Children and young people's reading in 2025
39 comments
·September 10, 2025graemep
Loughla
>management refused because it improve any of their metrics
This is what everyone in the United States asked for. You wanted data driven decision making. Do not be surprised when the measure becomes the goal.
Sorry if this sounds bitter, but I spent all day yesterday arguing with administration at a college that data driven decision making is only as good as the data you feed the system, and that specifically targeting metric improvement for its own sake is step one in the road to mind death.
graemep
The case I was talking about was in the UK.
ACCount37
We "wanted data driven decision making" because it beats vibe driven decision making. Even if data is meh.
agentcoops
There are more divisions than just “data” vs “vibes.” After all, even in the natural sciences, the best data is useless without an explanation/hypothesis that can never just be reduced to the data. Precisely what is thrown out in the decline of reading is familiarity with the centuries of hard-won Enlightenment knowledge, especially concerning the stakes of education, which isn’t just vibes and that ought precisely drive our further data-driven insight into these questions.
Second best, however, I’d take the “vibes” of a random teacher over the religion-based decision making that seems to be on the rise in the US. “Data-driven” religiously motivated educational policy is the worst of all possible worlds.
snapcaster
I would push back on that. I think often people's "vibes" are a lot closer to reality than extremely gamed metrics
tux3
It depends. Not all good things are legible and easy to put into a spreadsheet.
Blind data-driven decisions destroy all illegible good in this world that can't be boiled down to some number going up. And there's a lot of it.
strken
Does it? How do you know?
CompoundEyes
20-30 minutes of quiet reading time is recess for some of the introverts.
sandworm101
I would say that they are reading fewer books but I think total number of hours reading is similar or growing.
Reading tweets and text messages is still reading. My nephew has trouble learning to read, until he started playing minecraft and needed to read websites and instructions for mods and such. Then getting his first cellphone did away with any concept of reading difficulties. We have entire economies of people reading text on computers all day (ie my job). I would bet that the average person today read better/faster than their equivalent in centuries past. They are reading junk, but they are actually reading.
squigz
> A friend of by daughter's went to a school where there were times when they had to sit and read a book - nothing kills enjoyment better than being forced to do something. You are telling kids its a chore you have to do, not something done for fun.
This is, I think, a tricky line to walk. Reading is, like most things, a skill that must be practiced, and school is a good place to do so. I think a bigger part of this practice that kills enjoyment is not being able to choose what you're reading; of course kids are going to dislike reading when they're forced to read books or stories they have no interest in at all.
graemep
They need to learn to read but not told "you must read" even if they have a choice.
My kids learned to read with me (flashcards, Ladybird books) for fun (flashcards were a game), and then just carried on by themselves by picking up interesting books (which relies on having access to interesting books - having books at home makes a huge difference, as does access to libraries and bookshops)
Telemakhos
One of those inconvenient facts: kids who will be successful in life learn to read at home before starting formal schooling, and they have an adult who reads with them three or more times a week; kids who don't get that at home are much more likely to remain illiterate or to read at well below their grade level. It's inconvenient because there isn't anything anyone except the parent(s) can do about it, and the parent has already made that choice by the time the kid gets to school.
notmyjob
Stress and pressure due to the job market and housing costs. Smarter teens are drilling leetcode to stay competitive so they won’t be destitute when the boomers liquidate social security and deficit us all into eternal serfdom, or that’s what one of them told me when I asked why he didn’t spend more time reading novels.
tolerance
I think what speaks to the core of today's young men runs counter to my impression of the kind of books being popularized.
When I was younger and read fiction I had access to a fair amount of copies of young adult novels that would never be front-and-center at a bookstore or library. In fact I think that most of these books were the rejects from the main libraries in my town. Violence, abandonment, resent, regret abound! Many of it was senseless and the endings were not as neat and resolved as the schoolteacher led me to believe how all books ought to end.
I’m not recommending this experience. But young men do need author[itie]s to guide them through the discomforting aspects of their lives in an un-fantastic fashion.
embeng4096
+1 to your point about the type of books being popularized.
I grew up obsessively rereading Redwall, Pendragon, RA Salvatore’s stuff, Ranger’s Apprentice, Enders Game, Tyrant of Jupiter, Maze Runner. Like you said, the me of now can’t recommend things like Tyrant, but still I can’t imagine that would have appealed to any of the girls I knew at that time, let alone the young women of today.
By the same token, although I read Twilight and Hunger Games, I never was obsessed like the girls in my classes were. I can’t imagine that boys today are particularly interested in A Court Of Thorns and Roses and the other spiritual successors of Hunger Games, Divergent, Twilight, etc.
tialaramex
Because this is UK focused it assumes you'll know that FSM = Free School Meal which is a proxy for household poverty. People who've seen this kind of work in other fields will recognise such proxies and probably assumed that's what is going on, but just in case.
