Are Kids Really Reading Less, or Are We Just Measuring Wrong?

Kid Reading

Hot on the heels of sensationalist fake news claiming that men hate reading, a recent piece in the Guardian breathlessly reports that reading is about as popular with children as spinach and homework.

But are kids really reading less, or are they just measuring wrong?

Like the “Men hate reading” meme, the Guardian article’s claim that children’s reading enjoyment has reached a record low hinges on data from a single source: this time, it’s the National Literacy Trust’s (NLT) Annual Literacy Survey.

While these findings may reflect trends in dead tree reading, they overlook other important factors and forms of reading that may better reflect children’s actual reading habits.

Because the Guardian draws solely from the NLT’s survey, it’s doubtful that it gives us the full picture of children’s reading habits. Surveys like this tend to focus on physical books, subjecting them to the same oldpub blind spot that plagues the Nielsen BookScan numbers. It would be interesting to see a survey that we know for sure included eBooks, online services like Royal Road, and fanfic sites.

Remember, these media are less likely to be counted as “reading for pleasure” by traditional surveys, despite being, well, reading for enjoyment. To fully understand whether children’s reading habits are truly in decline, we would need data that includes these new, increasingly popular reading formats.

Related: No, Men Do Not Hate Reading

Though the NLT survey suggests a drop in reading enjoyment, note that it doesn’t address potential contributing factors. This X thread by policy researcher Lara Brown exposes the abominable state of traditional children’s publishing. When oldpub is more concerned with enforcing weird ritual purity laws instead of telling fun stories, it’s no wonder their sensitivity-read slop is losing its audience.

And don’t discount the effect of school curricula on children’s view of reading. When kids associate reading with academic pressures rather than entertainment, we shouldn’t be suprised they’re having less fun. My high school reading list would have killed my love of novels if a good friend hadn’t loaned me Dune.

Like Nielsen, the NLT reports a widening gap in reading enjoyment between boys and girls. The problem ince again is, there’s no context. Boys gravitate toward digital, visual, and interactive formats overlooked by most surveys. Rather than viewing this gap as a simple decline in reading enjoyment, it could be an evolution in reading habits. Because if better data collection dispels the reading rift between men and women, it stands to reason we’d see the same among boys and girls.

While the article paints a bleak picture, it ignores the positive findings from the same survey, such as how children who do read for pleasure report several benefits. That finding suggests that giving kids reading material they actually enjoy is the solution. It follows that parents and teachers should help children discover what they like to read instead of imposing preconceived tastes and ideologies on them.

Finally, the call to government action gives away the Guardian‘s game here. Calling on the government to solve a problem caused by government schools is just prescribing more of the same bad medicine. What that should tell you is that the Guardian is less concerned with helping children enjoy reading and more interested in expanding the state’s influence over them.

So, while the NLT data might reflect a drop in children’s enjoyment of conventional reading, it doesn’t provide a comprehensive view of how today’s kids find and enjoy stories. Expanding the definition of reading to include digital and interactive formats might reveal a much brighter picture. And ditching ideology in favor of fun will quickly rekindle kids’ love of reading.


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10 Comments

  1. bayoubomber

    I do have to wonder how much of the metrics are based on people not reading the “approved” list of books? Between my dad and school, I hated reading because the menu forced onto me was boring.

    The prevailing attitude is that if it was a fun book, it wasn’t educational, therefore would rot your brain just as bad as TV. How silly a notion it is now that we live in a world where creativity is stunted because no one was allowed to read the books that cultivated it. Bleeding out from school into the real world, we see this attitude manifest with what we have now: a very specific set of books targeted at a specific demographic because it makes you sound intelligent or high status for reading them.

    Underlying all this, there’s always been a war against the fantastical by egg headed weenies who want everything grounded in realism. Sadly, literature is just another battleground for that ideological war.

    • It’s said that only jailers have a problem with escape. It’s no wonder that school architecture closely resembles prison architecture.

      • Wiffle

        I’m glad someone else noticed the overlap between school and prison architecture .

        • One day, I was in study hall reading a book that identified certain building features (few, small windows, bare concrete walls, etc.) as showing hatred for children. I recall looking around and thinking “Yep.”

  2. The mainstream portrays reading as lame/effeminate, schools assign books that are chores to read/nihilistic slogs, bookstores stock women/racial grievance pornography in some of the least aesthetically attractive covers in all of publishing history. Oh, and libraries are run by humorless school marms who peddle death cult propaganda that males instantly bounce off of.

    Unless parents (who statistically read less than ever) give good books to their kids to read, how is the average child supposed to get into reading in the first place? Where is the door for them to even find?

    This is the same basic question regarding the failing comic book industry. But no one wants to change the broken way things are done, so nothing gets better. We just want these mediums to die.

    • It’s hard to get people to change their minds when their salaries depend on not changing them.

    • Xavier Basora

      It makes me think back to the Scholastic book club catalogue, schools used to get (JD will nod his head, as we live in the same region)
      .
      We received paper catalogues in class and take them home. They had colour images with the blurbs, ages and price. We’d then checkmark the ones we wanted. My parents spared no expense (though they did limit it to 20$ for the 3 of us which bought a lot of books in the mid 70s)

      They gave us a check to bring to class and a few weeks later we got the books in class; we were quite excited and would compare books. I literally learnt English (aside from going to English school) and developed my love of reading from the Scholastic book club.

      Also, back then, the French language schools did have this. Scholastic finally got around to it in the 90s (my nieces benefitted, as my sister and sister and law did similarly)

      I saw the recent catalogues in both languages, and I’m honestly unimpressed with the titles and genres

      xavier

  3. Eoin Moloney

    There are cultivation novels online with literally thousands of chapters (in case you’re wondering how they can possibly write that much, it mostly comes down to being extremely repetitive, formulaic, and having short chapters, something which apparently has not stopped them from being popular). Something tells me all the people reading these aren’t likely to be old.

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