7 ms·

Teen reading slumps to worst this century due to surge in screen time

42 points by pseudolus 8d ago

Charly_HW 8d ago
To be fair, I don’t see enough discussion about education since the 2000s. Parents are the only ones who complain and put some pressure, but once they no longer have kids in school, they stop caring about the quality of education. There needs to be a better framework for assessing quality than the student-parent generational comparison.
unsupp0rted 8d ago
And they're not quoting poetry at each other anymore. It's a great loss.
- saidnooneever 8d ago
  a fine way to point to the real issue. a loss of critical thinking.
  - sph 8d ago
    I was about to downvote you because I read your username as reply to OP’s comment. To add: at what point we stop dismissing the culture of our ancestors that we have lost as mere nostalgia? I hate how we cannot have a serious discussion about our modern culture without devolving to this cliché rebuttal. I guess I should keep praying for a coronal mass ejection to free us from our digital jails.
    - unsupp0rted 8d ago
      It's cliche because every generation has said the exact same thing about the previous generation. Everything that was considered fancy and high-culture when I was in my formative years is fancy and high-culture now and everything after that is slop and mind-rot. But it makes no difference: the older generations die and the newer ones take over either way, and what's acceptable or even high culture changes.
      - sph 8d ago
        > It's cliche because every generation has said the exact same thing about the previous generation. So this means that we have decided a priori that life can only improve in all aspects? That’s evidently absurd. This is called a thought-terminating cliché. It’s as intellectually nuanced as putting your fingers in your ears and singing “la la I’m right”. It’s often used not because it is true, but because to prove otherwise is very hard and inherently subjective.
        unsupp0rted 8d ago
        It's not really a thought-terminating cliche. Concrete issues (e.g. iPads in the classroom result in worse tested recall) retain plenty of space. It's the vague repetitive "man yells at cloud" gripes that get auto-terminated, e.g. "is our children learning?"
- deleted 8d ago
  [deleted]
glimshe 8d ago
Every generation worries that the behaviors of the next will be the downfall of humanity. I wouldn't be surprised if the Greeks and Romans felt the same. I grew up reading and still do it today. But my teen kid, who's a great student, hates reading books. He knows many things but gets all his information from Discord chats, AI and social media videos (and his parents, but he ignores that). It does sound terrifying. "Grew up reading Gemini". But, at the same time, I think it's going to be okay. Hippies, role playing gamers and punk rockers also terrified parents and most of us turned out fine.
- saidnooneever 8d ago
  the difference is you can have bookshelves full of knowledge to keep. those discord chats will be deleted / inaccessible at someone else's doing. thats different than going into peoples homes and libraries and burning books, which is what you have to do to stop readers from learning and sharing.
- cultofmetatron 8d ago
  > I wouldn't be surprised if the Greeks and Romans felt the same. reading and writing are corrupting your ability to remember everything you need to know!!
- acadapter 8d ago
  Greeks and Romans did experience a >99% loss of their literature during the medieval period...
  - bluGill 8d ago
    When someone refers to the Greeks and Romans they are refering to a time long before the medieval period. Things got continued to get better after their most well known thinkers died for a century. (well define better... The there is a lot we would hate about their culture, but they would have considered better)
- pif 8d ago
  > Discord chats, AI and social media videos A.k.a: no trustable source.
zug_zug 8d ago
Well for whatever it's worth, I feel like I understand why. At least when I was in school, nobody really made a very persuasive case for why reading was important (which I think it is) and I'd routinely get assigned books like Animal Farm or whatever and be told like "Spend X hours reading this thing and learn some profound lesson about life." And I'd just be like, "What? This book cannot prove anything, other than one person's opinion on history. It's I guess cool as a parable about things my history class has failed to teach me, but without even knowing the base truth about USSR I can't even know what point Orwell was attempting to make." Like still to this day we have a story about some pigs going corrupt, which, great, but if you ACTUALLY want to know whether corruption is a key part of human nature you cannot achieve that through fiction. You need actual research studies (e.g. Milgram, etc), or history, or something.
- gjvc 8d ago