Freak_NL
It's an academic paper, so if written correctly it does not make that assumption (about the domain-specific abbreviation at least). Instead, the abbreviation will be written out in full at the first use, and it is:
> Slightly more children and young people who didn’t receive free school meals (FSMs) told us they enjoyed reading compared with their peers who received FSMs
dmichulke
To reinforce, it doesn't mean Finite State Machine or Flying Spaghetti Monster
kqr
Given what children claim motivates them to read it sounds like well-written text adventures would do wonders for literacy.
But I suspect that would not be that easy. I think both books and text adventures would be competing against activities with much lower requirements on effort, and much higher immediate rewards.
wccrawford
What does "they read something daily in their free time in 2025" actually mean?
I think it means actual books.
I think it excludes forums, discord chats, and general online stuff.
Kids are forced to read more than ever before to interact with their peers. The rise of sites like Web Novel and Royal Road are inspirational. I would guess that there are more "writers" than ever before in history.
hennell
The PDF report covers the difference between print and screen reading around page 27, I think their daily reading must be content available in print and screen but it is not clearly defined.
That section does show that 2/3rds of screen reading though is direct messages, social media, and text in video games. Blogs and forums only hit 1/4.
Kids might be forced to read more than ever before, but not all reading is the same, anymore than using a games console and iPad as a kid makes you fully computer literate.
spacebanana7
There’s been a tragic drop off in the quality of children’s books in the past decade or so. Of course they can go back to the classics or read stuff from the 2000s but those often lack connection to contemporary culture.
lemming
Our daughter is 11 and is a voracious reader. This isn’t my experience at all. We read daily to her until she didn’t want us to any more a year or so ago. But we never had any trouble finding good books, some new and some older.
I really love kids books of all sorts - especially the illustrated ones are real works of art.
joenot443
Do you have a son? Does he read as much?
Some parents I know have suggested it's much, much easier to find newer books which interest daughters than books which might interest their son. They asked me to find some newer books he might find interesting.
Does anyone have suggestions on 2020s books aimed at adolescent boys? Ideally ones more focused on the real experience of boyhood, I think he'd be less interested in ones focused making adult commentary on social or identity topics.
metaketra
I would recommend the website Royalroad https://www.royalroad.com/home. It has a ton of stories by amateur authors. They're not enriching, deep, or social commentary. It's a modern version of pulp magazines, in the vein of Conan the Barbarian with worse writing, but in the end those were published in a paid magazine, while this is a free website accessible to all.
While they're not high quality, with a couple of exceptions, they're very fun to read, and in my opinion, while you can spend your time reading only high quality books, it's nice to just have what is essentially the fast food of fiction as well. Reading is a habit, and creating it by focusing on something like this, can still allow you to read something with depth and quality later on.
There's a big market for this for girls and for women in any book store, but for the most part, you can't find the same for men.
If you want specific recommendations you can check around /r/rational on reddit, since they tend to cover some of the better stories from that site.
prawn
I have both (10-13ish) and both read almost constantly. Our son is the older one, read early and also very quickly, and that's set a tone for his siblings who now read a lot as well. Neither in that 10-13 age bracket above has trouble finding novels they enjoy from fantasy or adventure settings. There was an earlier period where we asked friends' teenagers to suggest book series, but these days our children seem to find their own novels during library sessions incorporated into their schooling.
figers
I have daughters that love nancy drew novels, read to them before bed, currently on book 28.
for a boy the Hardy boys is the equivalent..
Also depends on the age but other good ones are:
Artemis Fowl Alex Rider Berenstain Bears
watwut
Yeah, we did not had any issue finding good book either. Good kids books exist and are easy to find. The kids not reading is not caused by books not existing.
Books are not culturally relevant anymore, not for adults and not for children.
footy
I've been thinking about this a bit lately, because my sister has a son I'd like to share some of my favourite Goosebumps books from the 90s with. I think they'd still be fun reads for a 7-10 year old, but I wonder how much the world depicted in them would make sense for my nephew.
roenxi
These stats are hard to interpret - this could all very well be consistent with the kids these days turning out to be the most literate generation in history. There is very strong incentive to get good at reading to interact with the internet even if it isn't reading for 'enjoyment'.
There is a linked PDF, but I'd actually be more interested in reading the original survey to see how 'reading' is being framed. Is an hour in the HN comments section counted as reading for fun?
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aaron695
[dead]
I think there is a lot going on that contributes to this.
1. Adults read less, so children see their parents reading less often (it at all!) so do not grow up thinking it is a fun thing to do. I love reading because my parents did, and my kids do because I do.
2. Schools do not make reading enjoyable. A teacher I know suggested that their school did somethings to make reading fun, and the management refused because it improve any of their metrics. A friend of by daughter's went to a school where there were times when they had to sit and read a book - nothing kills enjoyment better than being forced to do something. You are telling kids its a chore you have to do, not something done for fun.
There are other things do. There are schools that teach Shakespeare for English literature GCSE without giving them the whole text, and without watching a video of the play, let along going to the theatre.
3. There are fewer and smaller local libraries so kids cannot discover what they like as easily. There are fewer bookshops too, because people read less.