If you go to the original link [0] you will see that things are actually pretty stable and okay?
Reading for pleasure is sharply down among schoolkids, report shows
131–140 of 350 posts
Re: Reading for pleasure is sharply down among schoolkids, report shows
#132C-SPAN: Doctor on How Screen Time Hurts Kids' Cognitive Development https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fd-_VDYit3U
Re: Reading for pleasure is sharply down among schoolkids, report shows
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean it’s obviously not just that otherwise we’d make every kid play the original Donkey Kong and call that a success
The original donkey kong is pretty difficult compared to some of the wide-audience games that have been coming out. As far as I can tell, if the audience of a particular franchise includes younger generations as a majority or near-majority, the difficulty plummets. I don't think "plummets" is even that sensational. See pokemon, kingdom hearts, mario games, final fantasy games. Some franchises and genres have survived…
That's mostly the MBAification of games that I think is completely disconnected from what most kids want. But the MBA logic is about maximizing market reach. Relatively few people will choose not to play a game because it's too easy, but ostensibly the same isn't true of games that are seen as difficult. Of course Elden Ring, Dark Souls, et al completely proved this to be nonsense (to say nothing of pvp games), but who's gonna let a bit of reality get in the way of pie charts, bar graphs, and powerpoints?
In the world of games outside the big money AAA MBA stuff, there's plenty of highly challenging franchises that maintain true to themselves and thrive, even with plenty of kids playing. E.g. - I suspect the median age for Binding of Isaac is well below the age of consent.
Re: Reading for pleasure is sharply down among schoolkids, report shows
#134This 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.
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 graphi…
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.
Re: Reading for pleasure is sharply down among schoolkids, report shows
#135I read for pleasure; ~100 books a year on average. When I go anywhere, I am reading. My daughter informed me that the mothers of her teammates were outright making fun of me for having my 'nose buried in a book,' before every event. I asked her if they were making fun of everyone else for having their nose buried in their phones; she laughed and said they probably were not. Why is reading for fun something that's wor…
I love the result of reading, and the occasional jolt I get when reading, but not the activity of reading. I need to consume the text word for word, scanning with my eyes. The thing that gets me most happened after I got into Hemmingway: everything in a book happens in the forefront. In a movie you can have things happening outside your span od attention. Not in a book. You can’t have a doorbell happening in the background - it’s explicit and relevant to the story (which has spawned a counter-culture of writers).
Re: Reading for pleasure is sharply down among schoolkids, report shows
#136Are we surprised? Books were entertainment when that's all the world offered. Now whenever reading gets mentioned online, it's a "smarter way" to consume entertainment. Readers always give off a smug aura. Technology has come along and with that visuals, audio, engagement. The Tiktok Algorithm is this generation's Shakespeare. This isn't a bad thing.
It’s absolutely a bad thing, and there’s extensive research demonstrating it
Re: Reading for pleasure is sharply down among schoolkids, report shows
#137While this is probably bad, reading gets more credit than it should, especially when it gets to reading junk content, not engaging with the content, and escapism. A baseline level of reading is important, but beyond that, I'd rather kids go out and do things than just read about them.
Re: Reading for pleasure is sharply down among schoolkids, report shows
#138Recommendations? What are you reading? I recently enjoyed a few books of the "We are Legion, We are Bob" series
This is something i actually found chatgpt useful for. I gave it a list of books ive read and why i liked them, it gave me a list, some minimal summaries. I went and did some searches, read the back, told chatgpt my thoughts and it refined the list once more.
It was able to turn me to an author of a number of scifi books that really piqued my interest. One of them it prefaced with "dont read tue summaries" which i thought strange, but i listend, and ultimately bought the book just from reading a single line summary of it.
Re: Reading for pleasure is sharply down among schoolkids, report shows
#139I read for pleasure; ~100 books a year on average. When I go anywhere, I am reading. My daughter informed me that the mothers of her teammates were outright making fun of me for having my 'nose buried in a book,' before every event. I asked her if they were making fun of everyone else for having their nose buried in their phones; she laughed and said they probably were not. Why is reading for fun something that's wor…
It always has been negative attention gathering - reading marks you as a nerd.
And yeah, by far the strongest predictor I've ever seen for "does the kid do X that everyone agrees is good for people to do" is always "do the parents do it?". You lead by example. Kids are great at picking up on whether you enjoy it or not.
Re: Reading for pleasure is sharply down among schoolkids, report shows
#140We recently had some behavior issues with our kids - they didn't want to do activities outside the house, they hated reading, they hated anything that required even the slightest discomfort or effort. We decided to cut device usage way down - they get 1 hour in the morning to play whatever games they want on computer, tablet, console. Then they get 1 hour before bed to watch TV. The rest of the day, no devices. We ar…
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