books with me on vacation.

matwood• 1 month ago

there is less literature on offer

Huh? When I was growing up we had the newspaper, Readers Digest, and maybe a library book at home to read (out side of school books). Now I have access to pretty much anything ever written on my phone. Lack of options is not why people read less.

globular-toast3• 1 month ago

Nor do they have books in the house. It's a great time to be a book lover because you can accumulate a huge library for next to nothing by harvesting all the stuff people are giving away. But you can go into a house with children these days and see not a single book in sight. It's sad.

pendenthistory• 1 month ago

No, that is the wrong causality. There is a third factor which make both parents and kids not read.

bitmasher9• 1 month ago

Reader here, about 50 books a year.

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.

procarch2019• 1 month ago

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.

hsuduebc2• 1 month ago

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.

It's the damn phone.

crooked-v• 1 month ago

So how much of this is a consequence of small children being taught to guess instead of to actually read? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_cueing

weedfroglozenge2• 1 month ago

Are we surprised?

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.

stringfood• 1 month ago

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

prettygood• 1 month ago

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.

NeutralCrane2• 1 month ago

It’s absolutely a bad thing, and there’s extensive research demonstrating it

weedfroglozenge2• 1 month ago

Perhaps the research is wrong though because our way of thinking has been "slow, controlled, non intensive".

Now that technology CAN give us content at faster speeds, isn't it better for the brains to change to adapt to the short form cycles? Otherwise you'll be left behind stuck on topic one when the new generation have absorbed 1, 2, 3, 4. etc.

zhivota• 1 month ago

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.

JimsonYang• 1 month ago

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

seanmcdirmid• 1 month ago

Yes. The hardest part about telling my kid to get off his device is setting a good example by getting off mine.

Frieren• 1 month ago

It is the phones fault and it affects more than kids.

It is the business model. There is an incentive to make games addictive. Like arcade games the goal is to keep kids as much time on the machine as possible. But now the arcade is in your pocket 24/7.

Even worse, there is an incentive even to just open the app as it is an opportunity to show you an Ad. Notifications, and periodical rewards make sure that there is a constant need to interact with the phone.

Unregulated markets will always end up in scams and addiction. Because both are the fastest and more reliable way of getting money.

jrflo2• 1 month ago

It's not even just kids, this is true for all people to be honest. Not saying we should go back to an agrarian society but maybe unrestricted access to dopamine slot machines isn't a good idea for your brain.

madaxe_again4• 1 month ago

I had a really effective inoculation against the Skinner box 20+ years ago, when I became addicted to an MMO. It took my life utterly turning to shit and barely escaping being kicked out of university for me to wake up.

Since, I’ve always been aware of and wary of the possibility of this kind of dopamine cycling.

I see it in others. My wife discovered YouTube shorts a year or so ago, and now she’ll lose entire days to watching 20 second clips of reality TV.

Thing is, with a grown ass adult you can’t limit their screen time. You have to let them dig to the bottom of the pit all by themselves, and only when they ask for help to get out of it can you help - otherwise nothing is learned.

It’s honestly not at all dissimilar to friends who I’ve seen fuck their existences up with drugs. They’ve had to hit rock bottom before they quit - or they died. Can’t think of anyone who just went “actually, today I won’t have any heroin”.

kakacik2• 1 month ago

Kids do what parents do, and what parents allow them to do. Allowing X hours daily gaming/screens is already bad parenting (depending on age but we talk about kids here), like it or not ask psychologists. At the end its just same genes & upbringing from the same genes (or failure to do so and ie nanny picks up).

Everything else is just an empty blah. Every single time there is unruly kid, I look at parental behaviors and its pretty obvious. Reverse is also true - every properly caring involved parent has much better behaving kid(s) around.

ivell• 1 month ago

There are kids with autism and ADHD that you may have not considered.

blks• 1 month ago

It’s devices but also parents. If parents don’t read books everyday, kids won’t either.

bcjdjsndon8• 1 month ago

Why can't you read from a screen instead? Why do all the benefits of reading seemingly disappear when read from a display screen?

beezlewax• 1 month ago

You may have noticed the same behavioural issues amongst your adult friends or at times in yourself. I know I have. Anytime I give up doom scrolling for a week or two I feel instantly less anxious about the world and everything going on around me.

Social media is a plague and will likely be looked on by the psychiatric/medical professional as extremely harmful in years to come. Something akin to smoking.

bcjdjsndon8• 1 month ago

Social media is a plague and will likely be looked on by the psychiatric/medical professional as extremely harmful in years to come.

