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Reading for pleasure is sharply down among schoolkids, report shows

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Re: Reading for pleasure is sharply down among schoolkids, report shows

#291

Post by MisterTea »

I was at a friends house for a party and their kids are not on screens. They are very active in their children's lives which influences their children's behavior. The kids were busy running around and playing with the other kids who came. They have a back yard and enjoy playing outdoors. They play card and board games. Both are on teams, one soccer, the other, baseball. They have a Switch and streaming TV but don't spend much time in front of them. They do this on their own. My friends jokingly groan of all the work they need to do but are rewarded by their children's happiness and well being. They read to their kids almost every night until around eight or so. Now the kids read books before bed because they want to. This is how I grew up.

Children learn from their parents. If you spend all day in front of screens, so will they. If you don't read, they won't read. School isn't the only place they should read. Doing activities outside of the home is also important. Go rent a cottage in the country and get out of the city.

Re: Reading for pleasure is sharply down among schoolkids, report shows

#292

Post by Silamoth »

Schlagbohrer wrote: post #189
larrik wrote: post #33

It's worse than this. I have kids in school. Our school system is one of the top in Connecticut, which is the quintessential "school" state (if any rich kid on TV goes away to school, it's probably to CT). These kids (all of them, not mine) can't really read. Not like when I was young. (I'm not even old! I graduated in the 2000's!) They certainly can't write. They have no stamina to do an essay or a test like when I…

At the risk of a flamewar I want to say that I still don't accept audiobooks as a 100% drop in replacement for actually reading. I know a lot of millenials my age who insist that listening to an audiobook while is completely the same as actually sitting down and focusing without distractions on a paper book for hours. But it isn't! Firstly, much is lost without seeing the formatting of the page, and without being abl…

This should be entirely non-controversial. Listening is much more passive. You can zone out more easily without re-reading. You don’t have to work your brain to figure out pacing or anything like that.

I think the only people who claim audiobooks are the same as actual reading are people who have never bothered to do much actual reading.

Re: Reading for pleasure is sharply down among schoolkids, report shows

#293

Post by jader201 »

MisterTea wrote: post #291

I was at a friends house for a party and their kids are not on screens. They are very active in their children's lives which influences their children's behavior. The kids were busy running around and playing with the other kids who came. They have a back yard and enjoy playing outdoors. They play card and board games. Both are on teams, one soccer, the other, baseball. They have a Switch and streaming TV but don't s…

This is true, to an extent, but one missing variable is peers, and the — sometimes outsized — influence they have relative to parents.

Some parents limit screen time and delay giving their children phones, but if their peers all have phones and spend much of their time on screens, the parents’ influence may lose out.

In your example, if the friends that came over pulled out their phones and spent most of their time on the phones, the others would eventually follow suit.

And, of course, the reverse is often true — if friends are sitting around talking/interacting, it can sometimes get the others off their screens.

But I’ve also seen many cases, unfortunately, where this wasn’t the case — even though many are interacting, they’ll still keep their face in their screen.

This is often true in adults, too.

Re: Reading for pleasure is sharply down among schoolkids, report shows

#295

Post by AnodicElegy »

I believe it's a huge advantage to be an avid reader, especially of novels, in childhood. It helps not just with the ability to understand and retain written information, but also with increasing eloquence and breadth of knowledge.

I read frequently to my two-year-old son. It's a fun challenge for me, as I attempt to give every character a different voice and keep it consistent, to emulate the professionals who narrate the audiobooks that I listen to. Currently, he is enjoying Archie comics. I hope the effort I'm putting into it now will help secure his attraction to the medium once he's reading independently.

I love video games as much as I do novels. My parents restricted them for me severely (along with all other screen time) as a child, though, so the amount of time I spent on them was much smaller than the amount I spent reading novels. I thank my folks for that now. I'm not going to be as strict as they were with my son, but I hope I can find a happy medium. He's already very attracted to television, but we try to keep that to short, occasional sessions.

Re: Reading for pleasure is sharply down among schoolkids, report shows

#296

Post by MSFT_Edging »

reverius42 wrote: post #167
watwut wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Young adult fiction being the fing young adults read the most makes 100% sense.

"Young adult" fiction is supposed to be for like 11-15 year olds. By high school I'd think you should be reading regular "adult" material. I think the curriculum generally agrees and assigns what we'd call adult literature in high school English.

Careful, if the YA fans could read, they'd be really upset at this.

Re: Reading for pleasure is sharply down among schoolkids, report shows

#297

Post by elevaet »

What's working for our family (2 boys) is: restricted screen time, no phones until 14, heavy parental controls on devices when they do get them, rationed gaming on weekends only (2 sessions of 1h20 each), enforced reading time before bed, lots of sports.

Both of our kids read a lot, one is a bookworm, the other could take it or leave it tbh, but at least he can sit down and read, which is not a skill to be taken for granted anymore unfortunately.

Re: Reading for pleasure is sharply down among schoolkids, report shows

#298

Post by ndriscoll »

watwut wrote: post #186
mrob wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Young adult" in this context is a publishing industry marketing tactic. It doesn't refer to actual adults. The target audience is mostly children who want to feel like they're getting away with something they're not supposed to.

Young adult literature is not "books for target range of 11-15". OP made that claim up to make it sound terrible that people who finished high school report liking to read books literally written for their age bracket. Official young adult age range is 13-18, which means literally high schoolers. And yes, they are already grown a lot, so those books frequently end up being popular among reading adults too. I am from…

I remember plenty of "young adult" books in the school library in elementary and middle school in the 90s. e.g. I read A Wrinkle in Time in 4th grade, and The Giver was assigned in 7th. I think Hatchet may have been a choice of assigned reading in 5th. IIRC (and a quick search confirms) all of these were marketed as young adult. I've always thought of YA as targeted at roughly 9-12 years old. I remember thinking the term was patronizing when I was a kid.

Re: Reading for pleasure is sharply down among schoolkids, report shows

#299

Post by ekjhgkejhgk »

weedfroglozenge wrote: post #158
NeutralCrane wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s absolutely a bad thing, and there’s extensive research demonstrating it

Perhaps the research is wrong though because our way of thinking has been "slow, controlled, non intensive". Now that technology CAN give us content at faster speeds, isn't it better for the brains to change to adapt to the short form cycles? Otherwise you'll be left behind stuck on topic one when the new generation have absorbed 1, 2, 3, 4. etc.

I don't believe we can understand in depth faster than we used to.

When the volume of content goes up, the depth goes down.

What is happening is that we're consuming more and engaging with everything more superficially. I think that's a concerning trend.

Re: Reading for pleasure is sharply down among schoolkids, report shows

#300

Post by superxpro12 »

kuerbel wrote: post #256
zhivota wrote: post #115

We 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…

It depends on what they are doing on the device, 100%. When I was a kid I got a GameBoy, one of those old red ones, played tetris or Mario Land for an hour and after that it was boring and I did something else. Got an N64 which was already way more engaging, but even then after an hour or two I was done. It just got worse the more sophisticated games became. And now we have infinite videos and content, infinite scrol…

There's some real value in playing older video games precisely because they were developed before immoral engineers got involved and focused on creating engagement solely to be engaging. Prior to this, games were good because of story or challenge, and the engagement naturally followed.

Today, you can see the engagement engineering everywhere. ESPECIALLY IN MOBILE... omg the FOMO, flash colors, 3 second screen transitions, gambling mechanics. It's an addicts nightmare.

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