Why kids don’t like to readBooks and Writing, health and lifestyle — by TDavid @ 7:02 pm PST
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None of our children like to read.
I’m saddened somewhat by this reality, but it’s time to face facts. We’re now having to force our youngest teen to sit and read aloud to me for a minimum 15 minutes each day. It’s the first thing he needs to do when he gets home is come see me and start reading aloud.
I never much cared for reading aloud, but love reading otherwise. My reading these days isn’t for adventure and suspension of belief like it was when I was younger as much as it is news (RSS feeds), documentation and nearly all non-fiction.
Blame it on … ?
What’s to blame for children not being excited about reading? When both your parents love to read and you are surrounded by books, I don’t think parenting is to blame. So what are the other distractions? What are driving kids away from the wealth of information and amazing places you can only visit in your mind?
Computers
I had a computer when I was younger (Vic-20 first) and started programming at a young age. There were lots of times I chose reading over tapping at the keyboard. The presence of a computer can’t be the main culprit. Or can it?
TV
Not in our house. We’ve had no TV service by choice for 250+ days. I’m not sure TV is stealing reading time like it did 15, 10 or possibly even 5 years ago. When I was a child I liked to watch TV, but I still enjoyed reading more. Give me a good Ray Bradbury story over anything on TV. Well, maybe except for Twilight Zone.
Internet
The internet could be guilty. Last night I went to help a friend with is LAN. The christmas present for his teenage daughter was a laptop and she felt like the computer was broken because it couldn’t get connected to the internet. Where was the first place she went to test the internet in the browser? MySpace. I’m glad none of our teenagers are that into MySpace.
Cell phone / Texting
At least in the case of my friend, this was non-stop while I was working on his network. His daughter was going back and forth text messaging with her friends. I could tell by the annoying sounds the phone made. She switched it to vibrate but it still made noise that even annoyed her father. His daughter seemed disturbed that our boys weren’t into text messaging. Is this trend more common with girls than boys? Our teens can’t get into text messaging because we don’t have cell phones. When I told my friend’s daughter this you’d have though my name was Fred Flintstone.
Video games (Xbox 360, Wii, PS3, etc)
In our household this is the primary reading time stealer. Our kids would much rather play videogames than read. Maybe games should have more reading rather than cinema type video. Text games like Zork would encourage reading. How about choose your own adventure type games. So much emphasis on graphics these days and not text.
Other
There are other activities like sports that could take away from reading and I’m sure readers can think of more to add in the comments below.
I told our youngest son (pictured above reading) that what would make us really happy parents is if he read not because we told him he had to but because he wanted to read. I don’t believe forced reading exercises work. Forced anything with teens can meet with unpredictable and undesirable results.
Idea: family book day
I think a family trip to the book store is on tap for this weekend. Everybody picks out at least one book. We pick a day each month and unplug from the games and the internet and read for pleasure. Think something like shutdown day but every month, not every year.
Any other ideas for positively promoting and encouraging reading in kids? Perhaps some incentive plans for them for reading books? To me the biggest incentive was being fascinated by the storyteller, but maybe today’s younger generation requires something more?
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I think you hit this right on the head.
Just taking myself as an example, I used to read all the time from say 3rd grade until 7th, then after that I really didn’t want to touch a book. Why? Because it wasn’t fun anymore. Having to do book reports and the teachers giving you a book and saying “read chapter 10 by tomorrow, then we will take a test on that.” So, all I would do is just read the assigned chapter, take the test, and all was forgotten. I can say honestly that my whole school career I read say 10 books, but I can’t recall anything about them. So I think it’s a very fair statement that forced reading is not a good thing.
And another thing. When I worked at a high school, I would hear teachers complain about the kids reading test scores and how they just don’t want to read. Yet when I went into the gym class, all the teachers aids , mostly jocks, would be reading the sports page front to back. Then I would ask them what’s going on with the 49ers and they could all recall the points of the articals.Or you would see kids at lunch time reading Car Tuner or Car Audio magazines and they could tell you how to wire your car for a booming system, or what you mod chip your car needs to lower it’s 0 to 60 time.
Yes you would like to see kids more into the classics, but with all the forced reading going on it’s just a big turn off and not fun for kids.
Comment by orangecrush — March 2, 2007 @ 7:41 pm PST
I should have said “high school career” .
Comment by orangecrush — March 2, 2007 @ 7:42 pm PST
Perhaps just me, but I miss reading for fun, orangecrush. Looking forward to that trip to the book store tomorrow. Hopefully our kids will find books that interest them and they’ll want to read them on their own without any pressure.
Comment by TDavid — March 2, 2007 @ 7:50 pm PST
“We’re now having to force our youngest teen to sit and read aloud to me for a minimum 15 minutes each day. It’s the first thing he needs to do when he gets home is come see me and start reading aloud.”
A great way to make him not want to open any book in his entire life
Comment by Rinkx — March 2, 2007 @ 9:23 pm PST
I think forcing our teen to read exercises doe not works any more.up to my knowledge teens are so bored with studying similar books on every stage & Technology giving many thing to them ,for that reason they are more concentrating other things rather than books., If we provide them different books which are according to the their interest They Read books more & more.Here [see signature] is an searching site which is one of the best book search engine. Try at once you may find something for you.