Not only will it not, autism will not last more than 25 years in it's current form. I bet money on both of those

jackp96• 1 month ago

Absolutely. I was homeschooled growing up, and my parents were fairly strict about screentime. We read anything we could get our hands on, and I feel like I'm a happier, healthier adult today because of it.

While I'm now on my phone too much, and I don't read fiction as much as I used to, I'm grateful for those foundations.

The friction and discomfort that come from reading/exercising/learning/growing is so important, and I hope we can find a healthier balance for the next generation.

bcjdjsndon8• 1 month ago

You're on a screen right now. I like how all these parents decrying the evils of screentime dont think they should get off it themselves.

I watched Harvey price, a fairly famous autistic person in the UK edit his own video on an iPad, adding sounds etc. I think that's fantastic self directed learning and it came from, shock horror, a screen. I think this anti-screen sentiment is hysteria, plain and simple.

bcjdjsndon8• 1 month ago

asking to do things outside like learning to ride bikes

They sound deprived, why haven't you got them a bike if you're complaining about screen time?

It's such a huge difference. It is the devices. It's 100% the devices.

You sound like you're convincing yourself here.

kuerbel2• 1 month ago

It depends on what they are doing on the device, 100%. When I was a kid I got a GameBoy, one of those old red ones, played tetris or Mario Land for an hour and after that it was boring and I did something else. Got an N64 which was already way more engaging, but even then after an hour or two I was done.

It just got worse the more sophisticated games became. And now we have infinite videos and content, infinite scrolling and such. How is a child supposed to withstand this onslaught? I only managed this by uninstalling YouTube and all apps with shorts.

originalvichy• 1 month ago

This sort of analysis can help find a healthy level of gaming or computer use. I spent hours reading Microsoft’s offline encyclopedia on the family PC, and playing games like Age of Empires which taught me history on the side.

Take control of what your kids play, and you can help them find more beneficial uses of electronics which is not an endless loop of bite sized low quality entertainment! :)

bawolff• 1 month ago

I think the internet is the real problem. Infinite choices, and sites designed specificly to keep you hooked. I feel like addictivity falls a lot when you are stuck with just offline things.

superxpro122• 1 month ago

There's some real value in playing older video games precisely because they were developed before immoral engineers got involved and focused on creating engagement solely to be engaging. Prior to this, games were good because of story or challenge, and the engagement naturally followed.

Today, you can see the engagement engineering everywhere. ESPECIALLY IN MOBILE... omg the FOMO, flash colors, 3 second screen transitions, gambling mechanics. It's an addicts nightmare.

S_Bear• 1 month ago

I've been replaying some of the games of my youth, and they are either super easy or don't take very much time (I remember the original Final Fantasy being this vast epic tale; it took me 9-ish hours to beat as an adult. My Punch-Out reflexes didn't die, and I made it to re-skinned Mike Tyson on my first go.) A third of a game of Civ V takes longer than any of the NES and Genesis games I played as a kid.

pipes• 1 month ago

Yep both the snes and N64 definitely negatively affected my attainment in school. It's an uncomfortable truth that in hindsight games did negatively affect me.

Now I waste time reading about how those old games were made!

hylaride3• 1 month ago

With real-time telemetry and feedback, companies now know what keeps people "engaged" and "hooked". It's god-awful for brains that are still developing.

kouteiheika• 1 month ago

It just got worse the more sophisticated games became.

I feel like it got worse not because games became more sophisticated, but because they got dumber and require less and less brainpower.

I spent my childhood playing ridiculous amount of video games, probably same amount or more as kids nowadays do. I had literally hundreds of Playstation games back in the day. And I turned out fine. But the difference was that I was playing a ton of games that required you to put some thought into them, and weren't easy, and often were story-heavy (e.g. JRPGs in particular; being from a non English-speaking country that's how I actually learned English!).

blahaj2• 1 month ago

I don't know how old your kids are and if they play video games with friends, so maybe they're too young for this to begin with.

Do you give them some kind of additional time budget that they can manage themselves over a longer period? There are things that you can do on a screen that just take more time than one hour at once, especially when you're playing with friends (or even learning something by programming etc.).

jhedwards• 1 month ago

Just for some perspective, my kids get about 1 hour of screen time a day, and a lot of my friends are shocked at how much they watch. I'm glad you made this change and saw the positive effect, especially to the extent that they started choosing other activities over screen time, but I can't image how much they were watching before you "cut down" to 2 hours a day, and how you could have felt that that was OK for children?

ido• 1 month ago

They didn't write how old the kids were, there's a big difference between a 3 year old and a 12 year old.