  Dunno why this is being downvoted. Animal Farm is a commentary / allegory on communism. Teaching it to young minds who have not experienced the difference between the realities of communism and the rest is a vanity at best.
  - hgomersall 8d ago
    It's also a story, and quite an enjoyable and well written one at that. My 8 year old son enjoyed being read it.
    - zug_zug 7d ago
      You know that's not the chief goal -- if that's the chief goal, we'd all be assigned to watch Babe rather than read animal farm.
    - bluGill 8d ago
      As I recall about half my class enjoyed it, and half hated it. I have nothing wrong with you being in the half that liked it. However I remain in the half that didn't like it.
ck2 8d ago
imagine what happens for a generation when you normalize access to gambling to a population with zero self-control but just like most states took the billions in smoking settlements and used it for everything else but to stop smoking, you can guess what they are going to do with the gambling settlements
- thijson 8d ago
  Smoking has morphed into vaping and zyn.
zug_zug 8d ago
For what it's worth, there seems to be no evidence that reading increases IQ. And it's kinda always struck me as slightly weird how proponents don't feel the need to gather evidence on the matter before making bold prescriptions for everybody else. 1. https://chatgpt.com/share/6aa158f6-b980-83e9-997e-e65be209f923 https://chatgpt.com/share/6aa158f6-b980-83e9-997e-e65be209f9...
- fnordsensei 8d ago
  I’m guessing that passing the tokens through the visual cortex doesn’t matter as much as how you engage with the content.
  - zug_zug 7d ago
    What matters is if you find research on what's true about this world like a responsible adult, or just try to come up with a zinger because you're not
VCFundedGenYer 8d ago
And AI companies are stealing and destroying all the books. Thanks Silicon Valley!
- lukasbm 8d ago
  More like, thanks judges and copyright laws
stonogo 8d ago
Same category error as always. "Screen time" is meaningless noise. They could be spending eight hours a day in the Kindle app reading classics. A good-faith study would evaluate what the kids are doing, not the tools they're using to do it.
- deleted 8d ago
  [deleted]
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 8d ago
  If they were addicted to their Kindles then why did their reading score drop?
  - stonogo 8d ago
    Great question! It's a shame these studies don't investigate that, and instead stop at "phones are making kids stupid."
- hackyhacky 8d ago
  > They could be spending eight hours a day in the Kindle app reading classics Have you been around kids recently? I think we all know what they're doing on the phone, and it's not The Great Gatsby.
  - thijson 8d ago
    They have a term for it, it's called brain rot. That's what I witness them watching anyway.
  - stonogo 8d ago
    Wouldn't it be neat if anyone actually checked?
- andrewla 8d ago
  Not even just a category error -- this is blatant malpractice to have this as a headline! The article is talking about reading scores, and this is especially pernicious given the fact that the last couple of years has not been "typical" by any measure; I seem to recall a global pandemic that might have had some influence. The numbers here are so overdetermined that it will never be possible to do a causal analysis, and jumping to "screen time" is almost outlandishly unjustified.
john_strinlai 8d ago
i'm sure generic 'screen time' is partly to blame, but i think the world is just moving fast and the education system (alongside everything else) is struggling to keep up. the constant stream of negative news, layoffs because of AI, etc. also aren't doing anything to motivate kids. many of my college students feel like they've already lost at life. between ai, the economy, job prospects, etc. i am sure high schoolers are feeling the same way, which certainly isn't going to make them more eager.
- boringg 8d ago
  Meh educational system probably lacking but parental support is the missing piece. So many parents just send their kids to school expecting them to auto learn - many reasons why parents dont have extra time --> also screen time addiction. Home environment is pretty big component to success.
  - john_strinlai 8d ago
    i think lack of parental support has been around for ages though, which makes it hard to attribute the very recent and sudden drop in reading comprehension, math scores, etc. to it. ive had to make pretty significant changes to my courses in the past two years. many teachers aren't, or are making changes slowly, which is causing some difficulty.
    - boringg 8d ago
      I would wager up until mid 00s you had one parent staying at home a lot more // work wasn't all encompassing -> which would probably equate to more attention on child rearing although I admit that is speculative. Also means a bit more attention to regulating screen time / inputs etc.
- forgetfreeman 8d ago
