My pet-peeve of today's kids

[Mr.Marion]

Most young elementary school kids I talk with nowadays don't read books. Not even e-books.

They sit around on phone or ipad surfing the web, playing videogames, texting, streaming shows/movies, etc. You rarely, if ever, hear that they are reading a book.

What has happened?? Do they find reading boring? Are their attention spans so shot that they are unable to read? Are they just lazy and spoiled? Are schools unsuccessful in finding proper literature to develop their students' interest in reading? Is the reading passion in people dying out?

When I was growing up in elementary school, reading was big in most kids around me. You had occasional troublesome students who despised reading but few & far between. Now it seems normal behavior.

[Hector]

I’m allergic to kids, period.

[great_chandel]

Most kids don't talk these days either. All they can do is text. Article after article states the same thing: communication in this generation of kids is the worst it has ever been.

[jwyblejr]

My nephew who is 16 reads. He likes to read manga. He either gets them from the school library or the local library.

[Mikey]

Back in the 70's when I went to school I never liked reading books -- only did it when I was forced to for school reports etc.

Most of the kids in my class were the same (save a few girls reading stuff like Little House) and one or 2 boys reading comics.

My school was your average modern (at the time) predominately white suburb/rural elementary school.

[sprytel]

I'm not sure I agree with your premise. My kids read more (duration wise, at least) than I do. I don't think their fondness for reading is that unique either. Children and young adult book series (from Harry Potter to Hunger Games to Diary of a Wimpy Kid to a bunch of others I am not in the loop enough to name) sell a ton of copies. Somebody is reading those books.

[Hedji]

Just like when we were young, it depends on the kid. I never liked to read, and yet I did very well in school, and consider myself fairly articulate in being able to communicate, and read as an adult if I choose. It's been proven that there are multiple intelligences and different ways of learning. I was very much an auditory learner. My ability to string words together was strongly influenced by radio dramatizations and film, not by reading. And now I'm an educator myself.

I loved comic books, but I don't think I really, truly read them. So again, according to the theory of multiple intelligences, I skew towards being a visual and auditory learner.

It's easy to look down our noses at 'today's kids', but I guarantee you, every generation has been doing the same. I don't really know if technology is helping or hindering (probably both), but ask yourself if you would be able to resist had someone handed you a device back in the 1970s? We were all pretty wowed by our electronic games as kids too.

[megomania]

Well when we were kids we read because we didn't have ipads, phones, tablets, etc. We had TV and maybe a video game console. My son is 8 - he reads, he watches TV, he writes, he draws, he plays video games, he uses technology. He's a kid growing up in the 21st century.

-Chris

[CrimsonGhost]

I don’t read books either.

[Wee67]

By the time I was 15, I had moved 13 times. I mention this just to say I sampled plenty of neighborhoods. Of course, that's till pretty anecdotal, but in all of those neighborhoods, my friends and I rarely read anything beyond school assignments. We generally played outside, pick-up sports or with our toys inside. Later on, when Atari took up a lot of our time, but still not a lot of reading. I didn't really start reading regularly until after college.

[Earth 2 Chris]

Plenty of kids read. My wife is a children's librarian. She has a lot of very passionate kids who know her by name and come up and hug her when they see her out.

Harry Potter alone tells you kids still read.

Yes, kids are engaged in their phones too much, that's true. But we were engaged in arcade games, and home consoles.

Both of my kids read. Nowadays the boy mostly reads comics and graphic novels, but the girl reads pretty much everything.

Chris

[palitoy]

I run a little free library, I can't keep kids books in stock. I get wiped out weekly.

[EMCE Hammer]

By the time I was 15, I had moved 13 times. I mention this just to say I sampled plenty of neighborhoods. Of course, that's till pretty anecdotal, but in all of those neighborhoods, my friends and I rarely read anything beyond school assignments. We generally played outside, pick-up sports or with our toys inside. Later on, when Atari took up a lot of our time, but still not a lot of reading. I didn't really start reading regularly until after college.

I'm immediately struck by the one common thread between all of these 13 neighborhoods full of illiterate feral children............

[TomStrong]

I’m a high school teacher and many of our students read. When I’m through with a lesson if there’s time some of them will get out a book they’re carrying and read. Always makes me proud.

[Megotastrophe]

complain all day about teen vampire novels and magic teenagers who fix dystopian futures, these books make enough money to tell me some teens read.