Children aren't reading for pleasure

Brief thoughts on tech and family

Record low numbers of children read books for pleasure. Some think this is the fault of the publishing industry: sensitivity readers sanitise Roald Dahl and big imprints commission books full of heavy-handed moralism (something which is hardly new to children’s books!). I doubt that the main reason children aren’t reading for pleasure anymore is that contemporary children’s books are puerile, unimaginative, and didactic. You can still walk into any bookshop, whether second-hand or not, and find Lewis, Tolkien, and all the classics from The Wind in the Willows to The Secret Garden. I think it is obvious that children won’t read any books, good or bad, easy or difficult, because they are used to receiving information audiovisually and reading only short-form text. This problem isn’t brand new — TV and computers have been household items for a while — but has surely intensified and become more widespread since the invention of the iPad.

We have long known that the kind of attention required to enjoy video entertainment is more unfocused than that required to read a novel. I suspect also that watching videos rather than reading long-form fiction from a young age stifles the emergence of the subject’s inner ‘voice’ which provides imagined audiovisual dimensions to a text. Perhaps this accounts for recent reports that some people do not animate their experience of the world with inner monologues (or inner dialogues featuring the constructed voices of made-up people, or the reconstructed voices of real people).

Might the newfound strangeness of an inner voice or voices have something to do with the increase in young people diagnosing themselves with multiple personality disorder (a disorder now known as Dissociative Identity Disorder, perhaps to dispel certain myths about it)? I don’t mean cases of traumatised people suppressing memories by means of dissociating, but cases in which the claim of involuntary personality ‘splitting’ seems highly dubious¹. If you and your peers don’t consider inner voices to be normal, because the culture is not literary, but you possess an inner voice and even imagine other ‘characters’ (perhaps you read fan fiction!) you might construe that as a kind of madness. You might lean into that. Treating social difference as evidence of a neurological disorder is quite a common assumption, and attributing a kind of valour to having a disorder not less common².

At the very least, one’s imaginative world seems closely related to the practice of coming up with inner monologues and dialogues. These voices might belong to several “characters”, whether they can be considered “sides” to oneself or not. I wonder if children still have imaginary friends. I had one for some months as a child, a boy named Andy Meal, who was something like a more virtuous version of myself - the Sméagol to my Gollum, if you will.

To make another obvious point: smartphones and iPads seem to be even more damaging than TV to attention, because they give you the option to switch from one form of entertainment to another whenever you feel a hint of boredom. TVs with lots of channels are like this, but without the internet, they are still limited in their offer of sources of entertainment. And while lots of TV shows are mere ‘slop’, it still shocks the average adult to see just how lurid and mindless the AI-created children’s ‘shows’ of YouTube and TikTok are. AI is ruthlessly adept at creating images which capture the attention of children who primarily consume digital content; one factor in its aptitude is that it is unconstrained by the matured vision of human writers, who necessarily stand at some distance from the febrile imaginations of children. This distance probably accompanies children’s writers’ sense of responsibility in facilitating proper child development. That might result in activists dominating children’s publishing, which comes with its own problems, but this seems still preferable to the crazed Wild West that is the internet landscape inhabited by Generation Alpha. I should note that a human imagination is still responsible for the conceptual invention of Skibidi Toilet, but this often not true of such entertainment. Plus, AI provides the design work; people can make very good money off videos which they have little hand in creating while foregoing any editorial interventions. 

Adults are increasingly addicted to video entertainment on their phones, whose apps are designed to interact with our dopamine to keep us hooked on them. How can children — whose impulse control needs to be rigorously trained lest it recede beyond the horizon of time altogether — be expected to resist addiction? The difference is that their habit precludes them from ever developing the focus or desire to read a great book, which if once learnt — like a language — in those plastic years of early childhood can always be salvaged. Early childhood massively determines one’s entire life, which is something that parents deny out of convenience whenever they hand an iPad to their children. To be a parent is to willingly suffer, to be exhausted, for several years in order to give your children a chance. I don’t say this haughtily. I both want children and fear the day (which is mostly frightening because unimaginable until it has happened) I become a parent. Many of us see the exhaustion parenthood entails and we regard the ‘way out’ of that exhaustion — distracting children with tech which does all the work of entertainment for you — with due suspicion, or at least conflicted feelings. This further reminds us that our lives as we know them don’t align so comfortably with the idea that family life necessarily involves toil, at least if it is to be rewarding (we fail to delay gratification now more than ever!). Perhaps the accompaniment of increased tech-driven choice, luxury, and leisure with falling birth rates isn’t so surprising after all. Better there were no temptation so ubiquitous to arrest your own children’s development to get a moment’s peace!

1. The adopted ‘alters’ or other personalities of these teenagers might be fantasies of self-conception. Perhaps they result from a particular kind of reading, rather than the scenario I posited. Particularly literary corners of the Internet include fan fiction websites. Fan fiction consists of written fantasies usually about an idealised version of the self existing in extant fictive worlds like that of Harry Potter. Fan fiction is about imagining yourself rather than others (and, in an interesting parallel, modern fiction in the form of real books is more autobiographical than ever before). This seems to resonate with the faux-‘multiple personality’ phenomenon.

2. It’s interesting to read about people’s inner lives before the digital age, and the way textual memorisation affected people’s imaginations, attitudes, and dreams. Medievals, whose literary culture was highly mnemonic, certainly had vivid dreams. But perhaps their dream lives were so vivid because they lucid dreamt. Biphasic sleeping can induce lucid dreams, and medievals routinely slept in two shifts, evening and morning.