“But even if the backlist contains a wealth of fiction starring boys, that’s not always a help to today’s young readers. Laura Gardner, a veteran middle-school librarian in Dartmouth, Massachusetts, told me that although some of the classics still stand up—kids love Gary Paulsen’s Hatchet and its sequels, along with the I Survived series—many students have a hard time getting into literature from past decades. Thanks to the disruptions of the pandemic, middle schoolers are coming into Gardner’s library with lower reading levels than they were when she started her career 17 years ago. But even the high-achieving students, she’s noticed, can’t be coaxed into picking up a book for fun unless it’s action-packed. “If the pacing isn’t pretty quick, then you’re going to lose the kid,” Gardner said. Older titles tend to feature more descriptive language and longer chapters; they start with more exposition, and have plots that unspool more slowly than today’s attention spans are used to.”
It still seems absurd. As parents of young kids in the late ‘00s and ‘10s, we made reading together the core of our nighttime routine from toddlerhood onward, made trips to the library constantly, and kept our house stocked with fantastic books.
It’s hard for me to even fathom why, seeing reduced attention spans, the conclusion is “we need new books that are competitive with tiktok” instead of “we need to fix this toxic attention environment.”
I guess the implication is that without such advertisements, old books are lost media for young kids. Their first brush is with new media that IS advertised to them, and upon finding it not compatible to their tastes (at least acc to the article) young boys tune out of the reading hobby altogether.
Obvious retort is that this where parents should step in... but that's a whole different debate.
And that is not even talking about the fact that 2:1 male female male character does not make male main characters hard to find.