Why Children Are Falling Out of Love with Reading
- David Salariya
- May 1, 2025
- 10 min read
Updated: 7 days ago
Books once had boredom on their side, they no longer do
In 1985, the American author Neil Postman published Amusing Ourselves to Death, his warning that a culture need not ban books or suppress serious thought if it can make entertainment the form through which everything must pass. He was writing mostly about television. Forty years later, his argument seems to have wandered into the child’s bedroom, the family kitchen and the primary classroom.
We repeatedly ask why children are falling out of love with reading? The phrase is comforting because it assumes that the love was naturally there: a normal feeling in childhood from which some regrettable modern influence has led children in 2026 astray.
I am no longer certain that this is true.
Children have always loved stories, but that is not quite the same as saying that children have always loved sitting alone with printed books. The great age of reading for pleasure may have depended upon a collection of circumstances that we have mistaken as permanent: public libraries, affordable paperbacks, books swapped between children, limited broadcasting, long unoccupied afternoons - and boredom.
In the Dundee of my childhood, life could be spectacularly dull.
I do not mean that tragically, nothing was wrong, there wasn’t much happening and adults did not hover over every unoccupied minute as a problem requiring an immediate solution. Entertainment arrived but television was limited. There was no phone in the pocket carrying films, games, gossip, music, messages and an inexhaustible scrolling of images.
A book did not have to defeat the entire entertainment industry before it was opened.
Reading therefore enjoyed an advantage that we rarely acknowledge - filling time, it offered privacy, escape, danger, comedy, travel and forbidden knowledge when the alternative might genuinely have been staring out of the window. We remember this as an age in which children possessed a purer love of reading. It was also an age in which books faced little competition.
But it changes the question we should be asking.
Perhaps children have not become less imaginative, less intelligent or less capable of loving stories. Perhaps the conditions that once initiated children into the sustained, solitary act of reading have disappeared.
And then, having removed boredom from childhood, we made matters worse. We took the book, the object that had once offered freedom from adult supervision, and placed it inside systems of reading levels, phonics checks, computerised quizzes, points, targets and measurable progress. We placed beside it technologies designed by some of the cleverest people alive to prevent attention from resting anywhere for long.
Then we expressed surprise when the book lost.
Postman’s argument was not that entertainment was wicked - it was that when everything must present itself as entertainment, slower and more demanding forms of thought begin to look defective. A book cannot flash, interrupt, congratulate, refresh and reward the reader every few seconds, its strength is that it does not.
A book asks the child to contribute something: attention, memory, patience and imagination. These were once ordinary habits of a relatively under-stimulated childhood, they are now beginning to look like acts of resistance.
This does not mean that the answer is to recreate the 1950s, confiscate every screen or prescribe improving literature with the medicinal determination once reserved for cod-liver oil. Nostalgia is not a literacy policy. Many children were excluded from the supposed golden age of reading; many homes contained few books; and the book world itself was often narrow, class-bound and insufficiently representative.
But neither is it useful to pretend that reading exists outside the competition for attention. Today’s child is not choosing between a book and nothing. A book is competing against professionally engineered systems that are designed to be addictive, immediate, personalised, socially validated and effectively without end.
Books once had boredom on their side, now almost the entire culture is organised around ensuring that boredom never gets through the door.
Before asking how we can make children love reading again, we may therefore need to ask a more uncomfortable question:
What gave reading its place in childhood in the first place - and can that place exist in a world determined to fill every empty minute?
Children aren’t falling out of love with reading by accident
Children aren’t falling out of love with reading by accident. We may have quietly engineered it - through screens, systems, and a culture that has turned books into something to be measured rather than enjoyed.
Why Are Children Reading Less? A Complex Problem
Two recent reports, one from the Publishers Association and another commissioned by HarperCollins - paint a sobering picture of children’s relationship with reading, and while the findings are worrying, they are, not surprising.
Fewer than half of under-fours are read to regularly. For boys, the figures drop even further. Only 32% of five-to-ten-year-olds choose to read for pleasure. More than a third of parents say they don’t enjoy reading to their children at all - so why are children falling out of love with reading?
