Comment by lukewrites
7 days ago
This 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.
One thing that helped in our house was making books unavoidable. We keep paperbacks lying around in every room. It sounds silly, but there’s a kind of “cover gravity” and guilt that pulls the kids ( and me) back into a book when a book is just sitting there gathering dust.
My parents had a rule where the default answer when I asked them to buy me things was no—except for books. Combined with the fact that we lived in the middle of nowhere and did not have cable TV, books were by far the most appealing thing around.
Isn't this the problem though, books are no longer attractive with all the other options? How can we make books cool without pretending all this tech didn't exist?
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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.
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.
> Throughout it I continued reading to him daily, mostly stuff that he comprehends just find but find too difficult to read on his own.
This reminds me of the father-son scenes in Zen and the Art and of Motorcycle Maintenance. The narrator—the father—reads Walden to his son, who is just at the edge of being able to understand it. That causes a lot of Q&A between father and son that the narrator initially finds annoying. But then he realizes that Walden reads better this way.
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.
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.
My son is in this transition phase right now. There are some of these "dumb" series which offer books ranging from mostly-image-some-text, some-images-some-text to text. The prose offerings are a great on/off ramp, since he knows the characters and conventions. I see absolutely nothing wrong with this trajectory and really don't even care how dumb, simple, whatever these books may be: my son is reading grade levels ahead of the rest of his class and these books have been a major contributor to his success.
My first daughter I managed to flip the switch for reading through Tintin and other graphic novels. My younger daughter skipped that entirely. She started reading later than the first, but jumped right in to longer full length books that were captivating for her (they were series she had seen her sister read).
I completely agree that we can encourage but reading needs to come naturally to them. You can't force-feed curiosity and passion, which is what reading is all about for young people.
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.
Nor do they have books in the house. It's a great time to be a book lover because you can accumulate a huge library for next to nothing by harvesting all the stuff people are giving away. But you can go into a house with children these days and see not a single book in sight. It's sad.
Less literature on offer? It seems to me the easiest time in human history to access any information whatsoever, including any and all literature.
The quality of modern literature may well be declining, but the is literally endless reading material everywhere
Sorry, I edited out some context there. What I meant is that _at school_ there's less literature on offer; instead, kids are burdened with reading "instructional texts" that are as terrible and lifeless as the name sounds.
I think parents have to counteract the negative effects of this by exposing their kids to the joys of words and reading. I agree with you 100% that there's an amazing diversity of texts out there now! Every so often when I grab an ereader I think about how blown away I would have been as a kid to think that I could take HUNDREDS of books with me on vacation.
I think GP meant it's not just "laying around", you have to actively look for books.
When I was a kid I had a ton of books from my parents in the house and when bored I could pick one up.
That's not the same as having a computer, tablet or phone, cause kids will gravitate towards non-reading activities.
(If everyone in the family owns an e-reader this obviously would be a different situation)
No, that is the wrong causality. There is a third factor which make both parents and kids not read.
> there is less literature on offer
Huh? When I was growing up we had the newspaper, Readers Digest, and maybe a library book at home to read (out side of school books). Now I have access to pretty much anything ever written on my phone. Lack of options is not why people read less.