Dan Kois writes about the decline in reading books among kids 8 to 12 and the precipitous decline in reading books for fun:
Ask anyone who works with elementary-school children about the state of reading among their kids and you’ll get some dire reports. Sales of “middle-grade” books—the classification covering ages 8 through 12—were down 10 percent in the first three quarters of 2023, after falling 16 percent in 2022. It’s the only sector of the industry that’s underperforming compared to 2019. There hasn’t been a middle-grade phenomenon since Dav Pilkey’s Captain Underpants spinoff Dog Man hit the scene in 2016. New middle-grade titles are vanishing from Barnes and Noble shelves, agents and publishers say, due to a new corporate policy focusing on books the company can guarantee will be bestsellers.
Most alarmingly, kids in third and fourth grade are beginning to stop reading for fun. It’s called the “Decline by 9,” and it’s reaching a crisis point for publishers and educators. According to research by the children’s publishers Scholastic, at age 8, 57 percent of kids say they read books for fun most days; at age 9, only 35 percent do. This trend started before the pandemic, experts say, but the pandemic accelerated things. “I don’t think it’s possible to overstate how disruptive the pandemic was on middle grade readers,” one industry analyst told Publishers Weekly. And everyone I talked to agreed that the sudden drop-off in reading for fun is happening at a crucial age—the very age when, according to publishing lore, lifetime readers are made. “If you can keep them interested in books at that age, it will foster an interest in books the rest of their life,” said Brenna Connor, an industry analyst at Circana, the market research company that runs Bookscan. “If you don’t, they don’t want to read books as an adult.”
As someone who spent her childhood immersed in books, I find this sad. It’s possible that videos are providing some of the same stimulation and solace, but I doubt it.
The main obstacle seems to be that recommendation chains have broken:
Traditionally, middle-grade book discovery happens via parents, librarians, and—most crucially—peers. At recess, your best friend tells you that you have got to read the Baby-Sitters Club, and boom, you’re hooked. That avenue for discovery evaporated during the pandemic, and it hasn’t come back. “The lag in peer-to-peer recommendations seems to be lingering,” said Joanne O’Sullivan, a children’s book author and PW reporter. “Kids are back in school, so why aren’t they sharing recommendations with each other? Why aren’t they as enthusiastic about books as they were prepandemic?”
I found all the proffered explanations only partially persuasive and can think of others. Maybe the kids likely to read are overscheduled, with too little free time to discover and enjoy books. And I have to wonder whether the assumption that kids want to read about people like themselves—aka identity politics—is part of the problem. One reason publishers turned down J.K. Rowling’s original Harry Potter manuscript was that they thought the boarding school setting might seem too “exclusive.” I remember reading somewhere that Rowling worried that American readers wouldn’t understand it. Yet the setting’s very exoticism is one of books’ appeals.
Do kids feel even they have permission to read for fun about people who are different from themselves? This may be projection on my part, I realize. Before our elementary school was integrated when I was in fourth grade, I used to read a fair number books about black heroes like Harriet Tubman that I got from the school library. Afterwards, I felt like those books were for the black kids, and I shouldn’t intrude on their territory. Of course, this was in South Carolina in 1969, when the gulf was enormous.
Maybe teachers should do more reading aloud to their classes. I discovered the Little House books when our fifth grade teacher read us On the Banks of Plum Creek (interesting that she started in the middle of the series). She also read us Snow Treasure, which I remember as incredibly exciting. It’s about Norwegian kids smuggling gold on their sleds during the Nazi occupation. Schools would undoubtedly deem these books too old-fashioned for today’s kids, but one of the most enjoyable aspects of reading is leaving the here and now for other times and places.
Virginia Postrel is a writer with a particular interest in the intersection of commerce, culture, and technology. Author of “The Future and Its Enemies,” “The Substance of Style,” “The Power of Glamour,” and, most recently, “The Fabric of Civilization.” This essay was originally published on Virginia’s newsletter on Substack.
Header photo by Johnny McClung.