Ntrails• 1 month ago

It is the devices. It's 100% the devices.

That anyone is pretending otherwise is mind boggling to me.

losvedir2• 1 month ago

How old are the kids? Honestly two hours of screens and devices seems like a lot to me, so I'm surprised that's where you cut down to. How much were they using them before? But my kids are young, so it's probably different if you're talking about like teens or something.

ImaCake• 1 month ago

If you go to the original link [0] you will see that things are actually pretty stable and okay?

0. https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/ltt/2025/

joe_the_user• 1 month ago

This is a link to reading test scores. Maybe reading test scores can stay stable while actual reading declines. I don't think situation is fine.

pss314• 1 month ago

C-SPAN: Doctor on How Screen Time Hurts Kids' Cognitive Development https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fd-_VDYit3U

dehrmann• 1 month ago

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.

supertroop• 1 month ago

It means we’re moving back to peasant strata that do the most menial jobs and live in ghettos. Kids that can read will be in charge, mostly managing functional idiots who can’t even watch an entire TikTok short. It will be a huge underclass that will be too dumb to riot.

hgomersall• 1 month ago

Among US kids. FTFY.

Apparently in the UK it's up: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cze93wggw74o

dyauspitr5• 1 month ago

I wonder what is it that makes reading so good but all the other forms of information transmission since then seem to have a somewhat negative effect on overall learning and well-being.

amelius• 1 month ago

What if we made books with tiktok length chapters.

lukan2• 1 month ago

And big pictures. Oh wait, I think those are called comics. And the really short ones are children picture books. You know, because small children don't have the concentration to focus on longer stories.

skc• 1 month ago

My son (8 years old) is a bit of a unicorn in that he lives his devices and his books pretty much equally.

On any given day we're either telling him to put away his switch or his book because that's how engrossed he gets.

softwaredoug• 1 month ago

The research shows sharpest declines at 13 years. We have a lot of infrastructure to support young readers. But not the the older readers.

It’s not just screens.

Teenagers are overscheduled compared to years past. My son’s purpose in high school seems to be to build a resume for a future college. OTOH I got into a decent college with mediocre grades and not even trying.

He reads a lot - but it’s assigned reading.

So nerdy, smart kids like my son get taken out of the reading for fun group. Exactly the kinds of kids that would have been reading casually in decades past.

hylaride3• 1 month ago

What's worse is that in many areas kids are not allowed (or can't due to urban design) go out of the house on their own anymore. I would actually prefer my kid being out and getting into some trouble than waste around the house. I live in a walkable neighbourhood where kids seem to be out and about on their own around grade 5, so I hope it works out ok for my daughter.

Schlagbohrer8• 1 month ago

Am I the only old-head who hates video explanations when what I wanted was something I could read? I hate searching for information in the web and the only relevant results are videos, of course with ads at the front.

snakeman• 1 month ago

You are not. It's infuriating to the point I've used Gemini to make a readable summary of a video, which works pretty well since they have better access to all the video data/metadata than OpenAI/Anthropic.

expedition32• 1 month ago

The lack of attention span and calling more than 3 sentences "needlessly verbose". I am just happy that I didn't grow up in the brainrot era.

qwery4• 1 month ago

I don't mean to put this report down -- it's a good thing to monitor and report on. I'm glad someone is paying attention.

And how are the parents/adults doing?

It's just that the obvious first place to look every time some statistic like this comes out is the parents/teachers/adults. I'd put money on 'Reading for pleasure: all-time low'.

DocTomoe3• 1 month ago

So ... kids did read more in a time the single most influential kids book series was popular as compared to today? Surprise.

Kids did read more when stories were more about friendship, horses and/or adventure and sci-fi rather than pre-approved content-filtered social studies messaging? Surprise.

The obvious solution would be to force kids to read more from the approved reading list, courtesy by the school board⸮ That'll make them enjoy reading again⸮

(I am not saying technology is innocent in this development. I'm saying: there are several factors, and screen time is by far not the only one.

amanaplanacanal• 1 month ago

I'm pessimistic about the future. We stopped reading, we are outsourcing thinking to LLM assistants, and we put the dumbest people possible in charge of running the country. I don't see how this could possibly end well.

jdw643• 1 month ago

Realistically speaking, I also think of this as a kind of evolutionary process. It is about obtaining necessary information within the flood of information. I do think the amount of reading is important, but I also wonder whether unconditionally suppressing dopamine is the right approach. Wouldn't we become more vulnerable if we were raised in a sterile environment?

