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.

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.

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.

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.

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.