I think there is a lot going on that contributes to this.
1. Adults read less, so children see their parents reading less often (it at all!) so do not grow up thinking it is a fun thing to do. I love reading because my parents did, and my kids do because I do.
2. Schools do not make reading enjoyable. A teacher I know suggested that their school did somethings to make reading fun, and the management refused because it improve any of their metrics. A friend of by daughter's went to a school where there were times when they had to sit and read a book - nothing kills enjoyment better than being forced to do something. You are telling kids its a chore you have to do, not something done for fun.
There are other things do. There are schools that teach Shakespeare for English literature GCSE without giving them the whole text, and without watching a video of the play, let along going to the theatre.
3. There are fewer and smaller local libraries so kids cannot discover what they like as easily. There are fewer bookshops too, because people read less.
>management refused because it improve any of their metrics
This is what everyone in the United States asked for. You wanted data driven decision making. Do not be surprised when the measure becomes the goal.
Sorry if this sounds bitter, but I spent all day yesterday arguing with administration at a college that data driven decision making is only as good as the data you feed the system, and that specifically targeting metric improvement for its own sake is step one in the road to mind death.
There are more divisions than just “data” vs “vibes.” After all, even in the natural sciences, the best data is useless without an explanation/hypothesis that can never just be reduced to the data. Precisely what is thrown out in the decline of reading is familiarity with the centuries of hard-won Enlightenment knowledge, especially concerning the stakes of education, which isn’t just vibes and that ought precisely drive our further data-driven insight into these questions.
Second best, however, I’d take the “vibes” of a random teacher over the religion-based decision making that seems to be on the rise in the US. “Data-driven” religiously motivated educational policy is the worst of all possible worlds.
The primary gist of what you wrote is important for people to grasp. Allow me to expand on it a bit, because thoughtless attitudes about "data" are pervasive, perhaps especially among the SV crackpots.
"Data" comes from datum [0], that is, what is given. What are the data or givens of measurement?
Whenever we measure something, we do so from the standpoint of some prior conceptualization. It makes no sense to speak of measurement apart from some conceptual context, as the measurement is of something as it is understood. It is through this conceptual background that we can situate some thing as a measurement, as data, and understand the meaning of this measurement, infer implications, and so on. Some call this the theory-ladenness of observation.
So you cannot say "Data! QED.", first, the meaning of the given is inaccessible without knowledge of its nature and the prior knowledge that allows us to locate the data in the appropriate context, and second, because data are not arguments. Data are used in arguments.
So if your conceptual context is flawed, your measurements are vulnerable, both in their motivating rationale and in their interpretation. A little error in the beginning leads to a great one in the end. And there's a lot of crap people carry around in their conceptual baggage.
So, we have at least three attack surfaces: the conceptual presuppositions of a theory, the theory, and the data sought to corroborate the theory.
Of course, theory-ladenness does not necessarily entail relativism [1]. So, the point isn't that we can't know anything, so anything goes, or that we don't know anything, so burn it all down. The argument is that we should be more cognizant of the bases of our justifications.
We don't use things like SAT because it's an ideal direct metric that captures how educated a student is perfectly, and allows for impeccable measurement of how successful the educational system is.
We use it because it beats the alternative - which is either going off vibes or using even more indirect metrics to measure how successful the educational system is.
If there's one school that claims it successfully teaches children to love reading, and another school that makes no such claim, but has +50 on SAT over the first school across the board? The second one is probably a better school.
> If there's one school that claims it successfully teaches children to love reading, and another school that makes no such claim, but has +50 on SAT over the first school across the board? The second one is probably a better school.
Or it's better at SAT prep? That's the entire point of OPs comment. Metrics become targets and then anything (that may still be incredibly important) but doe not contribute to that target gets lost.
If your manager says your performance is based on lines of code, you will be incentivized to write lots and lots of code. Does lots and lots of code mean you are being productive and making good software? Sometimes yes! Sometimes heaps of code means you are being ultraproductive and making amazing software. It could also mean you are writing much more code than you need to, introducing new bugs, not thinking about generalizing patterns, creating technical debt, making a worse UX, all of which I'm guessing you would agree are important to software engineering. But none of those things are going to matter in the lines of code metric.
So yes, sometimes having metrics for performance are worse than imperfect. Sometimes they are antithetical to the supposed goals. Student time is a zero sum game, and having a large portion of a crucial time in their development spent cramming for one metric is not going to have good outcomes for a society, only good outcomes for a metric.
The optimal amount of "teaching the students the actual subjects" you need to do to have them get good SAT scores is significantly higher than zero.
Sure, you can cram for SAT, and you can get gains on the metric from that. But you can't just cram all the answers into the students and have them get a perfect score via rote memorization. Students still have to learn things to be able to do well. Which is why SAT beats the "performance is based on lines of code" tier of shitty hilariously gameable metrics.
Out of curiosity, when was the last time you were involved in the school system? Things have changed a lot over decades what time previously spent "teaching the students the actual subjects" or time spent with extracurriculars continues to be eaten away by SAT prep. The downside of a bad score is now a disastrous outcome, and other parents have continued to optimize for the best score.
Oh, I don't doubt it that parents and students are optimizing for SAT outcomes themselves. You can't expect them not to. But no amount of SAT prepmaxxing can save you if you just genuinely know nothing - and having SAT is a huge upgrade over not having SAT. For one, it's a huge equalizer.
I've seen a few countries that went from "no standardized testing" to "full send standardized testing", and the benefits are too large to ignore. You can improve upon the tests, but removing them is a road to nowhere.
I'm sure the introduction of standardized tests are an improvement upon a current system, but that's not really the point I am making. My point is the ongoing use and optimization of them leads to worse outcomes overall in terms of actual understanding of the material.
> For one, it's a huge equalizer
Could you explain this for me? It's nice that everyone is taking the same test but every piece of data I've seen points to a clear correlation between household income and SAT score, hardly an equalizer.
SAT prep per se is an unbelievably shitty thing for people to waste their time on. It's largely mindless and uninteresting, stifles rather than encourages curiosity, emphasizes judging people by substantially arbitrary numerical scores, gives the false impression that some people are inherently better than others, and, in the medium to long term, is a grossly inefficient way to improve performance on the SAT.
If you want your own kids to get a high SAT language score when they are high school students, the top things you can do to help them are: (1) read aloud to them when they are very young, as much as you have time for, ideally choosing excellent books of wide variety, (2) keep reading aloud to them when they are older, (3) encourage them to read for pleasure, (4) converse about the world with them, without condescending.
If you want your own kids to get a high math score, (1) surround them with technical materials (construction toys, logic puzzles, board games, circuit parts, programmable robots, or whatever) and play with them together – or if on a tight budget, improvise materials from whatever you have at hand, and (2) spend time working non-trivial word problems one-on-one. Start from https://archive.org/details/creativeproblems0000lenc
If you have the personal time to do these steps, you won't have to give a shit about what their SAT score is, because it will be good enough for whatever they need it for. (Sadly as a society we don't have the resources or motivation to get every child enough listening-to-books-read-aloud time or enough playing-with-technical-materials-with-adult-help time, so we try to replace it with cheaper and more scalable vacuous alternatives like multiplication drills, spelling quizzes, and SAT prep.)
Vibes can be data. Take for instance the economy. All of these things like the GDP, employment figures, and so are supposed to be objective measurements. But precisely because of this they've been gamed to the point of absolute meaninglessness. Recent news regarding jobs numbers over the past 4 years emphasize this to the point of absurdity. All good numbers go up, all bad numbers go down. How's the economy doing? *shrug*
By contrast poll people on their 'vibes' of the economy and you'd suddenly get some real and meaningful data that can't really be gamed beyond outright lying about the results. You'd of course have things like people wearing rose colored glasses with regards to the economy when 'their side' is in power, but that doesn't really change the validity of their opinion. And those opinions, as an aggregate, can really provide a lot of really valuable information.