I think the middle ground is important.

rimliu2• 1 month ago

How do books equal sterile environment?

jdw643• 1 month ago

It is not that books are a sterile environment. Rather, I think the very attempt to isolate someone in an internet environment is itself a kind of sterile environment. To be honest, I think it is now difficult to get all information from books alone. I like reading too, but reading ultimately has a point where it becomes fixed at a particular moment. Do books from the 2010s align with theories from the 2020s? I don't think so. There is no need to know every trending theory, but conversely, I question whether we should be immersed only in books. Since the way we obtain information has fundamentally changed, I wonder whether reading must necessarily remain a hobby

jdw643• 1 month ago

I think the advantage of books is clear. A book has a logical beginning, development, turn, and conclusion all contained within one volume. In other words, you can learn that format itself, the method of logical exposition. But upon reflection, that is just a form, not the very essence of logical speaking. I certainly agree that books have formal advantages, but I don't think those are unique to books. Rather, the biggest drawback of books is that their form is fixed at a particular point in time. Critical thinking is not developed through books alone, and frankly, not all books are that good in terms of content either.

Andy_Donner• 1 month ago

I'm dyslexic and find reading genuinely taxing — my imagination moves faster than I can read, I lose the thread, and I've never enjoyed it. The last book I read for pleasure was when I was fifteen. I don't feel like I'm missing something.

But I read to my son every night and I love it. Not because I'm performing good parenting, but because it's one of the only times he just wants to sit with me rather than run off and do something else. He's completely absorbed. I get to be there with him in that.

He loves books in a way I never did and I'm glad. I wouldn't want him to have my relationship with them. The thread here keeps treating reading as a single thing — either you do it or you don't, and if you don't you're missing out. But being read to and reading alone are completely different experiences, and I think we underestimate how much the first one matters even for kids who will never be readers themselves.

decasteve• 1 month ago

I read to my two kids every day until they were 13-14 years old. They loved books. Every car ride was an opportunity to listen to an audiobook. The kids loved to write and make arts and crafts as well.

During the pandemic I took my kids out of public school for the first year of it. They went to an outdoor/nature based private school that popped up. It was a part time arrangement. The rest of their week was homeschooling. They read even more and even started doing math problems for fun. I stopped reading to my daughter because she wanted to read her own thing. I continued with my son who is two years younger.

After that year the kids went back to public school. My daughter was of age to go into high school. I was reticent because of the positive experience they just had and how happy my kids were at the time, and the awful experiences other kids were having with being stuck home online trying to have virtual classes at that age. The other kids were in and out of school with masks and sanitizing. Most have bad recollections of that first pandemic year. It was the opposite for us.

When they started high school there was an expectation to be connected via smartphone and social media. Without it, you were socially disconnected. The decline in reading for fun started there. The difficult experiences in high school, like bullying and social pressures to fit in, were amplified by the smartphones. By the time my daughter finished high school she stopped reading for fun entirely. My son is nearing the end of high school and he had similar experiences. They became less physically active, gave up on most sports they used to play.

Although, if I were to say what was the cause, I wouldn’t point to the devices, but the inability for the school system to adapt. The “social” media are gamified, pushing the psychological buttons of not only the kids, but for everyone. There’s the proverbial dopamine hit, toxic engagement, and reaction farming. Kids are potentially carrying a casino, brothel, and drug dealers in their pockets. Adults are having to deal with the same issues themselves. However, kids are in school. There’s an institution in place to guide them.

If we know attention spans and over-use of social media are a problem, the schools can adapt and compensate the other way. Remove it from the equation. Make education more physically hands on, more about training focus and self-discipline. Train them on tasks requiring longer periods of concentration. Go completely non-digital if you have to, or use fixed-in-place desktop computers where needed. Instead, they’ve allowed smartphones and social media to completely dominate the environment.

robviren• 1 month ago

Idk, since letting my son stay up as late as he wants reading trips to the library have been weekly, even as he transitions to actual no image chapter books. As others have said we try to time box tech best we can. I may have to physically lift him from the bed some days but it is worth it to find him passed out with a book in his hand at 10pm.

