A New Study Finds That Less Than Half Of Parents Like Reading To Their Kids

For the first eight or so years of my children’s lives, every day concluded with a bedtime story. Sometimes I could get away with one book but, more often than not, they’d toddle over to me with a stack of Mo Willems, Sandra Boynton, and Dr. Seuss. Trips to the library were done on a weekly basis. It was just such a pleasant, happy memory from their early childhood days... and yet it seems I might just be in the minority here. Apparently, a lot of parents — like, a majority — really don’t enjoy reading to their kids.

The survey of almost 2,000 people, conducted by HarperCollins UK and Nielsen, revealed a troubling downturn in family reading from a similar survey conducted in 2012. Just 41% of parents with children between the ages of 0 to 4 report reading to their children frequently — a steep decline, the survey notes, from 64% 13 years ago. That could be because only 40% of parents with children aged 0 to 13 find reading books to their children fun.

I ask you! Was LeVar Burton making Reading Rainbow all those years for nothing? Honestly, I’m kind of shocked. Do you not enjoy doing different voices? Emoting? Making your kid laugh? Seeing how many pages you can skip of a particularly long book without your child noticing? (I said I enjoyed reading to my children: I didn’t say I had the energy to read Horton Hears A Who in its entirety at the end of a long day. No one does.) Respectfully: some of you weren’t annoying, overly-enthusiastic theater kids, and it shows.

There was also a difference in parental reading habits and the gender of their child. While 44% of girls aged 0 to 4 are read to “every day/nearly every day,” only 29% of boys the same age can say the same. Less surprising, perhaps, was that overall numbers go down as children get older and (presumably) can read on their own: 36% of 5 to 7 year olds and 22% of 8 to 10 year olds.

This may come down to parental attitudes about reading in general: Gen Z parents were more likely to see reading as “more a subject to learn” than their Gen X and Millennial cohorts (28% to 21%). About as many 5 to 13 year olds (29%) agree.

It gets worse.

Only 32% of grade-school children (between the ages of 5 and 10) frequently choose to read for enjoyment, down from 55% in 2012. For 12 and 13 year old boys, that drops to just 12%.

This appears to be a kind of ouroboros.

“Being read to makes reading fun for children,” says Alison David, Consumer Insight Director at HarperCollins Children’s Books. “So, it’s very concerning that many children are growing up without a happy reading culture at home. It means they are more likely to associate reading with schoolwork, something they are tested on and can do well or badly, not something they could enjoy.”

That said, we’re going to cut parents some slack: it’s hard out there for a mom (and a dad). More than a third of parents wished they had more time to read to their kids. It’s also hard out there for a kid — in 2012, 25% of 5 to 13 year olds said they had too much homework to read books. This time around, that number has shot up to 49%, nearly double.

Fortunately, we can all do something about it.

“The good news is when children are read to frequently, they very quickly come to love it and become motivated to read themselves,” David says. “Children who are read to daily are almost three times as likely to choose to read independently compared to children who are only read to weekly at home. It’s never too late to start, or resume, reading with children.”