There are people whose "vibes" are closer to reality than hard cold data. And then there are people who think their "vibes" are closer to reality than hard cold data.
In the absence of data yes, but intuition and judgement are just heuristics; they suffer strongly from personal biases and are not necessarily representative of reality.
You make it sound like you’re just shifting the problem elsewhere, when this isn’t the case.
It’s not wholly subjective. Some of the processes you can use to understand your data are mathematically proven. Many others are well-tested.
In any case the idea is to try to minimise your biases and check whether your assumptions are valid so that you can make better, more reliable, more informed decisions. It doesn’t have to be a perfect system to be better.
You're right. Of course i'm not rejecting "data" or "analysis" entirely, what im pushing back against is the (very common) thing that happens in companies where you get into a situation of "who you going to trust? the data or your own lying eyes" kind of thing
Yeah I agree with you. I think it's a good approach to check vibes against data and vice-versa, and not blindly trust one over the other - use one to look critically at the other. They both have defects.
> A friend of by daughter's went to a school where there were times when they had to sit and read a book - nothing kills enjoyment better than being forced to do something. You are telling kids its a chore you have to do, not something done for fun.
This is, I think, a tricky line to walk. Reading is, like most things, a skill that must be practiced, and school is a good place to do so. I think a bigger part of this practice that kills enjoyment is not being able to choose what you're reading; of course kids are going to dislike reading when they're forced to read books or stories they have no interest in at all.
They need to learn to read but not told "you must read" even if they have a choice.
My kids learned to read with me (flashcards, Ladybird books) for fun (flashcards were a game), and then just carried on by themselves by picking up interesting books (which relies on having access to interesting books - having books at home makes a huge difference, as does access to libraries and bookshops)
One of those inconvenient facts: kids who will be successful in life learn to read at home before starting formal schooling, and they have an adult who reads with them three or more times a week; kids who don't get that at home are much more likely to remain illiterate or to read at well below their grade level. It's inconvenient because there isn't anything anyone except the parent(s) can do about it, and the parent has already made that choice by the time the kid gets to school.
This seems to vary quite a bit across countries which suggests to me that something can be done about it - I cannot say what though.
Parents can be encouraged and informed, to an extent, but the problem is that if they do not enjoy reading, you cannot pass on something you do not have yourself.
Another problem in the UK is that I think policy makers think of reading as a life skill, and education in general as preparation for work, rather than as something to enjoy - at least for the hoi polloi (or "the gammon" to use a disturbingly common term), their own kids are different.
There's not a specific age where this work has to happen. Reading a variety of challenging books aloud to the class is one of the best things schoolteachers (especially early grades) can do for their students. Listening/language comprehension is incredibly important and underemphasized throughout most schooling.
Reading per se (i.e. decoding written symbols into sounds/words, at least in English or similar languages) is a quite discrete skill that takes something like 6–12 months to learn to basic proficiency, working an average of, say, 15 minutes per day with direct guidance. It has some basic pre-requisites (attention span, interest, recognizing the alphabet), but can be done at any age; some kids might be willing to learn to read at age 3 or 4, but it can certainly be started at age 8, 12, 20, or 45.
After that, speed and fluency improves with additional practice. Like anything, it's easier to get very fluent if people start younger because they have fewer other obligations. Someone who learned to read at age 4 and then spent hours reading for fun every day for 10 years is going to be far ahead of someone who learned a bit starting at age 8 but never had much help, and afterward only occasionally skimmed some magazines for the next 5 or 6 years but mostly spent their time on something else.
> kids who will be successful in life learn to read at home before starting formal schooling
What I did read was that early reading is not important to anything of importance, at best it can be a proxy to filter out neglected kids. Whether the kid can learn at that point is a question of brain development and you as a parent wont achieve nothing by trying to force it.
Are children forced to read 'boring' books in the quiet reading time at school? I thought the point of that time was to read your own book (chosen from home, the public library, or the school library).
As far as I know, school libraries still exist, and still have a wide selection of books. The books are rotated around schools in a county so the selection doesn't get stale.
I agree. It's similar to learning multiplication tables. We can all agree that math is more than endless hours of drill and kill, but there are certain skills where rote memorization is beneficial. When doing AP calculus, for example, there really just isn't time to have to work out 12 x 13 on paper or (god forbid) grab a calculator.
Unfortunately, addressing those issues would do little to address the underlying cause: We have many more ways to amuse ourselves compared to a generation ago, most of which require less "reach" for a dopamine hit (social media, netflix, video games, etc).
Personally, it seems conspicuous that one of the largest drops in 5-8 and 8-18 occurred in 2023-2024, right when the world experienced a layoff surge [1] and sites like HN noted a significant drop in hiring [2].
"enjoy reading either very much or quite a lot"
2023 to 2024, 5 to 8: 75.3 to 64.7
2023 to 2024, 8 to 18: 43.4 to 34.6
~250,000 layoffs @ ~1300 companies in 2023 [1]. Add another 100,000 and 1,000 if you take late 2022. And layoffs.fyi just tracks tech layoffs.
The WARN database has similar results. Been averaging 300-400 a month since January 2023, vs ~100 / month in the 2021-2022 timeframe. [3]
That's a lot of dislocation, moving to find jobs, household chaos, school shifting, and parents with different priorities.
I would say that they are reading fewer books but I think total number of hours reading is similar or growing.
Reading tweets and text messages is still reading. My nephew has trouble learning to read, until he started playing minecraft and needed to read websites and instructions for mods and such. Then getting his first cellphone did away with any concept of reading difficulties. We have entire economies of people reading text on computers all day (ie my job). I would bet that the average person today read better/faster than their equivalent in centuries past. They are reading junk, but they are actually reading.
A lot of the time they're skimming, rather than reading in depth. This is great for picking up key information quickly from a wiki, but it's also easy to miss something complex-but-vital.
I actually thing that millenials (i.e. the parents of 2025 children) read more than any other generation. Just not books.
Until recently, the internet was mostly text, we didn't have the bandwidth for anything else. And it meant reading. Text messengers took the place of phone calls, even more reading. Text was also how video games told stories, more reading. And finally, subtitles, they keep growing in popularity, so even when you are watching videos, you are reading.
GenX was all about TV, boomers spent more time outside and talking, and if you get far enough back, people didn't even know how to read. I think GenZ still read a lot, but now, audiovisual content is more prevalent on the internet than it was before. Also, audiobooks gained in popularity.
Maybe we should make define what "reading" is. Is it actual reading, as in textual communication, or is it consuming books, but in this case, do audiobooks count?
If you only count reading paper books, then sure, people read less, but that's because there are so many alternatives nowadays. And maybe some attention deficit.
Stress and pressure due to the job market and housing costs. Smarter teens are drilling leetcode to stay competitive so they won’t be destitute when the boomers liquidate social security and deficit us all into eternal serfdom, or that’s what one of them told me when I asked why he didn’t spend more time reading novels.
I think what speaks to the core of today's young men runs counter to my impression of the kind of books being popularized.
When I was younger and read fiction I had access to a fair amount of copies of young adult novels that would never be front-and-center at a bookstore or library. In fact I think that most of these books were the rejects from the main libraries in my town. Violence, abandonment, resent, regret abound! Many of it was senseless and the endings were not as neat and resolved as the schoolteacher led me to believe how all books ought to end.
I’m not recommending this experience. But young men do need author[itie]s to guide them through the discomforting aspects of their lives in an un-fantastic fashion.
+1 to your point about the type of books being popularized.
I grew up obsessively rereading Redwall, Pendragon, RA Salvatore’s stuff, Ranger’s Apprentice, Enders Game, Tyrant of Jupiter, Maze Runner. Like you said, the me of now can’t recommend things like Tyrant, but still I can’t imagine that would have appealed to any of the girls I knew at that time, let alone the young women of today.
By the same token, although I read Twilight and Hunger Games, I never was obsessed like the girls in my classes were. I can’t imagine that boys today are particularly interested in A Court Of Thorns and Roses and the other spiritual successors of Hunger Games, Divergent, Twilight, etc.