storus• 1 month ago

Kids are overloaded by homework, why would they want to do any "pleasure" reading in addition?

rimliu2• 1 month ago

for pleasure?

mattbettinson• 1 month ago

If I watched training videos all day at work, I don't think that would diminish my enjoyment of netflix

bondarchuk• 1 month ago

Well yes, because video is a different medium.

sardukardboard• 1 month ago

I recall enjoying books so much i would skip homework and read, regardless of feeling overloaded or not

Kids would even read in class and get their novels confiscated for the hour

mold_aid3• 1 month ago

I'm definitely on the "it's the devices" train, but reading instruction in school in the US after high school really breaks students into an absolute exhaustion with the practice. Not to mention they're still reading the stuff I read in the '80s. Certainly some exceptions but I do not think secondary instruction has the right take on this.

lo_zamoyski• 1 month ago

Education today is broken in general.

Few people have a clue about what education is actually for. How can you possibly educate students well if you don't know the destination? And how can you know the destination if you don't know what it means to be human? To be human entails a destination that is definitive for the species.

Overwhelmingly, education today is a shaped by the logic of consumerism. Consumerism begins with a false anthropology, that of the hedonistic homo economicus.

1. Schools send a strong message, whether explicitly or implicitly, that education is about "getting a job". It's about being able to secure a career. At the very least, it is sold primarily as a ticket out of poverty and a means of moving up the social ladder. In a competitive, hyperindividualistic, and consumerist society, status is measured by consumption, so education is a means to increase your power to consume.

2. How many times have we heard teachers say "knowledge is power"? That's a Baconian turn of phrase that represents a turn in scientific history where understanding and knowledge are subordinated to technical power and control. Understanding nature is here dethroned to make way for dominating nature. "Know-how" for us is more important that knowing the "what" and the "why".

3. The coverage of topics and how they're addressed is often jumbled and incoherent. There is some ordering, sure, but it is usually superficial and sloppy. Its practice is like that of some mysterious and obsolete ritual. Many pedagogues are simply bad.

4. Understanding is not rewarded as much as producing supposedly measurable results. In schools, the ultimate result is the grade. The grading system is inherently competitive and designed to rank people first and foremost in a technocratic fashion under the pretense of objectivity. This has "management science" written all over it.

5. Education fads and attempts to artificially infuse technology into education is motivated by profit and abetted by ignorance. Indeed, education in general is big business. Forget tablets and computers. It suffices to note the rapacious practices of the textbook industry, made worse by the fact that these textbooks are almost invariably terrible from a pedagogical standpoint.

Given the soullessness and mechanical nature of modern education, why should we be surprised by what we observe? (I'm not proposing some kind of squishy curriculum. Much of the "reform" of the last few decades that has received just derision is just as misguided, or even worse.) Just as we can talk about factory farming, we may talk about factory education. Students are numbers. But education occurs through relationships. This must begin with parents, but parents are too busy making ends meet or chasing the next promotion. When families were large, older siblings would pick up the slack.

The primary purpose of education is intellectual and moral freedom. Not hyperindividualist freedom, which is about the satisfaction of appetite and the ability to do whatever you happen to feel like doing. The classical view of freedom, which is the ability to do what is objectively good and the ability to be more fully human. Since human beings are essentially intellectual beings and moral beings, it follows that our greatest and most essential expression of freedom is found in the intellectual and the moral.

mold_aid3• 1 month ago

yeah I'm seconding all of that, esp. the critique of edtech

smcg• 1 month ago

I read a lot of books when I was younger, but I also read a lot of magazines. They gave me something light in between books. Now devices have replaced magazines and they suck you in.

vmilner• 1 month ago

I remember when Fighting Fantasy Gamebooks (Mix of 'Choose your own adventure' and solo D+D adventure) were big in the UK in the 80s, and teachers were sniffy about them not being proper reading. I bet they'd love their kids to be reading them now.

firefax• 1 month ago

Maybe that's because pleasure is down among schoolkids.

Every minute of the day dedicated to homework, or a structured activity that can be a bullet point on a college application.

MisterTea• 1 month ago

I was at a friends house for a party and their kids are not on screens. They are very active in their children's lives which influences their children's behavior. The kids were busy running around and playing with the other kids who came. They have a back yard and enjoy playing outdoors. They play card and board games. Both are on teams, one soccer, the other, baseball. They have a Switch and streaming TV but don't spend much time in front of them. They do this on their own. My friends jokingly groan of all the work they need to do but are rewarded by their children's happiness and well being. They read to their kids almost every night until around eight or so. Now the kids read books before bed because they want to. This is how I grew up.

