Reading is fundamental, but is it fun?

Adults are reading for pleasure less often than ever. How can they encourage kids?

I’ll call her Mary. She was a bright fourth- or fifth-grader who was struggling with reading. Her deficit was not severe, and she was reading at grade level within a few months. She can read what she needs to and did well in middle and high school. But in her spare time she wouldn’t be caught dead with a book in her hands.

We tried many genres: short stories, graphic novels, popular series, children’s classics, comics, joke books. Nothing enticed her. Reading for pleasure was as foreign to her as ancient Greek.

I find many students feel like Mary, to varying degrees. Even as their reading skills improve, they don’t feel an accompanying exhilaration and urge to hit the library. They want mainly to read the scripts on their video game screens.

This correlates with new statistics that show daily reading for pleasure in the United States has decreased 40 percent over the past 20 years. Only 16 percent of adults – less than one in five – read for fun these days. Why? Smart phones and video screens are obvious culprits. So is our shrinking amount of leisure time.

But what’s most disturbing is a growing sense that reading is regarded as unimportant, an intruder on our time off. Too many parents dutifully read to their infants until the kids hit kindergarten, then entrust the rest to teachers. Most kids eventually learn to read; fewer and fewer seem to develop a passion for it.

Parents still read with children, but it has become less common, according to a new study from the University of Florida and University College London. This is a shame, since research links parental reading with early literacy development, academic success and family bonding.

“Reading has historically been a low-barrier, high-impact way to engage creatively and improve quality of life,” said Dr. Jill Sonke, a director at the University of Florida lab that sponsored the study. “When we lose one of the simplest tools in our public health toolkit, it’s a serious loss.”

Children live what they learn. If the rest of the family reads regularly, a child will follow suit. If parents limit screen time and ensure access to books, the books will be found and read. If mom or dad reads to their children each night, even through elementary school, the kids will learn to value literature. Moreover, they will expand their imagination, the ability to “see” the story in their own mind, which fosters creativity.

The best way parents can develop reading is to model it. Read to your children. Read with them. Utilize libraries, and make trips there fun outings. Control screen access; set aside time for free reading. Ask your kids about books they read. Feign interest. Ask them to explain the plot. If you’re reading to/with your child, ask him or her to summarize what happened in the previous chapter before starting the next one. Have them describe a main character in their imagination, or a main setting. As they get older, issue them the ultimate challenge: Summarize their story/chapter/article/book in one sentence.

Don’t assume that because your children can read that they will, or that since you were an avid reader it’s in their DNA. The world has changed. I’m 63; I shudder to think how our lives would be different now had we grown up with the Internet, social media, and video games. Even in families that value reading, the digital world poses an immense challenge.

In the end I couldn’t move the needle much with Mary. We would read her history text or her English assignment or her social studies chapter. Attempts at anything extra were politely rebuffed or grudgingly accepted. Technically she improved enough to get good grades. She could break apart multisyllable Latin and Greek words, and understand what she was reading. Yet I consider her a mild disappointment.

What good are doing, I wonder, if we teach our kids to read but they treat it as a chore? Do my children enjoy books the same way I did? Is that still possible in a digital world? What kind of society will we be after 50 years of smart phone culture?

It seems we are losing something when we devalue reading as a leisure activity, something foundational, something vital to our collective well-being. Books hold archetypal stories, action-packed adventures, spell-binding mysteries, gut-splitting humor – all the entertainment value we find on screen and stage. How do we convince our kids of this? Maybe we first need to convince ourselves.