Agreed, what a weird statement by the article's author. My kids love reading books. They don't read on screens much, it has to be a book.

>what a weird statement by the article's author

I can never understand this reasoning.

The statement by the article's author covers 80% or more of kids, who mostly don't read (and 90% or more reads zero to one book a year).

It's like someone noting that "people have one nose" and somebody arguing, "This is such a weird statement to make, my neighbour, who was on a traffic accident, has none"!

Extreme Outliers (1-2%), or even smaller minorities (3-10%) don't make a general statement "weird", at worse they make it not exhaustive.

(...) Conducted by psychologist and professor Jean Twenge, the study finds that the reading decline among American teens is worse than expected. In 2016, only 16 percent of high school seniors reported daily reading of a book or magazine. Roughly 40 years ago, 60 percent of high school seniors did the same.

(...) About a third of 12th graders also said they had not read a book or e-book for pleasure in the last year — which is about triple the number who said so in the 1970s.

Not much better for adults:

(...) The share of men reading for pleasure on any given day fell from 25 percent in 2004 to 15 percent in 2017, a drop of nearly 40 percent. The decline among women was a more modest 29 percent, from 31 percent in 2003 to 22 percent in 2017. The survey data shows declines in leisure reading across all age levels.

(...) Between 2003 and 2016, the amount of time that the average American devoted to reading for personal interest on a daily basis dropped from 0.36 hours to 0.29 hours. (...) From a breakdown of reading by income quartile, it turns out that the rich read more—but they read less and less every year. Americans in the lowest income quartile did manage to read more in 2016 than they did in 2003—a rare trend—but that’s probably a dead-cat bounce; the 2003 number was so low that it was as likely to improve as not.

https://www.humanitiesindicators.org/content/indicatordoc.as...

Sources: New Yorker, WP, U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, etc.

Yep, many think their single n=1 counterexample dismantles the truth of a general trend.

Especially when they fail to realize the selection bias of their commenting on a forum for curiosity-driven technology enthusiasts.

Why do you assume that American kids decline to read is a reflection of a world trend ?

I’m sorry but those numbers are not true everywhere.

For example, in France, a study from 2016 shows that 78% of kids read for pleasure, with an average of 6 books per trimester.

That’s not that bad I guess, but hey, what do I know, I am not American...

So sorry but no, my example is not an n=1. But more a n= 78% of around 70M persons country.

>Why do you assume that American kids decline to read is a reflection of a world trend ?

Well what happens in the US, more often than not, is usually translated into a global trend too (and surely a western trend), even if it takes a decade or so (anything from fast-food to hip-hop to social trends, etc.). It's not like the US situation for that matter is unique in some way. Kids now have video games, unlimited TV options (even up to the 90s TV options were restricted), YouTube, social media, and several other things besides. Reading books is very low in their priorities.

>For example, in France, a study from 2016 shows that 78% of kids read for pleasure, with an average of 6 books per trimester.

From that number alone, and with empirical observations as a fellow European, I'm curious study and its methodology. Maybe done to promote the "good work" done by the culture or education ministry, or to make the book industry look good (to investors) or trendy (to kids)? Care to post the link to the study? Does it include comic books in that "reading"?

Meanwhile, how about this?

https://www.thelocal.fr/20171205/french-school-children-rank...

"Kids these days" never really goes away huh? Funny how smart phones and social media will be our version of that.

>"Kids these days" never really goes away huh?

And it's seldom wrong either.

Kids do have different behavior in different ages. Whether that's good or bad is another thing (in some things it's bad, in others are good). But culture, habits, etc, are not the same blob of sameness for centuries. Kids in 1950 are different than kids in 2020 or kids in 1900.

In this particular case, indeed, kids these days seldom read books, whether in print or eBook form.

Whether they still read social media pages, and online news, is beside the point when it comes to reading books.

It’s frustrating because it’s based on anecdotal evidence and preconceptions. It also defaults to the assumption that all change is bad.

I know plenty of kids these days who read books, lots of them in fact. Often reading fiction and literature especially.

>I know plenty of kids these days who read books, lots of them in fact. Often reading fiction and literature especially.

Well, since you've mentioned anecdotal evidence, all the statistics say kids read less than ever. Down to 1/4 or so of what kids in the 70s read (including eBooks).

https://www.humanitiesindicators.org/content/indicatordoc.as...

“The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.”

~ Socrates

In case you're wondering why you're being downvoted, the quote seems to be fake [1]. The picture that sometimes go with it, [2], is fake as well.

[1] https://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/05/01/misbehave/

[2] https://imgur.com/jwSls6X

The other stupid thing about that supposed quote is that the presumption that he must have been wrong may not be justified. Socrates is thought to have lived 470-399BC. By the end of that lifetime, it would have been obvious to an impartial observer that Athenian power was fading; another generation or two later and Athens was no longer an independent power.

Yeah, it seems like the previous generation is always upset about the next generation, but they're not always wrong. Humanity has survived, sure, but most of the civilizations those sentiments were coming from haven't.

That's an interesting observation. I wonder whether a falling empire correlates to children misbehaving at schools.

I wonder whether studies were done on it in Britain or Spain, both of which you could say had empires which collapsed (though this did not threaten their whole existence).

To be clear, I'm not claiming that it does correlate... I'm only saying that you can't be sure it doesn't. It could be a selection effect, in that while it is said by everyone everywhere, we only hear from people in their cultural prime, which is just before the collapse. On the other hand, it may not be something everyone everywhere says, and it may be something that is mostly said by people in collapsing empires, in which case, it may very well be a true observation.

My main claim would just be that we don't have enough data to cite this quote (were it real) in mockery, as it is not quite as obviously wrong as it may seem from the very casual view of history.