It's funny you say that, because the Tyrant of Jupiter series was written by Piers Anthony, whom I understand to be considered nowadays as problematic and misogynistic. The misogyny shows through, especially in a scene where the main male protagonist is making back room military deals with a woman, and the method of negotiation is, to be rather explicit, a martial grappling match, in the nude, in a zero-G bubble, where the protagonist wins the rounds by physically subduing his woman counterpart and achieving PIV penetration before they separate and go again.
Like I said, I can't recommend that series now that I have a more mature perspective. But I can't imagine that a book written by a misogynistic author with explicit themes of female submission to male authority obtained by use or threats of physical and sexual violence would be particularly appealing to women in general, let alone women who have grown up in a culture that has in recent times had much more acknowledgement of such things, e.g. MeToo, more widespread conversations about toxic masculinity, the oppression of women by physical force and the male-dominated hierarchy that projects that force.
If you disagree and think that young women (and enby people) would find such books appealing though, I'm interested to hear why.
I can't imagine that a book written by a misogynistic author with explicit themes of female submission to male authority obtained by use or threats of physical violence would be particularly appealing to women in general
Note the phrase “sweet and steamy” from the subtitle of the very book you link. Tyrant had sexual content, yes - sweetness, steaminess and romance? Not really
Edit: the subtext I’m speaking of is of submission and domination through implicit or explicit coercion. I’m not speaking of sub/dom with connotations of mutual enjoyment and consent, as can be the case in real or fictional situations of romance in general or even specific kinks like BDSM. I may be called sexist for this but my perception is that women can and do enjoy the latter (as the popularity of books like you linked imply) and greatly dislike the former
I was alive in that time and girls did not like those books, at all (of course WOMEN may be a different story). They liked Harry Potter, and LOTR after the movies came out because Orlando Bloom.
I was alive at that time and I loved the Redwall books, Enders Game, LOTR before the movies, and some Heinlein. Never read Harry Potter, which came out when I was in middle school. And I was a girl.
Characterizing girls as only liking Harry Potter and Orlando Bloom is like saying boys only liked WWF and Jackass. It's a mindless stereotype.
I was alive too and moved in sf/fantasy circles. And I am saying that you are just being sexist and wrong.
If you have seen only boys liking Harry Potter, LOTR or Ender Game, then it is purely result of who you picked as friends. Because girls read all of those.
I said girls loved Harry Potter and LOTR. Girls forced me to perform the Harry Potter theme in band class because I was the only one good enough to play it! And its wasn't my friends. It was the entire class.
My local bookshop closed this year, so no, I don’t frequent them as often as I wish these days.
To your credit, I’m sharing my impression of the books that I read in elementary school. Come to find out they may not have been as obscure for as I thought. I was just 8/9 years old reading YA novels. Joe Hardy’s girlfriend dying in that car bomb must have awakened something primal in me.
I’m not recommending this experience. But young men do need author[itie]s to guide them through the discomforting aspects of their lives in an un-fantastic fashion. Start em while they’re young!
And we’re talking about young men, visceral depictions of real life drama and books. Reading is a different experience than digital media, would you agree?
It's a vicious cycle. Less fiction from male perspective is published because boys don't read. Boys don't read because men are less represented in fiction.
I don't think there is a solution except some form of affirmative action.
Because this is UK focused it assumes you'll know that FSM = Free School Meal which is a proxy for household poverty. People who've seen this kind of work in other fields will recognise such proxies and probably assumed that's what is going on, but just in case.
It's an academic paper, so if written correctly it does not make that assumption (about the domain-specific abbreviation at least). Instead, the abbreviation will be written out in full at the first use, and it is:
> Slightly more children and young people who didn’t receive free school meals (FSMs) told us they enjoyed reading compared with their peers who received FSMs
Given what children claim motivates them to read it sounds like well-written text adventures would do wonders for literacy.
But I suspect that would not be that easy. I think both books and text adventures would be competing against activities with much lower requirements on effort, and much higher immediate rewards.
With my own kids what has worked is setting aside time, before bed where they _have to read_. It can be anything they want, they pick books from library most of the time.
The risk of this approach might be that it could suck the fun out of it making it a chore, but that has not been the case - they both like to read books now.
Creating that space for reading has been essential. It's impossible to compete against all of the other things otherwise.
Indeed. When I was young I had a mandatory bedtime that was slightly before I got tired, and not having many alternatives I ended up using it for reading. I suppose these days electronics would have to stay outside the room for it to work.
This is the way. My son (10) went from actively trying to do anything else while he was supposed to be reading, to actually settling down and reading continuously for at least 30 minutes every night. We've had the rule since he was 6, but it seems like in the last year he has flipped from not being that interested to now highly valuing it and being upset if something impinges on his reading time... which of course we will extend bed time a bit to ensure he gets his reading time.
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There’s been a tragic drop off in the quality of children’s books in the past decade or so. Of course they can go back to the classics or read stuff from the 2000s but those often lack connection to contemporary culture.
Our daughter is 11 and is a voracious reader. This isn’t my experience at all. We read daily to her until she didn’t want us to any more a year or so ago. But we never had any trouble finding good books, some new and some older.
I really love kids books of all sorts - especially the illustrated ones are real works of art.
Some parents I know have suggested it's much, much easier to find newer books which interest daughters than books which might interest their son. They asked me to find some newer books he might find interesting.
Does anyone have suggestions on 2020s books aimed at adolescent boys? Ideally ones more focused on the real experience of boyhood, I think he'd be less interested in ones focused making adult commentary on social or identity topics.
I would recommend the website Royalroad https://www.royalroad.com/home. It has a ton of stories by amateur authors. They're not enriching, deep, or social commentary. It's a modern version of pulp magazines, in the vein of Conan the Barbarian with worse writing, but in the end those were published in a paid magazine, while this is a free website accessible to all.
While they're not high quality, with a couple of exceptions, they're very fun to read, and in my opinion, while you can spend your time reading only high quality books, it's nice to just have what is essentially the fast food of fiction as well. Reading is a habit, and creating it by focusing on something like this, can still allow you to read something with depth and quality later on.
There's a big market for this for girls and for women in any book store, but for the most part, you can't find the same for men.
If you want specific recommendations you can check around /r/rational on reddit, since they tend to cover some of the better stories from that site.
I have a 12 year old daughter and 10 year old son. My daughter has been reading voraciously since about 9 years old. This past summer she plowed through several 800-1000 page books.
My son is not nearly as voracious as she is, but has, in the past 6 months started to really value his reading time, enough that he gets upset when things interfere with it. Also, he now goes out and researches books to read (often via YouTube during his Youtube time). I think what got him here was consistency.
We've read to them every night until they were in second grade and then required them to read overnight. It took a while to take hold with both, but once it did they dove in and now really value it.
As for what he is reading - Diary of a wimpy kid series, Percy Jackson, Mysterious Benedict Society are the current favorites.
I have both (10-13ish) and both read almost constantly. Our son is the older one, read early and also very quickly, and that's set a tone for his siblings who now read a lot as well. Neither in that 10-13 age bracket above has trouble finding novels they enjoy from fantasy or adventure settings. There was an earlier period where we asked friends' teenagers to suggest book series, but these days our children seem to find their own novels during library sessions incorporated into their schooling.
Yeah, although my son had trouble learning to read and wasn't really reading at grade level until the end of second grade, by the time he was ten he was reading all kinds of different books that interested him without needing our suggestions. He did read some "young reader" books, but also read a lot of classic adult novels.
I think this is probably very genre specific. I suspect the nonfiction and realistic fiction boy/manly/macho genres(outdoors, machines, fighting, and the like) may have been especially cannibalized by games/video. I don't recall seeing any of this stuff on my last trip to a physical bookstore. But on the fantasy/geeky side there are more great options than there have ever been, and, as a girldad, I can tell you that female main characters are tough to find.
