Summary
A National Literacy Trust (NLT) survey reveals that children’s enjoyment of reading is at its lowest in 19 years, with only 34.6% of eight- to 18-year-olds saying they enjoy reading in their free time.
This marks an 8.8 percentage point drop from last year, part of a declining trend since 2016.
Reading frequency has also hit a historic low, and a significant gender gap persists, with only 28.2% of boys versus 40.5% of girls enjoying reading.
The NLT calls for a government taskforce to address these declines, warning that “the futures of a generation are being put at risk.”
I know personally my enjoyment of reading dropped like a rock in my tweens & teens. Too much schoolwork and over analyzing of books in school got me burned out. I made up for it in my late 20s-30s though.
My daughter has been better so far in this regard, but now that she’s in high school I can tell she’s getting closer to mirroring my feelings. She’s switched to Manga/graphic novels instead of long form novels and that’s helped a bit, but we’ll see if that keeps up in the years to come.
I get the over analyzing thing, but I think that really comes down to the style of teaching. I had some good teachers and bad teacher, teachers, and with a good teacher teachers, I did enjoy literary analysis as long as it didn’t get too bogged down in the analysis and two departed from actually enjoying the peace of literature we were analyzing.
And I’m particularly glad that I still have those skills for analysis as an adult.
Teenage years are stressful, there’s plenty to hope for that it’ll pass. Look for solid page turners tuned to her interests and drop a copy at the right moment later on.
Reading fiction is something I can only do when I’m calm, relaxed and have no worries. That is not a state I have experienced for like thirty years.
Maybe if we raised children in a world that wasn’t a complete dumpster fire they would be able to read for hours at a time.
Christ. This rings true.
I tried to read fiction. hell, I even tried to read fiction I read 20 years ago.
I couldn’t do it because I couldn’t focus on the story.
I read Isekai manga now, and I’m waiting for the sweet release of death to take me to another world where I don’t have to put up with this bullshit.
I just want a nice quiet existence with one, maybe two, cat girls and go on fun adventures to hot springs with them. maybe farm a bit, build a small village.
no phones, no computers, no bullshit fascist fuck heads trying to rule the world.
I feel you. Wish I had some words of encouragement or something but the fact is, we live in clown world.
I’m sure that that’s been replaced by screen time. Social media in particular is much more neurochemically rewarding.
Maybe I’m missing it but where in the article does it say “reading books”? Reading can be done via a tablet or even a phone. You can check out a digital book from the library. The article as far as i can tell just says they don’t enjoy reading for pleasure
It can be, but I doubt it’s nearly as common as paper reading or social media.
True but I guess the way I’m reading it is reading is reading regardless of how you read.
The article is just saying they don’t read for pleasure. Regardless of the format
That’s why we need to ban TikTok!!! \s
Hmm. I wonder if the internet’s benefits to literacy are starting to dissipate too, as video-based services become really popular.
Not just in the UK. In the U.S. too. We have never been able to get our daughter interested in reading. We read to her every night when she was a kid, but once she learned to read, she wasn’t interested in reading or us reading to her. She can read. She has no reading disabilities. When she’s assigned a book in school, she has no issue reading it and doing tests on it and such.
But reading just doesn’t interest her in the slightest. It breaks her librarian mother’s heart, but nothing seems to convince her.
Some people need a reason to read, some knowledge or skill to be gained, and aren’t into just reading for reading’s sake. I’ll never read Harry Potter or most other fiction, but I’ll definitely binge some electronics engineering and programming reference books. Doesn’t mean I hate reading. It just has to be useful to me. I have to walk away with the feeling of having gained info that I didn’t have before.
That’s probably why I don’t play many videogames either.
It serves The Powers That Be for us to not like reading. We should read just enough to consume and accept contract terms. That’s it. Anything else is dangerous.
In my country, I can understand that children read less. Many don’t learn about books at home anymore, and the books we throw at the kids in school are bound to alienate kids from ever touching books again.
not surprising. Reading was all I did in my youth but as media got better and better and more available I read less and at the start of the millenia that basically became nearly zero. Only entertainment reading I do is stuff like this really.
Audiobooks, audiobooks, audiobooks. I read a lot as a kid/teen so maybe I have that going for me, but into my adult years and the invention of YouTube I didn’t read quite so much.
Then audiobooks entered my life, 1 a month with audible is easy to achieve as bed time reading. Then I added them to chores. I’m un/fortunate enough to work a mindless job so I added them there too mixed in with music. Now I smash a couple books a week and still have an unhealthy YouTube habit.
The reason is simple, in the time of motion picture, videogames, and music, why would somebody decide to stare at bland black text on white paper for 3 hours a day?
Reading is by far the least approachable, most time consuming and least rewarding for of self entertainment. Books where the most popular because their distribution was the easiest and the cheapest. Now distribution of digital media including movies, music and videogames has become trivial.
Books are also the easiest to create (in relative terms), meaning for every GOOD book there are 1000s of really bad ones, and it’s not readily apparent which one is which. Where as for every really good movie there are many only 10 mediocre ones.
What the article describes as “better mental health” regarding to children reading, is usually a product of the abstraction that book inherently posses. Since all you can go off when reading a novel is your own imagination and maybe some official artwork, books have the least reinforcement of social standards.
Text is a very reliable way to relais information, but when it comes to telling a story, the more senses you can captivate the more alive a story will feel. Books don’t appeal to your eyes and ears but movies do.
We don’t cry about people no longer writing with a feather quill.
It’s shocking and dispiriting that people assume reading is inherently “better” than the alternatives.
Curious what is the alternative to reading?
I’m more curious as to why someone who apparently doesn’t like reading and writing is posting on a text-based forum.
Lol for a moment I honestly thought you meant me.
Oops! Sorry!
It’s all good
Meatwad: “Books are from the Devil and TV is twice as fast”
Frylock: “Twice as fast at what?”
Meatwad: “Information”