  I'm not sure where you see velocity. The last major innovation in arethmetic was the introduction of zero when the hindu-arabic numeral system was adopted by medieval western societies. Likewise english grammar isn't exactly a hotbed of churn.
Tycho 8d ago
And sad thing is they will be mostly scrolling through pictures and videos, with extremely low information density, when the could be scrolling high quality text like HN comments or a well curated X feed.
anonthrownaway 8d ago
How are we to take arguments for teen literacy seriously when they ubiquitously use "screens" as a pejorative? I had a 12 year old nephew ask me why I was reading while on vacation. I sent him a link to this clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ed_86qgvSp8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ed_86qgvSp8
pelagicAustral 8d ago
They need to give them Opus and unlimited tokens, they'll be reading all day
vonnik 8d ago
To be clear this trend starts really early, at least in grade school. I have a second grader and most of his friends have had iPads for years, play video games for hours per day at home. Those kids don’t like to read, and/or are reading slow. Their parents wonder why, and blame the school. You have to make books the most exciting thing in the house for most of the day. And you have to model the behavior of reading; ie read aloud to your kid, and make sure they see you reading for your own pleasure. Go to used-book stores and libraries and keep plenty of books in the house at or near the kids level that they have chosen. Learn to like Dogmab and be ok reading it 1000 times to them before they hit first grade. That’s the only way. Most parents are taking the easy way out with screens, due to deeper issues in the world, like having demanding jobs, dual income households, living far from extended family and not wanting to do the hard work of fighting the societal defaults. But that why most kids don’t want to read, and why we see these stats about teens.
- jihadjihad 8d ago
  This is a hard truth many wish to deny. An article published every month decrying the poor habits or lack of good habits of children, with a not-so-subtle implication that it is the fault of the children themselves. It is 100% true that "you have to model the behavior of X" to your kids, otherwise all bets are off and headlines like this should not be surprising in the least.
- jonhohle 8d ago
  Reading with kids before bed was our wind down activity. I attribute that and limiting screens to an hour most days to their interest in reading.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 8d ago
  > make sure they see you reading for your own pleasure. Monkey see, monkey do!
- deleted 8d ago
  [deleted]
jonhohle 8d ago
My wife instilled a strong love of reading in all of our children from a young age. They all ask to go to the library, but my oldest became the most voracious reader. If we didn’t limit screen time, he probably wouldn’t sleep, but with unlimited time with books, he’ll easily finish a novel in a day, and sometimes two. My parents and me are terrible readers, to the point where I thought I might have mild dyslexia. Once in a blue moon I find a book I can’t put down, but in the 80s I already had video games to fill my time. Having a voracious reader at a reading level 10-years or more beyond his age is its own challenge. Most of the HN crowd thinks kids should have access to all books, but I assure you, there are many books inappropriate for various developmental levels, regardless of reading proficiency. There’s also little support from libraries or the industry (rating systems, content warnings, etc.) to make that easy for parents.
- orwin 8d ago
  The best memories I have as a child are 'inappropriate' books (especially 'when I was five I killed myself' at ~12yo and 1984 at ~14.). I always had issues (disliked being touched, difficulties to empathize), but those books emotionally shook me, moved me so much, so hard I like to think I became a better version of me after reading them. Started doing theater at 12 after Buten, started working as after school counselor for 6 to 8 yo kids and help them do their homework after reading 1984, ultimately becoming a youth camp counsellor at 17. Which were terribly outside my comfort zone, but Buten showed me how to improve myself, and Orwell how to improve the world (or at least try my best).
  - jonhohle 8d ago
    I personally wouldn’t choose 1984 for a 14 year old, but would consider it rather tame compared to modern fiction. Some of it would make the grocery store check out isle romance novels blush but also don’t contain any profound message.
    - orwin 7d ago
      Weirdly, what hit me at 14 wasn't the big brother stuff, it was the romance and how sentiments, emotions were a danger in that world.
josefritzishere 8d ago
The future is bleak.
ChrisArchitect 8d ago
[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49608697 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49608697

