I browsed the shelves for as long as my mother would allow when I visited the library as a child. When her patience – or our available time – finally petered out, I brought seven or eight books up to the library counter to check out – a healthy mix of historical fiction, fantasy, mystery, and classics. The librarian often raised an eyebrow or chuckled at my stack of books, but my mother knew I would usually read them all.

I tore through books in my childhood and teenage years. But I wasn’t alone. My siblings read a similar amount, as did some in my friend group, especially those with little to no access to video games and social media.

Such habits are increasingly rare among children. A 2024 study conducted by the National Literacy Trust (NLT) in the U.K. found that only 35% of children ages 8-18 read for pleasure – a number 8.8 percentage points lower than in 2023. Since 2016, the NLT has seen a downward trend in children reading for pleasure.

A 2020 study conducted by the National Assessment of Educational Progress on 9- and 13-year-olds found that those who regularly read for fun in the U.S. has also dropped substantially over the past decade. Data from 2022 and 2023 show the continuation of this declining trend.

Meanwhile, screen time for children in our country continues mounting since the pandemic.

This isn’t news to most of us; we witness such decline every day in anecdotal forms. I used to see children (and adults) reading on trains and planes; now I primarily see screens. I’ve also seen the decline in the emptiness of my neighborhood library and in the complaints of schoolchildren when they encounter books I once enjoyed.

Efforts are underway to counteract this decline, however. Second Lady Usha Vance recently announced a “Summer Reading Challenge” for children in grades K-8, inviting children to read 12 books between June 1 and Sept. 5, completing a log of what they read. Each child who completes the challenge will receive a certificate, a small prize, and an entry into a raffle to visit Washington, D.C.

Schools often institute similar summer reading challenges or requirements. A classical Christian school in my area created a “Screen Free Summer Challenge,” encouraging children to spend as many days as possible without screen-based entertainment.

Such challenges can help direct children to spend their time taking in the written word rather than delighting in the easy pleasures of the online world. But reversing our culture’s trend toward practical illiteracy will require more than the enticement of a prize or grade.

In my years as a student, tutor and teacher, I have found that those who read much do so not primarily because they are required or enticed, but because of a deep love for reading, a love inculcated and emboldened by their peers and family.

In order to achieve a culture that encourages reading, we need to build sub-cultures that do not normalize ease – the ease of flipping through TV channels or scrolling through social media – but instead recognize the value of difficult delights. Such work begins in the home, with the culture of the immediate family, and moves outward to the neighborhood and then to the church or school community.

By difficult delights I do not mean only those found within the pages of a book, but also the delights of work in the garden or garage, or the delights of time spent at the piano bench in front of sheet music or on a ladder with a paintbrush in hand.

For the enchantment of literature to become once again a force in our culture, we must become disenchanted with the latest offers of a passive and difficulty-free life mediated by screens and feeds. We must become disconnected from the consumerist mindset that dominates our society. When a sub-culture, however small, connects instead with gladhearted gratitude around pursuit of the good, true and beautiful – not the easy, crass and self-gratifying – children will be blessed in all variety of ways, including a fondness for good stories.

In other words, for children to love reading again, they must be shown and learn how to love life – real, embodied life, as God has given it, with all its difficult delights.

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The republication of this article is made possible by The Fred & Rheta Skelton Center for Cultural Renewal. 

Image Credit: PicPik