Teen reading slumps to worst this century due to surge in screen time

unsupp0rted

And they're not quoting poetry at each other anymore. It's a great loss.

glimshe

Every generation worries that the behaviors of the next will be the downfall of humanity. I wouldn't be surprised if the Greeks and Romans felt the same. I grew up reading and still do it today. But my teen kid, who's a great student, hates reading books. He knows many things but gets all his information from Discord chats, AI and social media videos (and his parents, but he ignores that). It does sound terrifying. "Grew up reading Gemini". But, at the same time, I think it's going to be okay. Hippies, role playing gamers and punk rockers also terrified parents and most of us turned out fine.

zug_zug

Well for whatever it's worth, I feel like I understand why. At least when I was in school, nobody really made a very persuasive case for why reading was important (which I think it is) and I'd routinely get assigned books like Animal Farm or whatever and be told like "Spend X hours reading this thing and learn some profound lesson about life." And I'd just be like, "What? This book cannot prove anything, other than one person's opinion on history. It's I guess cool as a parable about things my history class has failed to teach me, but without even knowing the base truth about USSR I can't even know what point Orwell was attempting to make." Like still to this day we have a story about some pigs going corrupt, which, great, but if you ACTUALLY want to know whether corruption is a key part of human nature you cannot achieve that through fiction. You need actual research studies (e.g. Milgram, etc), or history, or something.

ck2

imagine what happens for a generation when you normalize access to gambling to a population with zero self-control but just like most states took the billions in smoking settlements and used it for everything else but to stop smoking, you can guess what they are going to do with the gambling settlements

zug_zug

For what it's worth, there seems to be no evidence that reading increases IQ. And it's kinda always struck me as slightly weird how proponents don't feel the need to gather evidence on the matter before making bold prescriptions for everybody else. 1. https://chatgpt.com/share/6aa158f6-b980-83e9-997e-e65be209f9...

VCFundedGenYer

And AI companies are stealing and destroying all the books. Thanks Silicon Valley!

stonogo

Same category error as always. "Screen time" is meaningless noise. They could be spending eight hours a day in the Kindle app reading classics. A good-faith study would evaluate what the kids are doing, not the tools they're using to do it.

john_strinlai

i'm sure generic 'screen time' is partly to blame, but i think the world is just moving fast and the education system (alongside everything else) is struggling to keep up. the constant stream of negative news, layoffs because of AI, etc. also aren't doing anything to motivate kids. many of my college students feel like they've already lost at life. between ai, the economy, job prospects, etc. i am sure high schoolers are feeling the same way, which certainly isn't going to make them more eager.

Tycho

And sad thing is they will be mostly scrolling through pictures and videos, with extremely low information density, when the could be scrolling high quality text like HN comments or a well curated X feed.

anonthrownaway

How are we to take arguments for teen literacy seriously when they ubiquitously use "screens" as a pejorative? I had a 12 year old nephew ask me why I was reading while on vacation. I sent him a link to this clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ed_86qgvSp8

pelagicAustral

They need to give them Opus and unlimited tokens, they'll be reading all day

vonnik

To be clear this trend starts really early, at least in grade school. I have a second grader and most of his friends have had iPads for years, play video games for hours per day at home. Those kids don’t like to read, and/or are reading slow. Their parents wonder why, and blame the school. You have to make books the most exciting thing in the house for most of the day. And you have to model the behavior of reading; ie read aloud to your kid, and make sure they see you reading for your own pleasure. Go to used-book stores and libraries and keep plenty of books in the house at or near the kids level that they have chosen. Learn to like Dogmab and be ok reading it 1000 times to them before they hit first grade. That’s the only way. Most parents are taking the easy way out with screens, due to deeper issues in the world, like having demanding jobs, dual income households, living far from extended family and not wanting to do the hard work of fighting the societal defaults. But that why most kids don’t want to read, and why we see these stats about teens.

jonhohle

My wife instilled a strong love of reading in all of our children from a young age. They all ask to go to the library, but my oldest became the most voracious reader. If we didn’t limit screen time, he probably wouldn’t sleep, but with unlimited time with books, he’ll easily finish a novel in a day, and sometimes two. My parents and me are terrible readers, to the point where I thought I might have mild dyslexia. Once in a blue moon I find a book I can’t put down, but in the 80s I already had video games to fill my time. Having a voracious reader at a reading level 10-years or more beyond his age is its own challenge. Most of the HN crowd thinks kids should have access to all books, but I assure you, there are many books inappropriate for various developmental levels, regardless of reading proficiency. There’s also little support from libraries or the industry (rating systems, content warnings, etc.) to make that easy for parents.

josefritzishere

The future is bleak.

ChrisArchitect

[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49608697

Charly_HW

To be fair, I don’t see enough discussion about education since the 2000s. Parents are the only ones who complain and put some pressure, but once they no longer have kids in school, they stop caring about the quality of education. There needs to be a better framework for assessing quality than the student-parent generational comparison.