42 points by pseudolus 8d ago

To be fair, I don’t see enough discussion about education since the 2000s. Parents are the only ones who complain and put some pressure, but once they no longer have kids in school, they stop caring about the quality of education. There needs to be a better framework for assessing quality than the student-parent generational comparison.

unsupp0rted 8d ago

And they're not quoting poetry at each other anymore. It's a great loss.

saidnooneever 8d ago
a fine way to point to the real issue. a loss of critical thinking.
- sph 8d ago
  I was about to downvote you because I read your username as reply to OP’s comment. To add: at what point we stop dismissing the culture of our ancestors that we have lost as mere nostalgia? I hate how we cannot have a serious discussion about our modern culture without devolving to this cliché rebuttal. I guess I should keep praying for a coronal mass ejection to free us from our digital jails.
  - unsupp0rted 8d ago
    It's cliche because every generation has said the exact same thing about the previous generation. Everything that was considered fancy and high-culture when I was in my formative years is fancy and high-culture now and everything after that is slop and mind-rot. But it makes no difference: the older generations die and the newer ones take over either way, and what's acceptable or even high culture changes.
    - sph 8d ago
      > It's cliche because every generation has said the exact same thing about the previous generation. So this means that we have decided a priori that life can only improve in all aspects? That’s evidently absurd. This is called a thought-terminating cliché. It’s as intellectually nuanced as putting your fingers in your ears and singing “la la I’m right”. It’s often used not because it is true, but because to prove otherwise is very hard and inherently subjective.
      - unsupp0rted 8d ago
        It's not really a thought-terminating cliche. Concrete issues (e.g. iPads in the classroom result in worse tested recall) retain plenty of space. It's the vague repetitive "man yells at cloud" gripes that get auto-terminated, e.g. "is our children learning?"
deleted 8d ago
[deleted]

glimshe 8d ago

Every generation worries that the behaviors of the next will be the downfall of humanity. I wouldn't be surprised if the Greeks and Romans felt the same. I grew up reading and still do it today. But my teen kid, who's a great student, hates reading books. He knows many things but gets all his information from Discord chats, AI and social media videos (and his parents, but he ignores that). It does sound terrifying. "Grew up reading Gemini". But, at the same time, I think it's going to be okay. Hippies, role playing gamers and punk rockers also terrified parents and most of us turned out fine.

saidnooneever 8d ago
the difference is you can have bookshelves full of knowledge to keep. those discord chats will be deleted / inaccessible at someone else's doing. thats different than going into peoples homes and libraries and burning books, which is what you have to do to stop readers from learning and sharing.
cultofmetatron 8d ago
> I wouldn't be surprised if the Greeks and Romans felt the same. reading and writing are corrupting your ability to remember everything you need to know!!
acadapter 8d ago
Greeks and Romans did experience a >99% loss of their literature during the medieval period...
- bluGill 8d ago
  When someone refers to the Greeks and Romans they are refering to a time long before the medieval period. Things got continued to get better after their most well known thinkers died for a century. (well define better... The there is a lot we would hate about their culture, but they would have considered better)
pif 8d ago
> Discord chats, AI and social media videos A.k.a: no trustable source.

zug_zug 8d ago

Well for whatever it's worth, I feel like I understand why. At least when I was in school, nobody really made a very persuasive case for why reading was important (which I think it is) and I'd routinely get assigned books like Animal Farm or whatever and be told like "Spend X hours reading this thing and learn some profound lesson about life." And I'd just be like, "What? This book cannot prove anything, other than one person's opinion on history. It's I guess cool as a parable about things my history class has failed to teach me, but without even knowing the base truth about USSR I can't even know what point Orwell was attempting to make." Like still to this day we have a story about some pigs going corrupt, which, great, but if you ACTUALLY want to know whether corruption is a key part of human nature you cannot achieve that through fiction. You need actual research studies (e.g. Milgram, etc), or history, or something.

