This is a result of living in homes where parents neither read to children nor model reading for pleasure.

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.

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ingvay7 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

One thing that helped in our house was making books unavoidable. We keep paperbacks lying around in every room. It sounds silly, but there’s a kind of “cover gravity” and guilt that pulls the kids ( and me) back into a book when a book is just sitting there gathering dust.

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raddan 2 hours ago | parent [-]

My parents had a rule where the default answer when I asked them to buy me things was no—except for books. Combined with the fact that we lived in the middle of nowhere and did not have cable TV, books were by far the most appealing thing around.

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andrew_lettuce an hour ago | parent [-]

Isn't this the problem though, books are no longer attractive with all the other options? How can we make books cool without pretending all this tech didn't exist?

	▲	lukewrites an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I think the content of many books is much cooler than the crap on my timelines. There’s just higher entropy (or activation energy?) to get the book picked up and opened vs the serotonin lever in our pockets. I’ve just strived to read like hell to my kids and make reading one of their most fun things around. Pretty much all we read is stuff they like, even if I hate it (I’m looking at you, Pokemon novels). If they like an author (in our house we love Daniel Pinkwater) I will go out of my way to find that authors books. We write to authors, we talk about what we read (somehow I serialised a retelling of Killing Commendatore), my 8 yo listens to my audiobooks in the car with me, we are frickin bookworms. And of course they still play Minecraft and animal crossing. It’s just that picking up a book is one of their default go-tos, and I think that’s enough. They’re building the habit and the understanding of what reading is about, and if we keep that up they will be ok.
	▲	solumunus an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		We can’t, it’s simply too addictive in comparison. It produces more dopamine, more quickly and consistently and there’s no way books will ever compete. Really it’s not even technology that is the problem, it’s specifically just algorithmic driven social media. We have to actively avoid the addictive algorithms and it’s really difficult.

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hahajk 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It's not necessarily that simple. Both I and my wife read, almost every week I read my daughter passages I've come across in my books, we have bookshelves in every room. We read to our younger children and they enjoy being read to.

I told my daughter that when I was her age I liked to read Animorphs, and girls were reading Babysitter's Club. She brought home these books from the school library and... they were graphic novels.

Apparently the school library is stocked with comic books and the kids can just read those instead of real books. And comic books don't have descriptions of scenes, they have almost no internal monologue or exposition, no symbolism or (literary) imagery, they really can't teach reading comprehension.

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NeutralCrane 26 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

I was going to mention this as well. Everything is a graphic novel these days. Go to the bookstore, and at least half of the shelf space dedicated to children is for graphic novels (and that doesn’t include the manga section). Almost every book series has a graphic novel version. And some of these are just complete skip. Dav Pilkey (Captain Underpants from my days, now DogMan and others) just pumps out the most low effort stuff imaginable.

It’s no surprise kids are reading way behind what previous generations did when this is what they are bombarded with.

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andrew_lettuce an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

My wife is a school librarian and really dislikes graphic novels, in part because they are so expensive they eat all of her meager budget. But she recognizes they can be the hook that catches a future reader. Not always, but sometimes she can get a kid to transition to full books from graphic novels, so they do have their place. They seem very useful with her significant ESL population.

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lukewrites 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

FWIW my son went through the same sort of thing during emerging literacy and it drove me kind of crazy. He started with simple texts, then started coming home with “graphic novels”. I just let him do it. He was stuck on those for a bit, started getting interested in World Record books (which, again, lots of pictures and not much writing), and then…read a Roald Dahl book a day for two weeks. For whatever reason, the switch flipped.

Throughout it I continued reading to him daily, mostly stuff that he comprehends just find but find too difficult to read on his own.

I think it just comes in its own time if nurtured.

Edit: I really like what John Gotto (I think…he wrote a book called Dumbing Us Down) observed about literacy; for a long time it just developed naturally without much formal instruction. I had that in mind for our kid and am glad I did.

	▲	raddan 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> Throughout it I continued reading to him daily, mostly stuff that he comprehends just find but find too difficult to read on his own. This reminds me of the father-son scenes in Zen and the Art and of Motorcycle Maintenance. The narrator—the father—reads Walden to his son, who is just at the edge of being able to understand it. That causes a lot of Q&A between father and son that the narrator initially finds annoying. But then he realizes that Walden reads better this way.

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cwbaker400 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I logged in especially to second what lukewrites has said.

My kids both started on and enjoyed graphic novels, then progressed to reading chapter books without pictures etc, I'd say in part because of the graphic novels.

	▲	sgc 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		My first daughter I managed to flip the switch for reading through Tintin and other graphic novels. My younger daughter skipped that entirely. She started reading later than the first, but jumped right in to longer full length books that were captivating for her (they were series she had seen her sister read). I completely agree that we can encourage but reading needs to come naturally to them. You can't force-feed curiosity and passion, which is what reading is all about for young people.