It’s easy to see how reading is being squeezed out - by time, by screens, and increasingly by a creeping sense that reading is just another form of schoolwork and one thing that put's a child of reading is the sense that it is too much like school work.
When reading becomes a grind, we all lose.
Even in the classroom, the joy of reading is eroded, read-aloud sessions are declining. Storytime is being replaced by computerised quizzes, Accelerated Reader, a once -innovative reading incentive programme, is now arguably doing more harm than good.
Many schools won’t stock a book unless it’s been approved and scored by the Accelerated Reader programme, and then publishers, in turn, often feel forced to play along if they want their books on school shelves. Yet there’s a real risk here: when a child reads for points, not pleasure, the magic and interest is lost.
Accelerated Reader isn’t harmful - but it doesn’t reliably help either. Turning reading into a test may boost tracking, but it risks killing joy. For most children, reading needs to feel like discovery, not homework
EEF: Accelerated Reader Evaluation Report (2021)
EEF: Accelerated Reader Secondary Trial (2015)
Despite this programme’s wide adoption, robust research questioning its effectiveness is long overdue. Anecdotal evidence suggests it’s making reading feel more like a performance metric than a pathway to imagination and empathy. As soon as reading becomes associated with quizzes, data, and schoolwork - not imagination, delight, or discovery. And once a child thinks reading is just another thing to perform at school, they switch off. We shouldn’t be grinding the joy out of books in the name of measurable progress.”
Systematic Synthetic Phonics
In the UK, systematic synthetic phonics has been the mandated approach for early reading instruction since the 2006 Rose Report. This method, emphasizing the relationship between letters and sounds, is reinforced by the Year 1 Phonics Screening Check. According to the Education Endowment Foundation, phonics instruction can lead to an average of +5 months' progress in reading for young learners, particularly those aged 4–7 . However, while phonics is effective in developing decoding skills, critics argue that an overemphasis on phonics can make reading instruction feel "joyless," potentially disengaging students from reading for pleasure . Experts suggest that combining phonics with exposure to whole texts may be more effective in fostering a love for reading . Thus, while phonics is a valuable tool in early reading instruction, it's essential to balance it with other literacy activities to nurture a genuine enjoyment of reading.
Performance over pleasure: the root problem
We’re raising a generation that sees reading as assessment. Nearly one in three children says that reading is “more a subject to learn than a fun thing to do.” That should ring alarm bells.
Parents aren’t to blame. Many want to read more, but feel overwhelmed or uncertain where to start. Gen Z parents, having grown up online, may never have experienced the kind of intimate, joyful reading their own children need. That’s where health visitors and early years professionals come in - quietly powerful agents of change who can show families how ten minutes a day with a book can transform a child’s world.
Publishing must also take some responsibility
It’s tempting to blame the problem on screen time or “gift books” bought at Christmas but left unread., however there’s a deeper publishing problem too.
The market is flooded with brand-name hardbacks, nostalgia re-boots, and celebrity authors - possibly known more for adult programs, titles more often designed for adult buyers than for children. Re-printing old books and trying to pass them off as new...books created and designed forty years ago are just not suitable for children in 2026...no matter how they are "refreshed" with a change of fonts.
Authentic, engaging books can be drowned out by this noise
If a child doesn’t connect with a book, they won’t read it. It’s that simple. And too often, the marketing of children’s books seems aimed more at nostalgic adults or retail gatekeepers than at children themselves.
There is hope - if we act wisely
The Turning the Page report recommends a range of systemic changes that could truly shift the dial:
Universal access to school libraries, especially in primary schools
National curriculum reform that prioritises reading for enjoyment
Support for teachers to diversify the texts they use
More inclusive publishing that reflects the lives of all children
A stronger cultural focus on reading as a daily pleasure, not a chore
These ideas are all doable. The tools exist. But they require political will, long-term commitment, and real leadership from every part of the reading ecosystem — from policymakers to publishers to parents.
We know what works - let’s use it.
Reading for pleasure shouldn’t be an afterthought or a luxury. It’s one of the single most effective things we can offer our children - for their mental wellbeing, cognitive development, empathy, and future opportunities.
