We decided to cut device usage way down - they get 1 hour in the morning to play whatever games they want on computer, tablet, console. Then they get 1 hour before bed to watch TV. The rest of the day, no devices. We are homeschooled so this is a LOT of free time.

After a few weeks, they're now: blasting through books daily (to the point where they forgot their own TV time, which used to be sacred), playing board games with us more frequently, asking to do things outside like learning to ride bikes (which they've previously shied away from), writing their own comic books and board games on paper, and overall just being creative through the day and entertaining themselves.

It's such a huge difference. It is the devices. It's 100% the devices.

Children learn from their parents. If you spend all day in front of screens, so will they. If you don't read, they won't read. School isn't the only place they should read. Doing activities outside of the home is also important. Go rent a cottage in the country and get out of the city.

I have kids in school. Our school system is one of the top in Connecticut, which is the quintessential "school" state (if any rich kid on TV goes away to school, it's probably to CT).

These kids (all of them, not mine) can't really read. Not like when I was young. (I'm not even old! I graduated in the 2000's!) They certainly can't write. They have no stamina to do an essay or a test like when I was a kid. They can't be bored or be creative.

We've talked to multiple teachers who just don't know what to do about it.

It was better before Covid (my oldest's grade isn't as bad), but those kids who were in early elementary or younger when covid hit? Completely incapable of what adults would consider basic school tasks. Even the smart ones who get good grades!

But it's not (just) smartphones and tablets, imo. It's chromebooks in the classroom. School is online now, even after covid, and it just doesn't work in my opinion.

Personally, I'd drop technology from the classroom entirely.

My daughter informed me that the mothers of her teammates were outright making fun of me for having my 'nose buried in a book,' before every event. I asked her if they were making fun of everyone else for having their nose buried in their phones; she laughed and said they probably were not.

Why is reading for fun something that's worthy of negative attention these days but scrolling social feeds is somehow socially acceptable? I just don't get it.

Of course kids aren't reading for pleasure; their parents likely aren't and there's societal pressure to NOT do it and instead use your phone to pass the time.

Thanks to the various waves of “education reform”, there is less literature on offer and less time for pleasure reading. However, if you’re reading them exciting things at home (and telling them about the exciting stuff you’re reading), they will love to read.

It’s not just screens.

Teenagers are overscheduled compared to years past. My son’s purpose in high school seems to be to build a resume for a future college. OTOH I got into a decent college with mediocre grades and not even trying.

He reads a lot - but it’s assigned reading.

So nerdy, smart kids like my son get taken out of the reading for fun group. Exactly the kinds of kids that would have been reading casually in decades past.

As a parent of school aged kids today, I know that rubs off on my kids too. I happily read to them and share a joy in a book with them. But I don't set a role model of reading a book causally on my own.

I've wondered if some of this is the home life and some of the frustrations from our own school years running off a bit too.

I read frequently to my two-year-old son. It's a fun challenge for me, as I attempt to give every character a different voice and keep it consistent, to emulate the professionals who narrate the audiobooks that I listen to. Currently, he is enjoying Archie comics. I hope the effort I'm putting into it now will help secure his attraction to the medium once he's reading independently.

I love video games as much as I do novels. My parents restricted them for me severely (along with all other screen time) as a child, though, so the amount of time I spent on them was much smaller than the amount I spent reading novels. I thank my folks for that now. I'm not going to be as strict as they were with my son, but I hope I can find a happy medium. He's already very attracted to television, but we try to keep that to short, occasional sessions.

Nothing points to that in our abysmal PISA reading results, general educational attainment and outcomes, or anecdotal observation, but hey! At least it might be worth asking them about the surveying methodology.

[1] https://www.cultura.gob.es/ca/actualidad/2026/01/260122-baro...

Both of our kids read a lot, one is a bookworm, the other could take it or leave it tbh, but at least he can sit down and read, which is not a skill to be taken for granted anymore unfortunately.

But I read to my son every night and I love it. Not because I'm performing good parenting, but because it's one of the only times he just wants to sit with me rather than run off and do something else. He's completely absorbed. I get to be there with him in that.

He loves books in a way I never did and I'm glad. I wouldn't want him to have my relationship with them. The thread here keeps treating reading as a single thing — either you do it or you don't, and if you don't you're missing out. But being read to and reading alone are completely different experiences, and I think we underestimate how much the first one matters even for kids who will never be readers themselves.

Every minute of the day dedicated to homework, or a structured activity that can be a bullet point on a college application.

A book takes days to finish. A YouTube video minutes.

We need it in 9”. That is if the opening dance is good enough to commit to the next 7”.

I recently enjoyed a few books of the "We are Legion, We are Bob" series

And how are the parents/adults doing?

It's just that the obvious first place to look every time some statistic like this comes out is the parents/teachers/adults. I'd put money on 'Reading for pleasure: all-time low'.

Modern kids / YA fiction seems so blah.

On any given day we're either telling him to put away his switch or his book because that's how engrossed he gets.

