It was Calvin––or rather, his stuffed feline friend Hobbes––that sparked my joy of reading. I would spend entire afternoons with my brother’s four-volume collection of the duo’s adventures. Reading would act as an escape from the real world to a spicer one, one where the body of Andy could rest. But as my generation has grown older, we have left our childhood collections behind, with fewer and fewer works taking their place.
In their latest edition of the Kids & Family Reading Report™, Scholastic notes that daily reading and even picking up a book every week is becoming scarce. These declines become more extreme as children enter the 12-17 age group, with frequent (5-7 days a week) reading shrinking by 43% and infrequent (<1 day a week) reading more than doubling. [1] These results are deeply troubling. The simple act of reading is an impact filter: it magnifies the benefits of any other task or education by enhancing critical thinking, stimulating creativity, and exposing populations to various perspectives. But with childhood reading rates falling, our youngest generations are losing crucial skills and experiencing a stagnating education. In the future, when these children enter higher education or the workforce, America will be left with a less influential and imaginative roster.
But this raises a question: if reading is so important, why has it declined? To answer this question, we need to break down our adolescents from the inside out: first, by noting a trend in their psychology; then, by analyzing their actions; and lastly, by categorizing the anti-reading environment surrounding them.
There is a joke amongst Gen Zers that parents always blame electronics for our shortcomings. And while this mantra often oversimplifies problems, it is applicable in the context of the reading drought. Alyson Klein of Education Week in 2023 quantified that “students spend seven to ten hours a day using online media”. During those hours, ads, pop-ups, and vibrant colors all constantly barrage our teenagers. Platforms like TikTok have created algorithms to steal our attention by repeatedly feeding users short-form, digestible, and highly addictive content. [2] A Microsoft study contextualizes this effect, noting that “average attention span dropped from 12 seconds to eight seconds”. [3] So when the sun sets, when we finally put down our phones, we are often too overstimulated to sit down and read mere words on a page. In a world where attention has become a valuable commodity, it should be no surprise that reading is declining.
However, screen time alone does not explain everything. Even if adolescents are on their screens for 10 hours, it fails to account for the other 6-8 hours spent awake. Additionally, with the rise of Ebooks and online libraries, students can still reap the benefits of reading with the convenience of their devices. We need to take a step back, a step away from the brains of our adolescents, and analyze their actions.
What is clear, especially among older students, is that free time for reading is dramatically shrinking. For high schoolers, the college admissions process is to blame. Brennan Barnard of Forbes in 2018 explained that “from comparing test scores to obsessing about class rank, schools create a Hunger Games environment where students are clamoring for a coveted spot at a selective college or university.” [4] Students spend more and more time creating non-profits, pulling all-nighters for their exams, and volunteering at their local soup kitchens, translating to less and less time for pleasure reading. After all, how is sitting down and reading a novel getting me into the college of my dreams?
And yet, this explanation does not apply to all children. After all, second and fourth graders at my local elementary school are not worried about their GPAs (I hope). When considering younger populations, the narrative around free time needs to change. Free time is in abundance, but the utilization of such free time has dramatically changed. Anastasia Kourti and her team of pediatricians from the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens in 2021 performed a meta-analysis on 17 studies from Europe and North America, finding that after the COVID-19 pandemic, students have spent less time outside and more time inside, browsing the internet and playing video games. [5] Unsurprisingly, being caged up in their homes has had dramatic effects on how kids socialize. Without their social circles in the outside world, students have found methods to recreate such environments in their homes. We as humans yearn for human interaction; the pandemic led our students to enable such interaction virtually. But with the pandemic receding and normalcy returning, our devices still hold such pathways to virtual communities. At the end of a long week, with a choice between books and these online communities we have created, the allure of human interaction leads millions of our younger generation to choose the latter.
The current downswing of literature among children can now boil down to one final reason: the environment around reading. Not everyone likes the idea of diving into a book. A significant population of students view reading as a chore or as an assignment. Whether that dislike stems from elementary reading logs or from high school book reports, some students will go to immense lengths to avoid reading books. Furthermore, not everyone appreciates those who read. Our favorite TV shows and fellow friends often associate readers with “nerds” and being “uncool”. There is a reason why the “nerd lunch table” in the movie Mean Girls has several books sprawled across it. Evan Huang from the TV show Fresh Off the Boat suffers a similar fate; viewers often view the young boy indulging in a novel. In the cut-throat social hierarchies of school cliques, students sacrifice reading for popularity points. And lastly, not everyone sees the value behind a good book. For many older teenagers, it has been several years since they have truly experienced the euphoria of enjoying a novel. The world of social media and COVID isolation has entranced many of our younger children. What both of these age groups lack is knowledge of the benefits of reading. It is easy to see reading as a meaningless task. There is seemingly no attraction force behind reading when given the choice between it and our devices. When students do not remember their childhood reading experiences and have no reason to pick them back up, the created scenario discourages the revitalization of reading. Without the interest of our students, a positive media portrayal, and a rekindling of literary spirit, reading rates have no choice but to decline.
Reading will likely never rebound to its levels in years past. The perception of books has forever changed; our world is moving faster than ever; and students have adopted new ways of life. However, these realities do not mean that change is impossible. Communities can jumpstart this transformation through public programs and community events. Book drives, allocating funding for libraries, and “reading passports”––where students can collect prizes for reading at local businesses––can all play an instrumental role in increasing accessibility, promoting reading enjoyability, and fighting social stigmas around books. On a district-wide level, schools can promote alternative methods to encourage reading. Audiobooks, visual aids, and phonics-based instruction––teaching the relationships between written word and spoken language––can generate visual and auditory stimulation better adapted to the shifting psychologies of our students. And lastly, on an individual level, we can learn to put distractions aside. Do we need to be checking Instagram every 30 minutes? Is that daily TikTok session really worth it? In putting aside distractions, not only does it mitigate the effects of social media on our stimulatory needs, but it also creates free time in our day to read in the first place. So the next time you find free time, consider picking up a book!
[1] www.scholastic.com/content/corp-home/kids-and-family-reading-report.html
[2] www.edweek.org/leadership/the-real-reasons-kids-arent-reading-more/2022/03
[3] https://time.com/3858309/attention-spans-goldfish/
[4] www.forbes.com/sites/brennanbarnard/2018/11/14/college-admission-helplessness-and-choice/?sh=75fa02632d49
[5] https://doi.org/10.3390/children8080706