A mother I know said the same thing about reading assignments at school, that they're all for girls now.
Having a female protagonist doesn't necessarily mean boys can't enjoy a book, of course. I (a boy) enjoyed Nancy Drew just as much as The Hardy Boys when I was young. But I suspect modern writings with girl protagonists are more focused on targeting girls than on making good stories that happen to feature girls, and may not be as universally enjoyable.
No, we just have the one daughter. But I was a boy, and I loved reading too. I don't remember needing books to mirror my experience, in fact I probably preferred books which didn't since I mostly found my own experience fairly boring!
Some recent-ish off-the-beaten track suggestions that our daughter really liked that might be appealing to boys:
1. The Unknown Adventurer books (https://www.theunknownadventurer.com): beautifully illustrated, Journey to the Last River is wonderful. We have the Lost Book of Adventure too, but our daughter didn't enjoy that one as much, I think that one would appeal more to boys. Looking at the page I see they have a third, I'll have to pick that up.
2. Almost anything by David Almond, although his young adult stuff tends to blend into his adult work and not all of it is appropriate/interesting depending on reading/maturity level. Plenty of male protagonists, mostly universal themes, some quite strange. I'd recommend reading them first to get an idea if they'd be good for your kid, I loved them. His first book Skellig is probably a good place to start just to see if you like the style or not, although they're all quite different from each other.
4. The Orphans of the Tide series by Struan Murray are great adventure/fantasy stories, if occasionally a little dark for younger kids. We got distracted before getting to the last one in the series, but the first two were good.
I can't help so much with stories specifically for boys, but generally I find that just focusing on high-quality, well written books of any stripe are a good bet. If you have a good bookshop nearby, go and find the helpful person - they can help steer you. And buy books from them so they stick around :-)
Isn't 2020s a pretty steep cutoff? I understand these stories shouldn't be too cut off from the current culture, but surely 10-15 years in the past is still fine? Even older, surely; 2 of the novels that stick out in my own childhood ('Bridge to Terabithia' and 'Where The Red Fern Grows') were decades before me.
Yeah, we did not had any issue finding good book either. Good kids books exist and are easy to find. The kids not reading is not caused by books not existing.
Books are not culturally relevant anymore, not for adults and not for children.
I think it's just always hard to find stuff you like, and time is a great filter. There are tons of new series that my sons like: the whole Percy Jackson world, Diary of a Wimpy Kid, Dog Man, Lemony Snicket, Nathan Hale's Hazardous Tales, etc. Lots of books out there!
Fantasy kids books, e:g Tolkien, CS Lewis (Narnia), Joan Aiken, Edith Nesbit are timeless though right? Then there are books set in a different time, that kids still enjoy e:g Just William series 1920-60 (which contains some stereotypes about race or gender roles which can actually lead to a healthy discussion about to what extent we've moved on and "don't say those sorts of things" nowadays) . So, books set in the current decade are great but kids can have a lot of fun reading older stuff if that isn't available. Ours read quite a mix of old and new.
I've been thinking about this a bit lately, because my sister has a son I'd like to share some of my favourite Goosebumps books from the 90s with. I think they'd still be fun reads for a 7-10 year old, but I wonder how much the world depicted in them would make sense for my nephew.
I disagree that literacy is all about reading fictional books and I wish we could broaden it a little bit more, even at school.
This might be an odd take, but I never liked reading books and have read very few books in my whole life. I do love to read news articles, forum posts, magazines etc. because the format fits me.
Judging myself by my education level and career I'd say I did just fine without opening a single book.
I enjoyed reading fiction until I studied electrical engineering. After that I felt that fiction was a waste of time. On a cognitive level I don't think it is, but I think the feeling comes from having been instilled with a sense that reading has to involve some degree of learning. As though everything I do has to involve some self betterment. It's frustrating and I feel a sense of loss about it.
I have to stop people from doing this in presentations all the time lol. Just say "Runtime decreased from 117s to 34". It is really easy to mentally compare two numbers; it is much harder to start with "Runtime decreased by 71% to 34s" and find the old value. Equally brief, never any ambiguity, easier on the mind, and no weird explosions as you approach zero.
I'd wager it's the first (51.1%). Mostly because I simply cannot imagine that nearly 70% of kids in 2005 enjoyed reading. That seems too high. Based on..? My vibes.
What does "they read something daily in their free time in 2025" actually mean?
I think it means actual books.
I think it excludes forums, discord chats, and general online stuff.
Kids are forced to read more than ever before to interact with their peers. The rise of sites like Web Novel and Royal Road are inspirational. I would guess that there are more "writers" than ever before in history.
The PDF report covers the difference between print and screen reading around page 27, I think their daily reading must be content available in print and screen but it is not clearly defined.
That section does show that 2/3rds of screen reading though is direct messages, social media, and text in video games. Blogs and forums only hit 1/4.
Kids might be forced to read more than ever before, but not all reading is the same, anymore than using a games console and iPad as a kid makes you fully computer literate.
These stats are hard to interpret - this could all very well be consistent with the kids these days turning out to be the most literate generation in history. There is very strong incentive to get good at reading to interact with the internet even if it isn't reading for 'enjoyment'.
There is a linked PDF, but I'd actually be more interested in reading the original survey to see how 'reading' is being framed. Is an hour in the HN comments section counted as reading for fun?
Does this consider audiobooks? Personally, I have been reading fewer physical books and have preferred to listen to them instead. This comes as my eyesight deteriorates, but I can imagine that for others, listening to books over audio can be a more pleasant experience.
I don't know the answer to your question, but whether this is a solution depends on your focus: if you want young people to be able to read properly (locate and ingest information quickly) then audio books are not going to solve that. If the focus is reading enjoyment then sure. Could also watch a video and be perfectly entertained
No, it isn't a solution, but at least young people would be ingesting literature, which I would argue is a far cry better than the brainrot YouTube videos targeting kids. That's an assessment of the status quo though, we should absolutely encourage more physical reading as an essential skill.
I think there is a lot going on that contributes to this.
1. Adults read less, so children see their parents reading less often (it at all!) so do not grow up thinking it is a fun thing to do. I love reading because my parents did, and my kids do because I do.
2. Schools do not make reading enjoyable. A teacher I know suggested that their school did somethings to make reading fun, and the management refused because it improve any of their metrics. A friend of by daughter's went to a school where there were times when they had to sit and read a book - nothing kills enjoyment better than being forced to do something. You are telling kids its a chore you have to do, not something done for fun.
There are other things do. There are schools that teach Shakespeare for English literature GCSE without giving them the whole text, and without watching a video of the play, let along going to the theatre.
3. There are fewer and smaller local libraries so kids cannot discover what they like as easily. There are fewer bookshops too, because people read less.
>management refused because it improve any of their metrics
This is what everyone in the United States asked for. You wanted data driven decision making. Do not be surprised when the measure becomes the goal.
Sorry if this sounds bitter, but I spent all day yesterday arguing with administration at a college that data driven decision making is only as good as the data you feed the system, and that specifically targeting metric improvement for its own sake is step one in the road to mind death.
The case I was talking about was in the UK.
We "wanted data driven decision making" because it beats vibe driven decision making. Even if data is meh.
There are more divisions than just “data” vs “vibes.” After all, even in the natural sciences, the best data is useless without an explanation/hypothesis that can never just be reduced to the data. Precisely what is thrown out in the decline of reading is familiarity with the centuries of hard-won Enlightenment knowledge, especially concerning the stakes of education, which isn’t just vibes and that ought precisely drive our further data-driven insight into these questions.
Second best, however, I’d take the “vibes” of a random teacher over the religion-based decision making that seems to be on the rise in the US. “Data-driven” religiously motivated educational policy is the worst of all possible worlds.
The primary gist of what you wrote is important for people to grasp. Allow me to expand on it a bit, because thoughtless attitudes about "data" are pervasive, perhaps especially among the SV crackpots.