We’re not short on brilliant books. But we need to be far braver — in publishing, in teaching, and in parenting - about how we get those books into the hands of the children who need them most.
There’s no shortage of brilliant books being published - but they can be drowned out by celebrity noise, marketing priorities, and a curriculum that treats reading as performance rather than pleasure. And of course, everything starts long before school. If we want to build a culture of reading, it needs to start in the home, supported by professionals like health visitors, who could play a powerful role in showing parents how simple, joyful, and vital daily reading can be. Libraries in schools with librarians in schools would make a huge difference.. We have the tools - we’re just not always using them wisely.
National Year of Reading 2026: A Welcome Signal - But Will It Stick?
The National Year of Reading’s “Go All In” campaign is, in many ways, exactly what the moment demands. It is upbeat, contemporary, none tof the old sermonising tone. “If you’re into it, read into it” recognises a simple truth: people have not stopped engaging with stories or information, they have simply found them elsewhere...usually on screens.
So this is progress to try and make children fall in love with books and heading.
It is encouraging to see a campaign of this scale, The last comparable national push came in 2008, and in the years since, reading has not just declined - attention has fragmented, libraries have closed, and reading in schools has, in many cases, become increasingly structured, measured, and managed.
But the challenge begins even earlier.
Recent data suggests that a significant proportion of children are arriving at school without basic language skills, independence, or readiness to access learning. Teachers report increasing time spent on care needs and catch-up support, reducing the time available for teaching itself. In such a context, reading is not simply a cultural issue - it is a developmental one.
Which brings us to the central question: can a campaign restore something that has been altered across so many layers?
Experience suggests caution.
Internationally, there is growing evidence that when young people are given the means -and the freedom to choose books, they engage differently. European “culture voucher” schemes and Brazilian book credits have brought new readers into bookshops in significant numbers, often for the first time, with many reporting reading for pleasure rather than obligation. The act of choosing, it seems, changes the meaning of reading.
But these initiatives also reveal a limit. Access can create entry. It does not, on its own, create habit.
Closer to home, the picture is equally complex. In seeking to support literacy, we have built systems that prioritise progression, measurement, and alignment. Books are selected for suitability, reading is tracked for performance, and success is often defined by completion. Even the publishing that has grown around these needs, frequently shaped for large institutional markets,
has tended towards the competent, the safe, and the reliably unremarkable.
None of this is ill-intentioned. Much of it is necessary.
But it does have consequences.
When children arrive at school already behind in language and confidence, and encounter reading primarily as something to be managed, assessed, and completed, it is harder for it to take root as something pleasurable or self-directed.
The current campaign attempts to correct this by repositioning reading culturally—less instruction, more invitation. That is both necessary and overdue.
But it also highlights a deeper tension.
Reading is not simply a message to be communicated. It is a behaviour shaped by early development, environment, access, and experience. Campaigns can raise awareness. They can shift perception. But without parallel attention to the conditions in which reading begins - in the home, in early years, in schools, and in communities—they struggle to take root.
None of this diminishes the value of the initiative. On the contrary, it is positive, important, even - that the industry is acting at all, and doing so with imagination and scale.
The question is not whether this campaign will be seen. It will.
The question is whether, once seen, it will be lived.
Because reading does not return through visibility alone. It returns when it is encountered early, chosen freely, and, crucially, repeated.
And that requires more than a campaign.
Let’s not turn reading into a test, let’s turn it back into what it was always meant to be: a source of joy, connection, and imagination.
The answer is not to make books flashier, faster and more like the media already defeating them. Nor is it to lecture children about the improving benefits of reading. It is to preserve places in childhood where attention is not constantly harvested, where choice is genuine, and where an empty half-hour is not treated as a systems failure. Reading for pleasure may depend upon access to books, but it also depends upon something we have almost designed out of modern life: the freedom to be bored long enough for a book to become interesting.
David Salariya has created over 60 series of children's books, many of which have helped young readers fall in love with history, drawing, and storytelling. He’s written for reluctant readers, visual learners and curious minds - and worries that too many children today are reading less, not because they want to, but because we’ve made books harder to love. Read more at davidsalariya.com.
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