gjvc 8d ago
Dunno why this is being downvoted. Animal Farm is a commentary / allegory on communism. Teaching it to young minds who have not experienced the difference between the realities of communism and the rest is a vanity at best.
- hgomersall 8d ago
  It's also a story, and quite an enjoyable and well written one at that. My 8 year old son enjoyed being read it.
  - zug_zug 7d ago
    You know that's not the chief goal -- if that's the chief goal, we'd all be assigned to watch Babe rather than read animal farm.
  - bluGill 8d ago
    As I recall about half my class enjoyed it, and half hated it. I have nothing wrong with you being in the half that liked it. However I remain in the half that didn't like it.

ck2 8d ago

imagine what happens for a generation when you normalize access to gambling to a population with zero self-control but just like most states took the billions in smoking settlements and used it for everything else but to stop smoking, you can guess what they are going to do with the gambling settlements

thijson 8d ago
Smoking has morphed into vaping and zyn.

zug_zug 8d ago

For what it's worth, there seems to be no evidence that reading increases IQ. And it's kinda always struck me as slightly weird how proponents don't feel the need to gather evidence on the matter before making bold prescriptions for everybody else. 1. https://chatgpt.com/share/6aa158f6-b980-83e9-997e-e65be209f923 https://chatgpt.com/share/6aa158f6-b980-83e9-997e-e65be209f9...

fnordsensei 8d ago
I’m guessing that passing the tokens through the visual cortex doesn’t matter as much as how you engage with the content.
- zug_zug 7d ago
  What matters is if you find research on what's true about this world like a responsible adult, or just try to come up with a zinger because you're not

VCFundedGenYer 8d ago

And AI companies are stealing and destroying all the books. Thanks Silicon Valley!

lukasbm 8d ago
More like, thanks judges and copyright laws

stonogo 8d ago

Same category error as always. "Screen time" is meaningless noise. They could be spending eight hours a day in the Kindle app reading classics. A good-faith study would evaluate what the kids are doing, not the tools they're using to do it.

deleted 8d ago
[deleted]
2OEH8eoCRo0 8d ago
If they were addicted to their Kindles then why did their reading score drop?
- stonogo 8d ago
  Great question! It's a shame these studies don't investigate that, and instead stop at "phones are making kids stupid."
hackyhacky 8d ago
> They could be spending eight hours a day in the Kindle app reading classics Have you been around kids recently? I think we all know what they're doing on the phone, and it's not The Great Gatsby.
- thijson 8d ago
  They have a term for it, it's called brain rot. That's what I witness them watching anyway.
- stonogo 8d ago
  Wouldn't it be neat if anyone actually checked?
andrewla 8d ago
Not even just a category error -- this is blatant malpractice to have this as a headline! The article is talking about reading scores, and this is especially pernicious given the fact that the last couple of years has not been "typical" by any measure; I seem to recall a global pandemic that might have had some influence. The numbers here are so overdetermined that it will never be possible to do a causal analysis, and jumping to "screen time" is almost outlandishly unjustified.

john_strinlai 8d ago

i'm sure generic 'screen time' is partly to blame, but i think the world is just moving fast and the education system (alongside everything else) is struggling to keep up. the constant stream of negative news, layoffs because of AI, etc. also aren't doing anything to motivate kids. many of my college students feel like they've already lost at life. between ai, the economy, job prospects, etc. i am sure high schoolers are feeling the same way, which certainly isn't going to make them more eager.

boringg 8d ago
Meh educational system probably lacking but parental support is the missing piece. So many parents just send their kids to school expecting them to auto learn - many reasons why parents dont have extra time --> also screen time addiction. Home environment is pretty big component to success.
- john_strinlai 8d ago
  i think lack of parental support has been around for ages though, which makes it hard to attribute the very recent and sudden drop in reading comprehension, math scores, etc. to it. ive had to make pretty significant changes to my courses in the past two years. many teachers aren't, or are making changes slowly, which is causing some difficulty.
  - boringg 8d ago
    I would wager up until mid 00s you had one parent staying at home a lot more // work wasn't all encompassing -> which would probably equate to more attention on child rearing although I admit that is speculative. Also means a bit more attention to regulating screen time / inputs etc.
forgetfreeman 8d ago
I'm not sure where you see velocity. The last major innovation in arethmetic was the introduction of zero when the hindu-arabic numeral system was adopted by medieval western societies. Likewise english grammar isn't exactly a hotbed of churn.