Comment by actoriya — March 2, 2007 @ 10:22 pm PST
Actually Rinkx, for whatever it’s worth, he told me that he is “liking reading more.” Certainly could be a ploy (I don’t buy everything I’m told). He doesn’t just sit there and read though, we stop and talk about the story too.
Comment by TDavid — March 3, 2007 @ 2:08 am PST
actoria - I did some searches using that ozone thing and it returned nothing that he’d be interested in. I saw more Google ads than anything else. Also, why would he want to download books on “adsense” ? He’s not a webmaster and shows not interest in being one.
Comment by TDavid — March 3, 2007 @ 2:17 am PST
Rinkx,
I think you’re wrong, sometimes kids even adults need to be pushed into doing things they might not want to do. We force kids into doing chores and I hardly think as they get older they won’t want to do any chores. As parents we are here to try to guide them as they grow into adults and if that means we need to force them to do say their homework, eat vegetables or whatever else they may resist it is part of our job. Also as TDavid pointed out he is actually starting to enjoy reading now. I think kids especially like to resist something thats new but once they get in a routine it is just part of their day.
Comment by Kara — March 3, 2007 @ 7:40 am PST
[…] TDavid: Why Kids Don’t Like to Read - “Any other deas for positively promoting and encouraging reading in kids? Perhaps some incentive plans for them for reading books?“ […]
Pingback by Jeff Barr’s Blog » Links for Saturday, March 3, 2007 — March 3, 2007 @ 8:31 am PST
I did my fair share of reading in elementary school and even found serials I enjoyed (although the names escape at the moment). I didn’t do a whole lot of reading in middle school, mostly short (four page) articles. I switched to a different school in eight grade and started reading a lot more. Really great books too, mostly fiction (Ender’s Game, Farenheight 451, Animal Farm, etc), but one or two non-fiction as well.
Highschool started out with me reading The Odyssey (I’m pretty sure I still have my copy somewhere). That was not an easy read and pretty traumatic. I started to dislike reading and would avoid it as much as possible. I remember often riding in school, franticly reading what I needed for that day. I also did a lot of Shakespear. I didn’t understand it all. I think it was the summer after my sophomore year that I decided to boycott the summer reading assignment. That didn’t go over to well and fortunately I had wonderful teachers who helped me pick things I might enjoy. I took a course called Roman Shakespeare my senior year that was pretty fun. But I was still left traumatized.
Spring semester of my junior year of college, I picked up a copy of A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking. Something struck me, I hadn’t had this much fun reading in a long time. For me, I found that I like reading non-fiction waaay more than fiction. I started sucking up books again, Elegant Universe, Naked Conversations, Blink, Freakanomics, Tipping Point, etc.
Long story short, maybe give non-fiction a try…it’s worked for me.
Comment by Andrew Ferguson — March 4, 2007 @ 1:32 am PST
There is no simple answer…just possible ideas; lead by example, establish a routine of going to the bookstore and let them find/pick out a book. Personally…I think too much of anything is a bad thing..even reading books. My kids play Star Wars Lego video game and they’ve learned team work, puzzle skills, the value of patience..you’d have to play to know. So don’t assume their other activities are bad, video games, the internet, TV, etc. I just try and give my kids a variety of environments. Btw..I found this blog while reading my RSS feeds on an early Sunday morning….while they are all still sleeping.
Comment by David Armstrong — March 4, 2007 @ 6:57 am PST
5-6 years ago I was talking with a guy who ran a used book store specializing in Fantasy/Sci-fi and he was blaming it on the Internet. Why read a book in those genres when you can be the character in a game?
Comment by engtech — March 5, 2007 @ 1:08 pm PST
Personally i think that this David guy is simply retarded and should deserve hate mail and to be hung. He should have to eat rotten toe nails. His argument was based on opinion and what goes on in his house hold; not on fact. You need fact to have a valid point. No one in their right mind would turn off cable for almost a year. You can’t force someone to like something they don’t you will just push them away.
yours untruly,
Ashley.
Comment by Ashley — June 5, 2007 @ 9:15 am PST
Gee, thanks for the note of confidence Ashley! LOL
Nice to see you actually brought some ideas to the table. I’m not sure me “eating rotten toenails” is going to motivate our teenagers to read more, but maybe that classifies as an idea.
Comment by TDavid — June 5, 2007 @ 9:41 am PST
Some people don’t watch TV that much. My household growing up was much worse, so that comment by Ashley sounds pretty dang privileged.. naye.. spoiled to me. While parenting is guidance, not forcing, too many young Americans feel like it’s their right to do whatever they want. Doesn’t quite work that way, at least not when I was growing up. And go figure that the same type of parenting got you people like B. Gates, and P. Allen. Go figure that one out. I’m sure that TD’s choice to move his family in one direction with no cable had buy-in. But then again, who are you to judge how he raises his kids? I could say the same about say… religious parents “forcing” their kids to go to church on Sundays.
While yes, it is based on his opinion, I agree with him having been an chat room administrator all these years. The fact that the SAT scores have been boosted twice for both verbal and math scores (once in 1995, another in later years) proves the point that younger America has some issues that can be resulted in games/texting/IMspeak/what not.
Comment by darkmoon — June 5, 2007 @ 9:51 am PST
[…] this year I pondered why our kids don’t read and this morning I’m reading the CNN article with a study that found 1 in 4 people […]
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