"Data" comes from datum [0], that is, what is given. What are the data or givens of measurement?
Whenever we measure something, we do so from the standpoint of some prior conceptualization. It makes no sense to speak of measurement apart from some conceptual context, as the measurement is of something as it is understood. It is through this conceptual background that we can situate some thing as a measurement, as data, and understand the meaning of this measurement, infer implications, and so on. Some call this the theory-ladenness of observation.
So you cannot say "Data! QED.", first, the meaning of the given is inaccessible without knowledge of its nature and the prior knowledge that allows us to locate the data in the appropriate context, and second, because data are not arguments. Data are used in arguments.
So if your conceptual context is flawed, your measurements are vulnerable, both in their motivating rationale and in their interpretation. A little error in the beginning leads to a great one in the end. And there's a lot of crap people carry around in their conceptual baggage.
So, we have at least three attack surfaces: the conceptual presuppositions of a theory, the theory, and the data sought to corroborate the theory.
Of course, theory-ladenness does not necessarily entail relativism [1]. So, the point isn't that we can't know anything, so anything goes, or that we don't know anything, so burn it all down. The argument is that we should be more cognizant of the bases of our justifications.
[0] https://www.etymonline.com/word/data
[1] https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2025/08/hanson-on-observati...
We don't use things like SAT because it's an ideal direct metric that captures how educated a student is perfectly, and allows for impeccable measurement of how successful the educational system is.
We use it because it beats the alternative - which is either going off vibes or using even more indirect metrics to measure how successful the educational system is.
If there's one school that claims it successfully teaches children to love reading, and another school that makes no such claim, but has +50 on SAT over the first school across the board? The second one is probably a better school.
> If there's one school that claims it successfully teaches children to love reading, and another school that makes no such claim, but has +50 on SAT over the first school across the board? The second one is probably a better school.
Or it's better at SAT prep? That's the entire point of OPs comment. Metrics become targets and then anything (that may still be incredibly important) but doe not contribute to that target gets lost.
"+50 on SAT across the board" requires at least being fairly good at SAT prep.
"Claims it successfully teaches children to love reading" requires nothing but a willingness to make unsubstantiated claims.
Both are imperfect performance indicators, but one is considerably less imperfect than the other.
Let me make a comparison.
If your manager says your performance is based on lines of code, you will be incentivized to write lots and lots of code. Does lots and lots of code mean you are being productive and making good software? Sometimes yes! Sometimes heaps of code means you are being ultraproductive and making amazing software. It could also mean you are writing much more code than you need to, introducing new bugs, not thinking about generalizing patterns, creating technical debt, making a worse UX, all of which I'm guessing you would agree are important to software engineering. But none of those things are going to matter in the lines of code metric.
So yes, sometimes having metrics for performance are worse than imperfect. Sometimes they are antithetical to the supposed goals. Student time is a zero sum game, and having a large portion of a crucial time in their development spent cramming for one metric is not going to have good outcomes for a society, only good outcomes for a metric.
The optimal amount of "teaching the students the actual subjects" you need to do to have them get good SAT scores is significantly higher than zero.
Sure, you can cram for SAT, and you can get gains on the metric from that. But you can't just cram all the answers into the students and have them get a perfect score via rote memorization. Students still have to learn things to be able to do well. Which is why SAT beats the "performance is based on lines of code" tier of shitty hilariously gameable metrics.
Out of curiosity, when was the last time you were involved in the school system? Things have changed a lot over decades what time previously spent "teaching the students the actual subjects" or time spent with extracurriculars continues to be eaten away by SAT prep. The downside of a bad score is now a disastrous outcome, and other parents have continued to optimize for the best score.
Oh, I don't doubt it that parents and students are optimizing for SAT outcomes themselves. You can't expect them not to. But no amount of SAT prepmaxxing can save you if you just genuinely know nothing - and having SAT is a huge upgrade over not having SAT. For one, it's a huge equalizer.
I've seen a few countries that went from "no standardized testing" to "full send standardized testing", and the benefits are too large to ignore. You can improve upon the tests, but removing them is a road to nowhere.
I'm sure the introduction of standardized tests are an improvement upon a current system, but that's not really the point I am making. My point is the ongoing use and optimization of them leads to worse outcomes overall in terms of actual understanding of the material.
> For one, it's a huge equalizer
Could you explain this for me? It's nice that everyone is taking the same test but every piece of data I've seen points to a clear correlation between household income and SAT score, hardly an equalizer.
SAT prep per se is an unbelievably shitty thing for people to waste their time on. It's largely mindless and uninteresting, stifles rather than encourages curiosity, emphasizes judging people by substantially arbitrary numerical scores, gives the false impression that some people are inherently better than others, and, in the medium to long term, is a grossly inefficient way to improve performance on the SAT.
If you want your own kids to get a high SAT language score when they are high school students, the top things you can do to help them are: (1) read aloud to them when they are very young, as much as you have time for, ideally choosing excellent books of wide variety, (2) keep reading aloud to them when they are older, (3) encourage them to read for pleasure, (4) converse about the world with them, without condescending.
If you want your own kids to get a high math score, (1) surround them with technical materials (construction toys, logic puzzles, board games, circuit parts, programmable robots, or whatever) and play with them together – or if on a tight budget, improvise materials from whatever you have at hand, and (2) spend time working non-trivial word problems one-on-one. Start from https://archive.org/details/creativeproblems0000lenc
If you have the personal time to do these steps, you won't have to give a shit about what their SAT score is, because it will be good enough for whatever they need it for. (Sadly as a society we don't have the resources or motivation to get every child enough listening-to-books-read-aloud time or enough playing-with-technical-materials-with-adult-help time, so we try to replace it with cheaper and more scalable vacuous alternatives like multiplication drills, spelling quizzes, and SAT prep.)
In Poland, many schools pride themselves for how good they are at preparing for end of high school exams. Nobody fails, nobody gets bad score.
Because if they as much as suspect you will fail, they will not let you graduate.
But statistics are kept clean :)
you might find this interesting : https://www.morethanascore.org.uk Says a lot of what you're saying, with some statistical evidence to back it up
(Note that the the British "SAT" is different than the American "SAT".)
Vibes can be data. Take for instance the economy. All of these things like the GDP, employment figures, and so are supposed to be objective measurements. But precisely because of this they've been gamed to the point of absolute meaninglessness. Recent news regarding jobs numbers over the past 4 years emphasize this to the point of absurdity. All good numbers go up, all bad numbers go down. How's the economy doing? *shrug*
By contrast poll people on their 'vibes' of the economy and you'd suddenly get some real and meaningful data that can't really be gamed beyond outright lying about the results. You'd of course have things like people wearing rose colored glasses with regards to the economy when 'their side' is in power, but that doesn't really change the validity of their opinion. And those opinions, as an aggregate, can really provide a lot of really valuable information.
I would push back on that. I think often people's "vibes" are a lot closer to reality than extremely gamed metrics
There are people whose "vibes" are closer to reality than hard cold data. And then there are people who think their "vibes" are closer to reality than hard cold data.
The second group is much, much larger.
I don't trust vibes.
Do you trust your own intuition and judgment on at least some matters or topics where data is scarce, ambiguous, or contradictory?
In the absence of data yes, but intuition and judgement are just heuristics; they suffer strongly from personal biases and are not necessarily representative of reality.
It also requires judgment and critical thinking to decide things like:
a) is this data accurate
b) is this data complete
c) is this data relevant
etc.
So even the act of selecting data is subject to bias, good judgment.
You make it sound like you’re just shifting the problem elsewhere, when this isn’t the case.
It’s not wholly subjective. Some of the processes you can use to understand your data are mathematically proven. Many others are well-tested.
In any case the idea is to try to minimise your biases and check whether your assumptions are valid so that you can make better, more reliable, more informed decisions. It doesn’t have to be a perfect system to be better.
You might not want to, of course.