Children learn from their parents. If you spend all day in front of screens, so will they. If you don't read, they won't read. School isn't the only place they should read. Doing activities outside of the home is also important. Go rent a cottage in the country and get out of the city.

jader201• 1 month ago

This is true, to an extent, but one missing variable is peers, and the — sometimes outsized — influence they have relative to parents.

Some parents limit screen time and delay giving their children phones, but if their peers all have phones and spend much of their time on screens, the parents’ influence may lose out.

In your example, if the friends that came over pulled out their phones and spent most of their time on the phones, the others would eventually follow suit.

And, of course, the reverse is often true — if friends are sitting around talking/interacting, it can sometimes get the others off their screens.

But I’ve also seen many cases, unfortunately, where this wasn’t the case — even though many are interacting, they’ll still keep their face in their screen.

This is often true in adults, too.

Tade0• 1 month ago

Peer groups sort themselves to an extent. It's never everyone that does X or is into Y.

I recall being immediately out when one of the boys asked which football team I support, to which I replied "none". So I got sorted to the much smaller group of kids who are not into that and we had our own common interests to bond over.

Looking at my daughter's social circle it starts as early as in preschool.

eunos• 1 month ago

Probably my brain is fried from TikTok or other social media but I found most books are superfluous in writing and can be extensively compacted without losing out too much Information.

AnodicElegy• 1 month ago

I believe it's a huge advantage to be an avid reader, especially of novels, in childhood. It helps not just with the ability to understand and retain written information, but also with increasing eloquence and breadth of knowledge.

I read frequently to my two-year-old son. It's a fun challenge for me, as I attempt to give every character a different voice and keep it consistent, to emulate the professionals who narrate the audiobooks that I listen to. Currently, he is enjoying Archie comics. I hope the effort I'm putting into it now will help secure his attraction to the medium once he's reading independently.

I love video games as much as I do novels. My parents restricted them for me severely (along with all other screen time) as a child, though, so the amount of time I spent on them was much smaller than the amount I spent reading novels. I thank my folks for that now. I'm not going to be as strict as they were with my son, but I hope I can find a happy medium. He's already very attracted to television, but we try to keep that to short, occasional sessions.

elevaet• 1 month ago

What's working for our family (2 boys) is: restricted screen time, no phones until 14, heavy parental controls on devices when they do get them, rationed gaming on weekends only (2 sessions of 1h20 each), enforced reading time before bed, lots of sports.

Both of our kids read a lot, one is a bookworm, the other could take it or leave it tbh, but at least he can sit down and read, which is not a skill to be taken for granted anymore unfortunately.

whatever1• 1 month ago

Why read when you can get a clip explainer from a dancing dude/gal.

A book takes days to finish. A YouTube video minutes.

We need it in 9”. That is if the opening dance is good enough to commit to the next 7”.

tim-projects• 1 month ago

Back in 2005 I spent 2 years where I'd walk for an hour each day to the city centre. There I'd go to the book store. I read so many books, from every different section.

Eventually, I started to notice that nearly all the books seemed to essentially be repeating every other book. I stopped reading.

Today I get occasionally read books, but honestly I feel like 95% of book material is just filler.

I get far more from reading websites like this one.

I challenge the notion that reading books is something that leads to smart and well educated people. I just don't think that's true.

What I think it is that leads to that, is curiosity.

Phones take curiosity and run it into overdrive and born out. That's the issue with them for me at least.

x1n13y84issmd422• 1 month ago

Maybe I can share an anecdote from my childhood?

I was born in the 80s, in USSR, and learned reading at 3 y.o. thanks to my mom who would read stories to me constantly while I was sitting next to her, trying to figure those mysterious symbols out.

When I got to elementary school, one of the topics kids would discuss first is how old they were when they started reading, and it turns out that 3 y.o. readers were not rare at all, quite opposite - most of my classmates started reading around the ages of 3 & 5. And if someone admitted they didn't start reading by the age of 6, they would get concerned looks from us all, like "Are you even ok mate?". A couple of kids who went to school not being able to read on their own, write and count at least up to 100 struggled to study and were lagging behind.

And that wasn't the case of our parents trying to raise prodigies, that's just where the bar was at the time. Also lack of any kind of digital entertainment and 3 state TV channels.

Reading for pleasure is sharply down among schoolkids, report shows

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