Books were entertainment when that's all the world offered. Now whenever reading gets mentioned online, it's a "smarter way" to consume entertainment. Readers always give off a smug aura.

Technology has come along and with that visuals, audio, engagement.

The Tiktok Algorithm is this generation's Shakespeare. This isn't a bad thing.

There use to be very popular touchstone series that a large portion of school age children read. It was Harry Potter for me, but there are similar books both before and after. I think we might just need better fiction to prove to students that books are worth their attention.

0. https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/ltt/2025/

I think the middle ground is important.

During the pandemic I took my kids out of public school for the first year of it. They went to an outdoor/nature based private school that popped up. It was a part time arrangement. The rest of their week was homeschooling. They read even more and even started doing math problems for fun. I stopped reading to my daughter because she wanted to read her own thing. I continued with my son who is two years younger.

After that year the kids went back to public school. My daughter was of age to go into high school. I was reticent because of the positive experience they just had and how happy my kids were at the time, and the awful experiences other kids were having with being stuck home online trying to have virtual classes at that age. The other kids were in and out of school with masks and sanitizing. Most have bad recollections of that first pandemic year. It was the opposite for us.

When they started high school there was an expectation to be connected via smartphone and social media. Without it, you were socially disconnected. The decline in reading for fun started there. The difficult experiences in high school, like bullying and social pressures to fit in, were amplified by the smartphones. By the time my daughter finished high school she stopped reading for fun entirely. My son is nearing the end of high school and he had similar experiences. They became less physically active, gave up on most sports they used to play.

Although, if I were to say what was the cause, I wouldn’t point to the devices, but the inability for the school system to adapt. The “social” media are gamified, pushing the psychological buttons of not only the kids, but for everyone. There’s the proverbial dopamine hit, toxic engagement, and reaction farming. Kids are potentially carrying a casino, brothel, and drug dealers in their pockets. Adults are having to deal with the same issues themselves. However, kids are in school. There’s an institution in place to guide them.

If we know attention spans and over-use of social media are a problem, the schools can adapt and compensate the other way. Remove it from the equation. Make education more physically hands on, more about training focus and self-discipline. Train them on tasks requiring longer periods of concentration. Go completely non-digital if you have to, or use fixed-in-place desktop computers where needed. Instead, they’ve allowed smartphones and social media to completely dominate the environment.

Kids did read more when stories were more about friendship, horses and/or adventure and sci-fi rather than pre-approved content-filtered social studies messaging? Surprise.

The obvious solution would be to force kids to read more from the approved reading list, courtesy by the school board⸮ That'll make them enjoy reading again⸮

(I am not saying technology is innocent in this development. I'm saying: there are several factors, and screen time is by far not the only one.

Apparently in the UK it's up: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cze93wggw74o

Parents also used to read books, not because it was what you were supposed to do, but because books were not competing against Netflix, computer games and general doom scrolling.

As well as reading novels there were books and magazines crammed full of information. For me it was the atlas that could be studied for hours, nowadays, why would a child with a geography obsession do that when they have Google Street View on their tablet?

In the former times there were two types of houses, those with books and those without. That was the true class divide. Not everyone was reading for pleasure, plenty didn't read anything more than the newspaper, which was near-universal in every home.

We also had books sold for a penny that were the AI slop of the times.

All considered, I think it is a bit silly worrying about the kids not reading books when so few adults are reading books themselves.

I get back to it few years back when I suddenly got an urge to read some robust fantasy, Storm light archive it is for now. I'm again hooked since on reading.

Problem is that I was aware what I'm missing which someone who never tried it could not. Something like reading Lord of the rings and The Hobbit again and again.

It's the damn phone.

I am not trying to say there is little value in reading, but I have always found it odd that some forms of consumption are more coveted than others.

I think it's undeniable that a lot of good comes from reading, and many here would probably agree it's better than scrolling Instagram reels or even watching YouTube videos. Still, reading by itself is just one medium that we found useful over the many years of human history: it's a way to learn about the world that surrounds us, or immerse ourselves in fantasy worlds. We as humans found text on paper to be a convenient way to share ideas relatively cheaply, while also being expressive.

I'm mentioning this only because I feel like "reading for pleasure" is the wrong framing for moral judgement, I imagine it's something more fundamental like what we perceive to be cultural activities that have lasting impact on our day-to-day. I imagine young parents nowadays are less strict on prioritizing their children's reading habits, because they themselves grew up in an environment where that wasn't strictly necessary to have relatively good career options.

The digital age opened up a few venues to cheat book reading, since there are now plentiful Reddit discussions on any classical book you're interested in, which were present even before the advent of LLMs. To play devil's advocate, is it truly worse to read a thread of people discussing an idea (i.e. HN), or read the book itself, and how do we know that? Perhaps it's the act itself of exploring the idea that's useful, not necessarily the action by which you do it? I imagine I'm not the only one who's dropped a book half-read because they felt satisfied by the author's answer halfway through.

I hope this comment wasn't too off-topic from the main point of "pleasure", it's just something I've been mulling over recently.