@ChrisMayLA6 @books suspect they did not class audiobooks as "reading"? My 14 y/o son listens to audiobooks and podcasts constantly.

@ChrisMayLA6 @books 35 years ago I was one of them. I think I might have been the only one I knew who even *wanted* to read daily for pleasure. I didn't read for pleasure every day though, partly because the GCSE examiners thought that reading for tedium was a better use of my time. I blame terrible but compulsory authors like Faulkner for teenagers choosing to read less than younger children, not sports and social media.

@ChrisMayLA6 @books Maybe. And maybe the way we teach reading in schools now kills the pleasure of reading and the incentive to read. It's tempting to look at the distractions and alternatives, but maybe this is a wood and trees issue. Maybe the kids don't see reading as a pleasure because they're taught it's a mechanical chore.
Phonics isn't reading.

@ChrisMayLA6 @books Social pressures too.

I remember when I was in school, and I was "gay" for reading a book not assigned by a teacher.

To heck with that.

@ChrisMayLA6 @books

"Daily" seems a pretty high bar and in my opinion not a useful measure. But I agree it's worrying that less than a third of teenagers say they enjoy reading.

@ChrisMayLA6 @books

Even if a kid is bookish, I think so much pressure, too much in fact, is put on kids and academic expectations have risen so high that it may leave them with no time or inclination to read even more after the day's schoolwork is done.

I can't help but think it comes from the youth worship a lot of Western culture is mired in. Makes it very hard to see opportunities to change or grow after the time of youth has closed. So we put pressure on kids to do too much.

@ChrisMayLA6 @books Is that much of a change though? Going back 35 years I would be surprised if more than a fifth of my contemporaries had read books daily for pleasure. The article does bury in there that reading books in digital form is being counted separately, too.

It's very annoying when journalists publish press releases without providing statistical context like that.