[julienchastang]

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

[MisterTea]

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

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

[nathan_compton]

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

[watwut]

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

It is cheaper, easily available and more fun.

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

[jjulius]

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

... huh?

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

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

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

Edit:

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

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

[araes]

Add a couple thoughts to that general idea:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[GrinningFool]

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