Tycho 8d ago

And sad thing is they will be mostly scrolling through pictures and videos, with extremely low information density, when the could be scrolling high quality text like HN comments or a well curated X feed.

anonthrownaway 8d ago

How are we to take arguments for teen literacy seriously when they ubiquitously use "screens" as a pejorative? I had a 12 year old nephew ask me why I was reading while on vacation. I sent him a link to this clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ed_86qgvSp8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ed_86qgvSp8

pelagicAustral 8d ago

They need to give them Opus and unlimited tokens, they'll be reading all day

vonnik 8d ago

To be clear this trend starts really early, at least in grade school. I have a second grader and most of his friends have had iPads for years, play video games for hours per day at home. Those kids don’t like to read, and/or are reading slow. Their parents wonder why, and blame the school. You have to make books the most exciting thing in the house for most of the day. And you have to model the behavior of reading; ie read aloud to your kid, and make sure they see you reading for your own pleasure. Go to used-book stores and libraries and keep plenty of books in the house at or near the kids level that they have chosen. Learn to like Dogmab and be ok reading it 1000 times to them before they hit first grade. That’s the only way. Most parents are taking the easy way out with screens, due to deeper issues in the world, like having demanding jobs, dual income households, living far from extended family and not wanting to do the hard work of fighting the societal defaults. But that why most kids don’t want to read, and why we see these stats about teens.

jihadjihad 8d ago
This is a hard truth many wish to deny. An article published every month decrying the poor habits or lack of good habits of children, with a not-so-subtle implication that it is the fault of the children themselves. It is 100% true that "you have to model the behavior of X" to your kids, otherwise all bets are off and headlines like this should not be surprising in the least.
jonhohle 8d ago
Reading with kids before bed was our wind down activity. I attribute that and limiting screens to an hour most days to their interest in reading.
2OEH8eoCRo0 8d ago
> make sure they see you reading for your own pleasure. Monkey see, monkey do!
deleted 8d ago
[deleted]

jonhohle 8d ago

My wife instilled a strong love of reading in all of our children from a young age. They all ask to go to the library, but my oldest became the most voracious reader. If we didn’t limit screen time, he probably wouldn’t sleep, but with unlimited time with books, he’ll easily finish a novel in a day, and sometimes two. My parents and me are terrible readers, to the point where I thought I might have mild dyslexia. Once in a blue moon I find a book I can’t put down, but in the 80s I already had video games to fill my time. Having a voracious reader at a reading level 10-years or more beyond his age is its own challenge. Most of the HN crowd thinks kids should have access to all books, but I assure you, there are many books inappropriate for various developmental levels, regardless of reading proficiency. There’s also little support from libraries or the industry (rating systems, content warnings, etc.) to make that easy for parents.

orwin 8d ago
The best memories I have as a child are 'inappropriate' books (especially 'when I was five I killed myself' at ~12yo and 1984 at ~14.). I always had issues (disliked being touched, difficulties to empathize), but those books emotionally shook me, moved me so much, so hard I like to think I became a better version of me after reading them. Started doing theater at 12 after Buten, started working as after school counselor for 6 to 8 yo kids and help them do their homework after reading 1984, ultimately becoming a youth camp counsellor at 17. Which were terribly outside my comfort zone, but Buten showed me how to improve myself, and Orwell how to improve the world (or at least try my best).
- jonhohle 8d ago
  I personally wouldn’t choose 1984 for a 14 year old, but would consider it rather tame compared to modern fiction. Some of it would make the grocery store check out isle romance novels blush but also don’t contain any profound message.
  - orwin 7d ago
    Weirdly, what hit me at 14 wasn't the big brother stuff, it was the romance and how sentiments, emotions were a danger in that world.

josefritzishere 8d ago

The future is bleak.

ChrisArchitect 8d ago

[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49608697 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49608697