The article kind of rejects this out of hand but I think it's mostly because that doesn't make for an article that touches on all the other topics the author wanted to write about.

>It might be screens, but it’s not only screens. It’s not like kids are suddenly getting their own phones at age 9; recent survey data from Common Sense Media reveals that phone ownership holds steady, at around 30 percent, among kids aged 8 and 9. (It isn’t until they reach 11 or 12 that the majority of American kids have their own phone.) Indeed, several people I spoke to mentioned that middle-graders’ lack of phones created a marketing problem in an era when no one at any publishing house has any idea how to make a book a bestseller other than to hope it blows up on TikTok.

So there's an uptick in reading for fun when the majority of 12 year olds have phones, allowing publishers to learn how to market to them? I really doubt it. Couldn't find anything supporting that in the Scholastic report where "decline by 9" comes from: https://www.scholastic.com/readingreport/navigate-the-world....

I think they're misinterpreting the Common Sense Media info they cite: https://www.commonsensemedia.org/sites/default/files/researc...

Age 8 is as far back as that data goes. If phone ownership started shooting up by 8, for example, it would make sense that it would take about a year for the reading habit to die off as much as it does.