Sometimes vibes includes things we're trying to get away from like stereotyping visible groups of people.
You're right. Of course i'm not rejecting "data" or "analysis" entirely, what im pushing back against is the (very common) thing that happens in companies where you get into a situation of "who you going to trust? the data or your own lying eyes" kind of thing
Yeah I agree with you. I think it's a good approach to check vibes against data and vice-versa, and not blindly trust one over the other - use one to look critically at the other. They both have defects.
Interesting your mind went there.
Does it? How do you know?
It depends. Not all good things are legible and easy to put into a spreadsheet.
Blind data-driven decisions destroy all illegible good in this world that can't be boiled down to some number going up. And there's a lot of it.
> A friend of by daughter's went to a school where there were times when they had to sit and read a book - nothing kills enjoyment better than being forced to do something. You are telling kids its a chore you have to do, not something done for fun.
This is, I think, a tricky line to walk. Reading is, like most things, a skill that must be practiced, and school is a good place to do so. I think a bigger part of this practice that kills enjoyment is not being able to choose what you're reading; of course kids are going to dislike reading when they're forced to read books or stories they have no interest in at all.
They need to learn to read but not told "you must read" even if they have a choice.
My kids learned to read with me (flashcards, Ladybird books) for fun (flashcards were a game), and then just carried on by themselves by picking up interesting books (which relies on having access to interesting books - having books at home makes a huge difference, as does access to libraries and bookshops)
One of those inconvenient facts: kids who will be successful in life learn to read at home before starting formal schooling, and they have an adult who reads with them three or more times a week; kids who don't get that at home are much more likely to remain illiterate or to read at well below their grade level. It's inconvenient because there isn't anything anyone except the parent(s) can do about it, and the parent has already made that choice by the time the kid gets to school.
This seems to vary quite a bit across countries which suggests to me that something can be done about it - I cannot say what though.
Parents can be encouraged and informed, to an extent, but the problem is that if they do not enjoy reading, you cannot pass on something you do not have yourself.
Another problem in the UK is that I think policy makers think of reading as a life skill, and education in general as preparation for work, rather than as something to enjoy - at least for the hoi polloi (or "the gammon" to use a disturbingly common term), their own kids are different.
FYI “gammon” is not at all a synonym for “hoi polloi”.
There's not a specific age where this work has to happen. Reading a variety of challenging books aloud to the class is one of the best things schoolteachers (especially early grades) can do for their students. Listening/language comprehension is incredibly important and underemphasized throughout most schooling.
Reading per se (i.e. decoding written symbols into sounds/words, at least in English or similar languages) is a quite discrete skill that takes something like 6–12 months to learn to basic proficiency, working an average of, say, 15 minutes per day with direct guidance. It has some basic pre-requisites (attention span, interest, recognizing the alphabet), but can be done at any age; some kids might be willing to learn to read at age 3 or 4, but it can certainly be started at age 8, 12, 20, or 45.
After that, speed and fluency improves with additional practice. Like anything, it's easier to get very fluent if people start younger because they have fewer other obligations. Someone who learned to read at age 4 and then spent hours reading for fun every day for 10 years is going to be far ahead of someone who learned a bit starting at age 8 but never had much help, and afterward only occasionally skimmed some magazines for the next 5 or 6 years but mostly spent their time on something else.
> kids who will be successful in life learn to read at home before starting formal schooling
What I did read was that early reading is not important to anything of importance, at best it can be a proxy to filter out neglected kids. Whether the kid can learn at that point is a question of brain development and you as a parent wont achieve nothing by trying to force it.
Are children forced to read 'boring' books in the quiet reading time at school? I thought the point of that time was to read your own book (chosen from home, the public library, or the school library).
As far as I know, school libraries still exist, and still have a wide selection of books. The books are rotated around schools in a county so the selection doesn't get stale.
I agree. It's similar to learning multiplication tables. We can all agree that math is more than endless hours of drill and kill, but there are certain skills where rote memorization is beneficial. When doing AP calculus, for example, there really just isn't time to have to work out 12 x 13 on paper or (god forbid) grab a calculator.
Unfortunately, addressing those issues would do little to address the underlying cause: We have many more ways to amuse ourselves compared to a generation ago, most of which require less "reach" for a dopamine hit (social media, netflix, video games, etc).
20-30 minutes of quiet reading time is recess for some of the introverts.
Personally, it seems conspicuous that one of the largest drops in 5-8 and 8-18 occurred in 2023-2024, right when the world experienced a layoff surge [1] and sites like HN noted a significant drop in hiring [2].
"enjoy reading either very much or quite a lot"
2023 to 2024, 5 to 8: 75.3 to 64.7
2023 to 2024, 8 to 18: 43.4 to 34.6
~250,000 layoffs @ ~1300 companies in 2023 [1]. Add another 100,000 and 1,000 if you take late 2022. And layoffs.fyi just tracks tech layoffs.
The WARN database has similar results. Been averaging 300-400 a month since January 2023, vs ~100 / month in the 2021-2022 timeframe. [3]
That's a lot of dislocation, moving to find jobs, household chaos, school shifting, and parents with different priorities.
[1] "Layoff Charts Tab" https://layoffs.fyi
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/1dvdssj/oc...
[3] https://layoffdata.com/
I would say that they are reading fewer books but I think total number of hours reading is similar or growing.
Reading tweets and text messages is still reading. My nephew has trouble learning to read, until he started playing minecraft and needed to read websites and instructions for mods and such. Then getting his first cellphone did away with any concept of reading difficulties. We have entire economies of people reading text on computers all day (ie my job). I would bet that the average person today read better/faster than their equivalent in centuries past. They are reading junk, but they are actually reading.
A lot of the time they're skimming, rather than reading in depth. This is great for picking up key information quickly from a wiki, but it's also easy to miss something complex-but-vital.
I actually thing that millenials (i.e. the parents of 2025 children) read more than any other generation. Just not books.
Until recently, the internet was mostly text, we didn't have the bandwidth for anything else. And it meant reading. Text messengers took the place of phone calls, even more reading. Text was also how video games told stories, more reading. And finally, subtitles, they keep growing in popularity, so even when you are watching videos, you are reading.
GenX was all about TV, boomers spent more time outside and talking, and if you get far enough back, people didn't even know how to read. I think GenZ still read a lot, but now, audiovisual content is more prevalent on the internet than it was before. Also, audiobooks gained in popularity.
Maybe we should make define what "reading" is. Is it actual reading, as in textual communication, or is it consuming books, but in this case, do audiobooks count?
If you only count reading paper books, then sure, people read less, but that's because there are so many alternatives nowadays. And maybe some attention deficit.
Stress and pressure due to the job market and housing costs. Smarter teens are drilling leetcode to stay competitive so they won’t be destitute when the boomers liquidate social security and deficit us all into eternal serfdom, or that’s what one of them told me when I asked why he didn’t spend more time reading novels.
im getting ready for a life of video gaming and living on a beach in a 3rd world country...
I think what speaks to the core of today's young men runs counter to my impression of the kind of books being popularized.
When I was younger and read fiction I had access to a fair amount of copies of young adult novels that would never be front-and-center at a bookstore or library. In fact I think that most of these books were the rejects from the main libraries in my town. Violence, abandonment, resent, regret abound! Many of it was senseless and the endings were not as neat and resolved as the schoolteacher led me to believe how all books ought to end.
I’m not recommending this experience. But young men do need author[itie]s to guide them through the discomforting aspects of their lives in an un-fantastic fashion.
+1 to your point about the type of books being popularized.
I grew up obsessively rereading Redwall, Pendragon, RA Salvatore’s stuff, Ranger’s Apprentice, Enders Game, Tyrant of Jupiter, Maze Runner. Like you said, the me of now can’t recommend things like Tyrant, but still I can’t imagine that would have appealed to any of the girls I knew at that time, let alone the young women of today.
