It wasn't unusual for a kid to have a favorite book. Maybe a favorite author. Even a library card.
You could give a child a book and expect them to disappear into it for an afternoon.
Now?
Give some kids a book and you might as well hand them a rotary phone.
We love to blame Gen Alpha for having short attention spans, being glued to screens, lacking curiosity, or struggling to concentrate.
But here's the uncomfortable part:
Children didn't create the environment they're growing up in. Adults did.
Gen Alpha is being raised in a world where reading has gradually been pushed out of the home, replaced by phones, tablets, YouTube, video games, streaming services and an endless supply of content designed to require as little patience as possible.
Then we send those same children to school and wonder why they don't enjoy reading.
Seriously?
What did we think was going to happen?
Reading Starts at Home
Schools can teach children how to read. But schools can't be expected to single-handedly teach children to love reading. That starts at home. Children learn what matters by watching what the adults around them value.
If Mom and Dad spend their evenings scrolling through Facebook, TikTok and Instagram, while the television runs in the background, what exactly is the child supposed to conclude about books?
If nobody in the house reads, why would a child assume reading is important?
We tell children, "You need to read more."
But children are watching us. And children are excellent at noticing hypocrisy.
A parent who tells a child to put down the phone while spending four hours on their own phone is not teaching discipline. They're teaching that discipline is something adults demand from children but don't necessarily practice themselves.
We Used to Make Reading a Thing
Reading used to be built into childhood.
You went to the library.
You had book reports.
Books were birthday/Christmas presents.
And somewhere along the way, we confused reading proficiency with reading enjoyment.
A child can know how to pronounce every word on a page and still have absolutely no relationship with books. That's a problem. Because reading isn't just about vocabulary. Reading teaches you how to think.
A Child Who Doesn't Read Has Fewer Places to Go
Books force children to do something modern technology rarely asks them to do. A book doesn't constantly interrupt itself. There isn't another book waiting every 30 seconds like a TikTok video. There isn't an algorithm screaming, "Here's something else!"
A book makes you stay in one spot to imagine, visualize, question, connect one idea to another, and sometimes, it makes you uncomfortable.
That's part of the point.
When children read stories, they encounter people who don't look like them, think like them, live like them or believe what they believe.
They learn empathy without somebody standing in front of them giving a lecture on empathy.
They learn cause and effect, consequences, that people can be complicated, that there can be more than one perspective (super-important).
And eventually, they begin developing something incredibly important: their own thoughts.
That's the Part We Should Be Worried About
A child who doesn't learn how to think independently becomes dependent on everyone else to tell them what to think. And we're already living in a world where that's becoming increasingly dangerous.
Algorithms decide what people see.
Social media decides what's popular.
Influencers decide what's fashionable.
Comment sections decide who's right.
Political parties decide who's angry.
And artificial intelligence can now produce an answer before a person has even finished forming the question.
Convenience is wonderful but convenience can also make people intellectually lazy.
If a child never develops the habit comparing sources or how to sit quietly with a complicated idea, how are they supposed to navigate adulthood?
"But My Child Doesn't Like Reading."
Maybe they don't. But that doesn't mean they can't. Children don't automatically hate reading.
Sometimes they hate reading what the parent or teacher wants them to read. There's a difference.
Find the right genre and stop worrying so much about whether they're reading the "right" book and start worrying about whether they're reading anything at all.
Parents Have to Stop Outsourcing Everything to Schools
This is where adults need to take some responsibility (translation: I'm about to step on some toes).
Teachers matter. But parents matter too.
We can't hand a child an iPad at age three, give them unlimited access to YouTube at five, let algorithms raise their interests at eight, and then blame the school at twelve because they don't want to read a novel.
That's not how this works.
Education doesn't begin when the school bell rings. Education begins at home.
And No, This Isn't an Attack on Technology
Technology isn't the enemy. A child can love video games and love books. I'm an example of that myself. A child can watch YouTube and read. A child can use AI and still learn how to think.
The problem is balance.
Technology gives children an unprecedented amount of information. Reading teaches them what to do with information.
Those aren't the same thing.
A child can consume 500 pieces of content in a day and still not understand a single complicated idea or tell you what half of it even was. More information doesn't automatically create more intelligence. Sometimes it just creates more noise.
We Need to Bring Back the Boredom
Here's another uncomfortable truth: Children need time when nothing is happening.
No phone. No television. No video game. Nothing.
Because boredom gives the brain somewhere to go. That's when imagination shows up. That's when curiosity shows up. That's when a child might pick up a book because there's nothing else competing for their attention.
We have become so terrified of our children being bored that we've eliminated one of the conditions that helps children become curious. Every quiet moment gets filled.
And then we wonder why they can't concentrate.
Reading Is Bigger Than Reading
Let me wrap this up because I'm beating a dead horse. And a bunch of you probably stopped reading 30 seconds ago because this post is longer than a TikTok video.
This isn't really about books. It's about raising people who can think. People who can sit with an idea without immediately needing somebody else to validate it. People who can understand another person's perspective. People who can change their minds when presented with better information.
That's what reading can help develop.
And those skills aren't optional anymore. They're survival skills.
Because Gen Alpha is growing up in an information environment unlike anything previous generations experienced.
They will have access to more information than any generation in history.
Eventually, childhood ends. Parents can't follow their children everywhere. Teachers can't follow them into adulthood. And nobody can protect them from every bad idea they're going to encounter.
Eventually, they're going to have to make decisions for themselves.
And when that day comes, we better hope we raised children who know how to think.
Not just children who know how to scroll.
Because the world doesn't need another generation that can consume information at lightning speed.
It needs a generation capable of stopping long enough to ask whether the information they're consuming is actually true.
That starts with curiosity. It grows through reading. And it becomes wisdom when a child learns to think for themselves.
So maybe the question isn't: "Why don't kids read anymore?"
Maybe the question is: "What have we done to make reading less important to them?"
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