Reading for pleasure is an activity that declines with age, according to a gov.uk study (see page 4).
To many of my older students, and to the dismay of their parents, reading always seems to be this ‘I don’t have time for it’ activity.
Having put somewhere between 3,000 to 5,000 tuition hours into helping children improve their English reading & writing skills, I thought I’d take a crack at this conundrum and figure what might be the cause.
I’ve dug into my own personal experiences, Googled virtually everything related to why teenagers hate reading, and scanned studies on gov.uk to compose the points below.
That being said, I’ve found no singular cause, but a myriad of them.
1. Writers Target Money-Spenders
If I was a writer and I had a mortgage, a family to feed, and a wife who thought my writing career was going nowhere, I’d think very carefully about my target audience.
Because there are two kinds of readers: those who spend money on books, and those who don’t. I’d be silly to target the latter.
Young teenagers are a bit of an odd bunch because they’re in this kind of limbo-state.
Most of them don’t read, and they have no disposable income, so in the writer’s eyes, God knows who’s buying the books; it could be their school, parents, or Great Aunt Edna who wants to spoil them for Christmas, and that makes marketing decisions difficult.
Not to mention, writing for teenagers is risky. The writer must ponder carefully on whether and how to explore taboo subjects like sex, abortion, depression, religion, sexuality, etc. Heaven forbid they fall into the crosshairs of a parenting group; not a big deal if you’re a well-known author with solid connections in the entertainment business, like David Walliams who wrote The Boy in the Dress (causing a bit of a stir on Mumsnet), but for the majority of new budding authors, fuggedaboutit. Too risky.
With that in mind, most writers target money-spenders; readers who’ve read so many books, and watched so many films, that almost everything’s a cliche to them. The writer can throw that kind of reader into the middle of a scenario (a technique called in media res: Latin for ‘in the midst of things’) and they’ll begin to fabricate the environment instantaneously, even with subtle descriptions. That’s because experienced readers are hyper-aware of all the traditional conventions of their favourite genres.
Now, if you were to give that kind of book to a teenager who doesn’t read, it won’t make sense. It’ll be so difficult for them to make out what’s going on, they’ll give up, or fall into the temptations of something more enjoyable.
This leads me to my next point…
2. External Forces Demand Attention
A 100,000-word book takes around 8 hours and 20 minutes to complete, with a reading speed of 200 words per minute (somewhat average for most teenagers).
That’s 8 hours and 20 minutes not spent on Fortnite, not spent on Call of Duty, and not spent on social media.
The smarty-pants who run companies like Epic Games (operator of Fortnite) employ some of the brightest, creative thinkers in the world, and all they’re up against is a book – to them, ancient technology. It’s like the McDonald’s Big Mac vs a plain bowl of lettuce. Actually no, lettuce is tolerable at times. Instead, make it a bowl of gruel from the 1700s and you get the idea. Absolutely no competition.
Even Pong, and Space Invaders, the popular (& now retro) 80s arcade games, could generate enough magnetism, despite their simplicity, to pull children away from books in their droves.
But it’s not like game developers, film-makers, and social media executives sit around an antique oak table, somewhere in a Transcylvanian castle, laughing like Bond villains, pondering on how they’ll put children off books.
They’re just in some type of indirect competition with one another. As a result, they create incredibly powerful spectacles and experiences, each of which have their own tremendous gravitational pulling power. Careers are built, and rely on maintaining the attention they bring.
The only thing stopping me right now from saying screw writing this article, let’s watch Netflix, (pretending for a moment that there’s something good to watch, for once) is that my desire to build the 101 Educate blog, at this very moment, is strong enough, to the point where it can transcend the gravitational pull of external influences.
To give you an idea, a rocket must hit somewhere in the region of 25,000mph to escape earth’s gravity. That requires a tremendous amount of energy; and do you know what else requires a tremendous amount of energy? Not getting sucked into YouTube’s recommendations while I Googled that fact.
The point is, everywhere we turn, forces demand our attention, and what can possibly act as a shield against them?
Well, that brings me to the next point, where I uncover another problem.
3. Difficult To Formulate Concrete Goals
Does your child know what they want to do in life? Of course not. How can they? With rapid technological developments, we don’t know what the world’s going to look like in 10 years, let alone 20, or 30.
Who could’ve predicted that being a YouTuber could lead to 6, 7 and for some, 8 figure earnings?
Firefighters, for instance, do much less firefighting. Technology has made it so that fire-retardant materials are the norm, a factor that led to funding cuts for fire brigades across the U.K.
Now there’s talk of AI (Artificial Intelligence) and robotics potentially displacing the whole labour market. Not to put your child off the noble profession of becoming a doctor, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the majority of GPs and surgeons were to be replaced by machines in our lifetimes, despite contrary arguments like this in the Guardian.
In 1876, William Orton, President of Western Union said the telephone had too many shortcomings to be seriously considered.
In 1903, Horace Rackham, President of the Michigan Savings Bank famously said ‘the horse is here to stay’ and that the automobile was ‘a novelty’.