By the same token, although I read Twilight and Hunger Games, I never was obsessed like the girls in my classes were. I can’t imagine that boys today are particularly interested in A Court Of Thorns and Roses and the other spiritual successors of Hunger Games, Divergent, Twilight, etc.
> I can’t imagine that would have appealed to any of the girls I knew at that time, let alone the young women of today.
That is just you being sexist tho.
It's funny you say that, because the Tyrant of Jupiter series was written by Piers Anthony, whom I understand to be considered nowadays as problematic and misogynistic. The misogyny shows through, especially in a scene where the main male protagonist is making back room military deals with a woman, and the method of negotiation is, to be rather explicit, a martial grappling match, in the nude, in a zero-G bubble, where the protagonist wins the rounds by physically subduing his woman counterpart and achieving PIV penetration before they separate and go again.
Like I said, I can't recommend that series now that I have a more mature perspective. But I can't imagine that a book written by a misogynistic author with explicit themes of female submission to male authority obtained by use or threats of physical and sexual violence would be particularly appealing to women in general, let alone women who have grown up in a culture that has in recent times had much more acknowledgement of such things, e.g. MeToo, more widespread conversations about toxic masculinity, the oppression of women by physical force and the male-dominated hierarchy that projects that force.
If you disagree and think that young women (and enby people) would find such books appealing though, I'm interested to hear why.
I can't imagine that a book written by a misogynistic author with explicit themes of female submission to male authority obtained by use or threats of physical violence would be particularly appealing to women in general
Are you familiar with romance novels? Which gender do you think is reading stuff like https://www.amazon.com/Morning-Glory-Milking-Cambric-Creek-e...
Note the phrase “sweet and steamy” from the subtitle of the very book you link. Tyrant had sexual content, yes - sweetness, steaminess and romance? Not really
Edit: the subtext I’m speaking of is of submission and domination through implicit or explicit coercion. I’m not speaking of sub/dom with connotations of mutual enjoyment and consent, as can be the case in real or fictional situations of romance in general or even specific kinks like BDSM. I may be called sexist for this but my perception is that women can and do enjoy the latter (as the popularity of books like you linked imply) and greatly dislike the former
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0022449080262440...
Humans are irrational. I haven’t fully made my peace with this either but I hope you find some release from suffering against that hypocrisy as well
I was alive in that time and girls did not like those books, at all (of course WOMEN may be a different story). They liked Harry Potter, and LOTR after the movies came out because Orlando Bloom.
I was alive at that time and I loved the Redwall books, Enders Game, LOTR before the movies, and some Heinlein. Never read Harry Potter, which came out when I was in middle school. And I was a girl.
Characterizing girls as only liking Harry Potter and Orlando Bloom is like saying boys only liked WWF and Jackass. It's a mindless stereotype.
I was alive too and moved in sf/fantasy circles. And I am saying that you are just being sexist and wrong.
If you have seen only boys liking Harry Potter, LOTR or Ender Game, then it is purely result of who you picked as friends. Because girls read all of those.
I said girls loved Harry Potter and LOTR. Girls forced me to perform the Harry Potter theme in band class because I was the only one good enough to play it! And its wasn't my friends. It was the entire class.
I read LOTR before the movies came out, the Silmarillion, and most of the books mentioned above and I know plenty of other women who have as well.
I suspect you do not read and do not frequent bookshops, because there is no shortage of books with violence or resent.
Also, young men have literally no shortage of violent or resentful entertainment in their disposal.
My local bookshop closed this year, so no, I don’t frequent them as often as I wish these days.
To your credit, I’m sharing my impression of the books that I read in elementary school. Come to find out they may not have been as obscure for as I thought. I was just 8/9 years old reading YA novels. Joe Hardy’s girlfriend dying in that car bomb must have awakened something primal in me.
I’m not recommending this experience. But young men do need author[itie]s to guide them through the discomforting aspects of their lives in an un-fantastic fashion. Start em while they’re young!
And we’re talking about young men, visceral depictions of real life drama and books. Reading is a different experience than digital media, would you agree?
It's a vicious cycle. Less fiction from male perspective is published because boys don't read. Boys don't read because men are less represented in fiction.
I don't think there is a solution except some form of affirmative action.
Because this is UK focused it assumes you'll know that FSM = Free School Meal which is a proxy for household poverty. People who've seen this kind of work in other fields will recognise such proxies and probably assumed that's what is going on, but just in case.
It's an academic paper, so if written correctly it does not make that assumption (about the domain-specific abbreviation at least). Instead, the abbreviation will be written out in full at the first use, and it is:
> Slightly more children and young people who didn’t receive free school meals (FSMs) told us they enjoyed reading compared with their peers who received FSMs
To reinforce, it doesn't mean Finite State Machine or Flying Spaghetti Monster
Given what children claim motivates them to read it sounds like well-written text adventures would do wonders for literacy.
But I suspect that would not be that easy. I think both books and text adventures would be competing against activities with much lower requirements on effort, and much higher immediate rewards.
With my own kids what has worked is setting aside time, before bed where they _have to read_. It can be anything they want, they pick books from library most of the time.
The risk of this approach might be that it could suck the fun out of it making it a chore, but that has not been the case - they both like to read books now.
Creating that space for reading has been essential. It's impossible to compete against all of the other things otherwise.
Indeed. When I was young I had a mandatory bedtime that was slightly before I got tired, and not having many alternatives I ended up using it for reading. I suppose these days electronics would have to stay outside the room for it to work.
This is the way. My son (10) went from actively trying to do anything else while he was supposed to be reading, to actually settling down and reading continuously for at least 30 minutes every night. We've had the rule since he was 6, but it seems like in the last year he has flipped from not being that interested to now highly valuing it and being upset if something impinges on his reading time... which of course we will extend bed time a bit to ensure he gets his reading time.
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There’s been a tragic drop off in the quality of children’s books in the past decade or so. Of course they can go back to the classics or read stuff from the 2000s but those often lack connection to contemporary culture.
Our daughter is 11 and is a voracious reader. This isn’t my experience at all. We read daily to her until she didn’t want us to any more a year or so ago. But we never had any trouble finding good books, some new and some older.
I really love kids books of all sorts - especially the illustrated ones are real works of art.
Do you have a son? Does he read as much?
Some parents I know have suggested it's much, much easier to find newer books which interest daughters than books which might interest their son. They asked me to find some newer books he might find interesting.
Does anyone have suggestions on 2020s books aimed at adolescent boys? Ideally ones more focused on the real experience of boyhood, I think he'd be less interested in ones focused making adult commentary on social or identity topics.
I would recommend the website Royalroad https://www.royalroad.com/home. It has a ton of stories by amateur authors. They're not enriching, deep, or social commentary. It's a modern version of pulp magazines, in the vein of Conan the Barbarian with worse writing, but in the end those were published in a paid magazine, while this is a free website accessible to all.
While they're not high quality, with a couple of exceptions, they're very fun to read, and in my opinion, while you can spend your time reading only high quality books, it's nice to just have what is essentially the fast food of fiction as well. Reading is a habit, and creating it by focusing on something like this, can still allow you to read something with depth and quality later on.
There's a big market for this for girls and for women in any book store, but for the most part, you can't find the same for men.
If you want specific recommendations you can check around /r/rational on reddit, since they tend to cover some of the better stories from that site.
I have a 12 year old daughter and 10 year old son. My daughter has been reading voraciously since about 9 years old. This past summer she plowed through several 800-1000 page books.
My son is not nearly as voracious as she is, but has, in the past 6 months started to really value his reading time, enough that he gets upset when things interfere with it. Also, he now goes out and researches books to read (often via YouTube during his Youtube time). I think what got him here was consistency.
We've read to them every night until they were in second grade and then required them to read overnight. It took a while to take hold with both, but once it did they dove in and now really value it.
As for what he is reading - Diary of a wimpy kid series, Percy Jackson, Mysterious Benedict Society are the current favorites.
These are fairly current: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_Rider. Aimed at teenage boys although I only know about them cos our daughter loved 'em.
