> if you need to be working very hard to give your kids a stimulating, healthy, childhood.

They don't work hard, they enjoy themselves.

They also have hobbies and my friend is always working on some hobby/home project. His wife is very social and is always planning something and he has no issues following along as he likes going out and doing things. They take the kids because they enjoy being with them and the kids also enjoy going out too.

The big issue today is the fact that parents are distracted by phones so their kids follow that example. It used to be everyone sat around, watching TV or talking to a friend on the phone. Those were limited activities as eventually you got tired of talking or nothing good on the few channels of TV so you found other things to do. Now its phones constantly pumping out attention stealing content 24/7. It's a prison.

I wish people would understand that their personal experience doesn't automatically generalise to collective trends.

It's great that your kids are reading, but clearly a lot of kids, and even more adults, aren't.

It's not just "up to parents" because the media, in all its forms, sets collective values.

And the strategic problem in the US is that reading - and culture in general - is caught between a number of competing ideologies, most of which are destructive to what's usually understood as education both in and out of school.

What individual parents do is downstream of all of those cultural influences. It's heavily dependent on socioeconomics, opportunity, and status, with error bars that depend on a random range of individual values.

The US is a competing patchwork of wildly incompatible cultures and traditions, some of which are directly opposed to each other, and all of which - in practice - are suspicious of traditional educational goals.

Put simply, no one is driving the bus. So it's stuck in a ditch, with its wheels spinning. And it's about to burst into flames.

There's only so much individual parents can do to fix that. The problems are strategic and political, not individual, and they're much harder to fix than they seem.

Your kids are small. They wont have other kids in school to talk about books with and to show them different books. The discovery of books and social aspect of it ends with you. It is completely different social environment compared to what I had. There used to be cheap junk book stories, journals about books, things like that. These do not really exist anymore, but similar structures exist for movies.

Assuming they will social, they will have friends to talk with them about anime shows and they will go visit them to watch those shows in their house. The kids in school will talk about anime, about netflix shows, but not about books.

> It's up to parents to, for lack of a better phrase, teach kids how to be bored.

You have full control while they are small. That goes away quickly and obviously even should go away.

But even more importantly, my parents and parents of my peers did not had to put that much work into us reading. They did not had to make the one big family project, they could have spend their weekends working in garden or going to play golf ... and generally speaking kids ended up reading a lot more anyway. They would read, because it was easily available and only fun thing to do.

> What's super fun, easily available and free for us is going to a park on the weekend to play and have lunch, and then driving around to a bunch of Little Free Libraries in the area.

It is not fun except for small kids. All these stats are about kids with agency which yours do not have yet.

>Fewer than 1 in 5 (18.7%) 8- to 18-year-olds told us that they read something daily in their free time in 2025, again, the lowest levels we've recorded, with daily reading levels decreasing by nearly 20 percentage points since 2005.

[1] https://literacytrust.org.uk/research-services/research-repo...

Seems like the kids just don't read anymore, yours being exception of course

Alas, the evolution of societies is dictated by rules that no individual cases, however inspirational, can radically influence.

You can teach your kids how to fly a plane, yet gravity is not up to parents.

It’s mostly that. Basically the only genres that still sell meaningful numbers are YA (with lots of adult readers, and if we want to count that as its own genre) and romance (99.9% of which isn’t more challenging than average YA, and usually has even less going on as far as ideas and theme—not to knock it, I mean hell, it’s no worse a use of time than tons of other things).

Adult genre fic, even, is dying, and lit-fic has long been in decline and has pretty much just been for a few nerds since roughly the turn of the millennium.

I think the decline of reading is exactly what’s pushed publishers and agents to favor easier and easier books: you have to pursue as much of the market as possible to make money now because the whole market’s not that big, so you can’t afford to exclude readers. That means favoring ever-easier books as readership declines.

The only other route to make a living is aiming straight at film/TV adaptation, which is very hard to break into but a handful of authors have successfully specialized in that. Their books do OK but they’re watched, as it were, way, way more than they’re read.

That kind of issue is very much "eh" for me personally. They're reading. Not everybody's motivated to read "Ulysses" or "War and Peace". Probably a significant percentage move to reading more challenging material with time.

The issue a lot of people are talking about is the decline in reading comprehension, lowered reading scholastic scores, the overall lack of reading, and the consumption of entertainment that requires little reading.

Stuff like the "Treasure Island" (#34), "Oliver Twist" (#56), and "The Hound of the Baskervilles" (#66) still rates rather high up on Young Adult literature sales by Amazon's reported numbers, even if romance and such is the top 5-10. They're reading.