How to Kill Kids’ Interest in Reading

So the bad news is that reading for pleasure already seems to be pretty rare and getting rarer among both kids and adults.

Let's start with adults.

An August 2025 study made use of a data set called the American Time Use Survey, nationally representative group of people that 10,000 or more every year are asked to recall everything they did in the preceding 24 hours.

So this study looked at the data, looked at reading for personal interest as one of the activities people might have engaged in.

including e-books and audio books, but not including, as far as I can tell, reading on your phone.

And they did this from 2003 to 2023.

You ready for the results? A slow, steady decline.

In 2003, about one in every four adults had read for pleasure at some point during the preceding day.

By 2023, that was down to about one in six, 16%.

Those who did do some reading read for about an hour and a half, but because so few people did it, the overall average of American daily reading for pleasure was 16 minutes.

They found about the disparities you would expect by income and education level.

Other studies have found similarly discouraging news in the UK and Australia.

In 2022, a census study found that less than half of U.S. adults reported having read one or more books during the preceding year.

And that percentage, too, has been declining gradually over the years.

As for kids, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, NAEP, When they test 9-year-olds and 13-year-olds, they also ask them a bunch of questions about their activities and their schooling.

And one of the questions is, do you read for fun almost every day? Among 9-year-olds in 2012, a little over half said yes.

That was down to 39% about 10 years later.

13-year-olds started off lower, 27%.

In 2012, 10 years later, only 14% of 13-year-olds, pretty comparable to adults.

Why? Why is reading for pleasure so rare in this society? Well, the answer that comes to mind most people's minds most quickly for this and virtually everything else that is unhappy in our picture of our society is social media.

screens.

And I say maybe, maybe.

I have to admit I'm pretty skeptical of the methodology behind a lot of those sweeping assertions that blame everything bad on this, especially among kids.

I don't think a lot of the claims by Jonathan Haidt and a conservative psychologist with a history of dubious claims about young people named Gene Twenge really hold up.

There may be something there, but first of all, I don't know of any solid evidence that causally connects the two.