Oh goodness Alex Rider is still going? I was reading those 20 years ago haha
I have both (10-13ish) and both read almost constantly. Our son is the older one, read early and also very quickly, and that's set a tone for his siblings who now read a lot as well. Neither in that 10-13 age bracket above has trouble finding novels they enjoy from fantasy or adventure settings. There was an earlier period where we asked friends' teenagers to suggest book series, but these days our children seem to find their own novels during library sessions incorporated into their schooling.
Yeah, although my son had trouble learning to read and wasn't really reading at grade level until the end of second grade, by the time he was ten he was reading all kinds of different books that interested him without needing our suggestions. He did read some "young reader" books, but also read a lot of classic adult novels.
I think this is probably very genre specific. I suspect the nonfiction and realistic fiction boy/manly/macho genres(outdoors, machines, fighting, and the like) may have been especially cannibalized by games/video. I don't recall seeing any of this stuff on my last trip to a physical bookstore. But on the fantasy/geeky side there are more great options than there have ever been, and, as a girldad, I can tell you that female main characters are tough to find.
A mother I know said the same thing about reading assignments at school, that they're all for girls now.
Having a female protagonist doesn't necessarily mean boys can't enjoy a book, of course. I (a boy) enjoyed Nancy Drew just as much as The Hardy Boys when I was young. But I suspect modern writings with girl protagonists are more focused on targeting girls than on making good stories that happen to feature girls, and may not be as universally enjoyable.
No, we just have the one daughter. But I was a boy, and I loved reading too. I don't remember needing books to mirror my experience, in fact I probably preferred books which didn't since I mostly found my own experience fairly boring!
Some recent-ish off-the-beaten track suggestions that our daughter really liked that might be appealing to boys:
1. The Unknown Adventurer books (https://www.theunknownadventurer.com): beautifully illustrated, Journey to the Last River is wonderful. We have the Lost Book of Adventure too, but our daughter didn't enjoy that one as much, I think that one would appeal more to boys. Looking at the page I see they have a third, I'll have to pick that up.
2. Almost anything by David Almond, although his young adult stuff tends to blend into his adult work and not all of it is appropriate/interesting depending on reading/maturity level. Plenty of male protagonists, mostly universal themes, some quite strange. I'd recommend reading them first to get an idea if they'd be good for your kid, I loved them. His first book Skellig is probably a good place to start just to see if you like the style or not, although they're all quite different from each other.
3. We really liked A Wish in the Dark, by Christina Soontornvat. Some social commentary but also a great story in an interesting world: https://soontornvat.com/books/a-wish-in-the-dark/. I also highly highly recommend All Thirteen, the non-fiction story of the Thai cave rescue, absolutely amazing story: https://soontornvat.com/books/all-thirteen/.
4. The Orphans of the Tide series by Struan Murray are great adventure/fantasy stories, if occasionally a little dark for younger kids. We got distracted before getting to the last one in the series, but the first two were good.
I can't help so much with stories specifically for boys, but generally I find that just focusing on high-quality, well written books of any stripe are a good bet. If you have a good bookshop nearby, go and find the helpful person - they can help steer you. And buy books from them so they stick around :-)
I have daughters that love nancy drew novels, read to them before bed, currently on book 28.
for a boy the Hardy boys is the equivalent..
Also depends on the age but other good ones are:
Artemis Fowl Alex Rider Berenstain Bears
Isn't 2020s a pretty steep cutoff? I understand these stories shouldn't be too cut off from the current culture, but surely 10-15 years in the past is still fine? Even older, surely; 2 of the novels that stick out in my own childhood ('Bridge to Terabithia' and 'Where The Red Fern Grows') were decades before me.
Yeah, we did not had any issue finding good book either. Good kids books exist and are easy to find. The kids not reading is not caused by books not existing.
Books are not culturally relevant anymore, not for adults and not for children.
I think it's just always hard to find stuff you like, and time is a great filter. There are tons of new series that my sons like: the whole Percy Jackson world, Diary of a Wimpy Kid, Dog Man, Lemony Snicket, Nathan Hale's Hazardous Tales, etc. Lots of books out there!
Fantasy kids books, e:g Tolkien, CS Lewis (Narnia), Joan Aiken, Edith Nesbit are timeless though right? Then there are books set in a different time, that kids still enjoy e:g Just William series 1920-60 (which contains some stereotypes about race or gender roles which can actually lead to a healthy discussion about to what extent we've moved on and "don't say those sorts of things" nowadays) . So, books set in the current decade are great but kids can have a lot of fun reading older stuff if that isn't available. Ours read quite a mix of old and new.
I've been thinking about this a bit lately, because my sister has a son I'd like to share some of my favourite Goosebumps books from the 90s with. I think they'd still be fun reads for a 7-10 year old, but I wonder how much the world depicted in them would make sense for my nephew.
What makes you think all authors have suddenly unlearned how to write "quality" children's books?
I disagree that literacy is all about reading fictional books and I wish we could broaden it a little bit more, even at school.
This might be an odd take, but I never liked reading books and have read very few books in my whole life. I do love to read news articles, forum posts, magazines etc. because the format fits me.
Judging myself by my education level and career I'd say I did just fine without opening a single book.
I enjoyed reading fiction until I studied electrical engineering. After that I felt that fiction was a waste of time. On a cognitive level I don't think it is, but I think the feeling comes from having been instilled with a sense that reading has to involve some degree of learning. As though everything I do has to involve some self betterment. It's frustrating and I feel a sense of loss about it.
> Just 1 in 3 (32.7%) [of] children and young people [...] a 36% decrease
So was it half of the kids before or two thirds?
I know it doesn't really matter but this sort of wording does make me curiousSince they do use "percentage points" further down, presumably it was 51% in 2005
I have to stop people from doing this in presentations all the time lol. Just say "Runtime decreased from 117s to 34". It is really easy to mentally compare two numbers; it is much harder to start with "Runtime decreased by 71% to 34s" and find the old value. Equally brief, never any ambiguity, easier on the mind, and no weird explosions as you approach zero.
I'd wager it's the first (51.1%). Mostly because I simply cannot imagine that nearly 70% of kids in 2005 enjoyed reading. That seems too high. Based on..? My vibes.
What does "they read something daily in their free time in 2025" actually mean?
I think it means actual books.
I think it excludes forums, discord chats, and general online stuff.
Kids are forced to read more than ever before to interact with their peers. The rise of sites like Web Novel and Royal Road are inspirational. I would guess that there are more "writers" than ever before in history.
The PDF report covers the difference between print and screen reading around page 27, I think their daily reading must be content available in print and screen but it is not clearly defined.
That section does show that 2/3rds of screen reading though is direct messages, social media, and text in video games. Blogs and forums only hit 1/4.
Kids might be forced to read more than ever before, but not all reading is the same, anymore than using a games console and iPad as a kid makes you fully computer literate.
These stats are hard to interpret - this could all very well be consistent with the kids these days turning out to be the most literate generation in history. There is very strong incentive to get good at reading to interact with the internet even if it isn't reading for 'enjoyment'.
There is a linked PDF, but I'd actually be more interested in reading the original survey to see how 'reading' is being framed. Is an hour in the HN comments section counted as reading for fun?
Does this consider audiobooks? Personally, I have been reading fewer physical books and have preferred to listen to them instead. This comes as my eyesight deteriorates, but I can imagine that for others, listening to books over audio can be a more pleasant experience.
I don't know the answer to your question, but whether this is a solution depends on your focus: if you want young people to be able to read properly (locate and ingest information quickly) then audio books are not going to solve that. If the focus is reading enjoyment then sure. Could also watch a video and be perfectly entertained
No, it isn't a solution, but at least young people would be ingesting literature, which I would argue is a far cry better than the brainrot YouTube videos targeting kids. That's an assessment of the status quo though, we should absolutely encourage more physical reading as an essential skill.
We're in for a rough ride as a species.
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