In the 90s, news stations and talk-show hosts like Letterman could not make sense of the internet’s potential.
I could go on (and here’s an extensive list on Forbes), but the point is, we’ve been terrible at making accurate predictions about where technology will take us, and ironically, many of these bad predictions have been made by those in dignified positions of power.
Having said that, what might be the case is that your child does have goals, desires & ambitions but these apply to a completely different world, whereby attaining those goals requires unconventional means – simply telling them to read more (often, for the sake of it) is advice that doesn’t logically compute on their wavelength.
This leads me to my next point…
4. No Desire (At Least Not Yet) To Strive Beyond Average
Why should children read? Because it’s a wonderful experience to lose oneself in a book. No. Wrong. It’s a dreadful answer we give, as a blanket statement, to children who ask the question. For many, this turns out to be a lie.
Let those who enjoy reading, enjoy it. If they’ve found their hobby, power to them. But to recommend reading (for the sake of it) to a child who doesn’t enjoy the activity, is like telling a cross-country runner to hang up their boots and give knitting a go.
Reading for pleasure’s sake is just that; reading for pleasure.
And while I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with being a fiction-loving bookworm, I don’t recall any historical event where fiction-loving bookworms eradicate world hunger, cure diseases, or bring world peace. Problems like those are usually tackled by highly motivated (and I stress, highly motivated) individuals who indulge in reading mostly non-fiction for the purpose of furthering their cause.
Excluding those who read for pleasure, the majority of readers do so for the purpose of extraction. Reading fiction allows one to extract new experiences, while reading non-fiction allows one to extract information.
And for that kind of reader, the experience better be worth it, there’s an opportunity cost involved. It takes a monstrous amount of time (8+ hours) to get through a 100,000-word book, and in today’s technological world, with 8 spare hours, one can indulge in a myriad of dopamine-inducing experiences on the internet.
As was also mentioned, careers rely & thrive on X amount of attention-hours staying put on Netflix, YouTube, gaming, social media, etc, all of which are in some kind of indirect competition with one another.
It’s easy to get lost in all this, but the truth is, to be average, does not require one to read that much, or at all.
My chess rating on Chess.com is considered average, but if I’m to ever reach grandmaster level, I need to study and pick up a few books on chess. But alas, I have no such desire in life.
For the sake of the argument, let’s assume that I did, and I had this urge to learn and consume everything there is to know about chess, that brings us to the next problem.
5. Choosing a Good Book is Difficult
Pick me, pick me, says this book, with a vibrant, decorative front cover on Amazon. It has a rating of 4.5 stars.
No, pick me, says another, with a front cover font slightly larger and bolder than the former. It has a rating of 4.7 stars, but fewer reviews.
With millions of books in circulation, readers rely not just on front cover designs, but on star rating systems, reviews by fans, reviews by critics, feedback from friends, etc.
Remember the opportunity cost involved – the book must be worth it, and not just worth it, valuable too. For if it isn’t, the reader shall remember, just as we remember that fancy movie trailer which got us excited, but led to disappointment in the full viewing.
Despite all these systems to help readers distinguish what is good and what is not, they dwarf in comparison to what teenagers are used to.
Any teenager who spends time on Tik Tok, YouTube, or whatever new platform comes about, knows full well of the signals that help them decide whether to view, or skip the content.
How do you know if a YouTube video is rubbish? Well, despite the platform removing the ‘dislikes’ button, viewers can still look at the comments, most of which are regarded as genuine.
How do you know whether a TikTok video is rubbish? Pay attention to the number of likes and comments it currently has, and if it doesn’t entertain immediately – skip.
How do you know whether a game is worth buying? Because a YouTuber said so, and the YouTuber has a lot to lose if they lie to their subscribers – plus, you can literally see them playing it.
On the other hand, marketers lie ALL the time – they bend facts to get us to buy, and we know this all too well as adults, and no doubt, teenagers realise this unspoken fact very quickly. Not to mention, Amazon admitted they blocked more than 200 million reviews in 2020.
It’s a minefield out there. Make one wrong move, one wrong purchase, and you risk setting ablaze the time you’ll never get back.
All I can say, up till now, is that one must tackle this process with strategic care. A sloppy book-hunting strategy is all it takes for external forces to break through & offer their fix as an alternative.
6. Other Possible Reasons
These are other reasons I’ve come across, but not yet had the time to fully explore in this article.
→ The GCSE Curriculum is Dry: Teachers are blaming the dry GCSE English curriculum for causing many colleges to drop A-Level English. Students simply aren’t enrolling in English like they used to. And frankly, I don’t blame them. It is dry, but that doesn’t mean there’s nothing parents can do to make it interesting.
→ They Don’t See You Reading: Many adults in the U.K. hardly read. They’re too busy. If a child doesn’t see you reading, or at least using books as a means to solve problems, they might not see the point in reading that much, although I haven’t found any research studies on this yet.
