Rise of social media, decline of reading cause for alarm
A new study has alarming findings but is probably not surprising to anyone who knows a teenager: High schoolers today are texting, scrolling and using social media instead of reading books and magazines.
American adolescents are cradling their devices for hours each day rather than losing themselves in print or long-form media, according to research published by the American Psychological Association. In fact, one in three U.S. high school seniors did not read a book for pleasure in 2016. In the same time period, 82 per cent of 12th-graders visited sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram every day.
Jean Twenge, a professor of psychology at San Diego State University and one of the authors of the study, said the lack of leisure reading is troubling. For her, the most important discovery hidden in the data is this statistic: In the 1970s, about 60 per cent of high school seniors reported reading a book, magazine or newspaper every day. In 2016, 16 per cent of high school seniors reported doing so.
“This decline in reading print media — particularly the decline in reading books — it’s concerning,” said Twenge, author of iGen: Why Today’s Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy — and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood — and What That Means for the Rest of Us (Atria Books, 2017).
“Reading long-form texts like books and magazine articles is really important for understanding complex ideas and for developing critical thinking skills,” Twenge said. “It’s also excellent practice for students who are going on to college.”
The decline in reading rates of legacy media began in the early 1980s and accelerated swiftly after the mid-2000s, when smartphones and high-speed internet access became widely available. At the same time, high schoolers’ screen time, including television, began to rise, nearly tripling from the late 1970s to the mid-2010s, according to the study.
In 2016, 12th-graders reported devoting about six hours of their free time every day to digital media. Tenth-graders reported devoting five hours, and eighth-graders reporting devoting four hours.
Twenge said the data show that teens would rather pick up their devices than a book. “Does digital media displace the leisure time people once spent on legacy media? We find that the answer is yes.”
The racial and gender breakdown of the surveyed group matched national demographics, and the main findings did not vary according to race, gender or socioeconomic status, Twenge said. There was one difference between the sexes: Girls reported visiting social media sites more than boys, who spend more time on video games.
What can parents do to make their teenager put down the phone and crack open a book?
The solution can require a complicated dance between coercion and suggestion, said Daniel Willingham, a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia and the author of Raising Kids Who Read (Jossey-Bass, 2015).
The first step is prying your kids away from their screens, Willingham said. But don’t tie lack of screen time to enforced reading. Don’t take your teenager’s phone and tell him he can have it back once he has read for 30 minutes.
“This is not the way we treat things that we want to teach children are pleasurable,” Willingham said. “I mean, think about it. You would never think of coercing your child into having a piece of cake.”
Instead, when enforcing a temporary ban on devices, make sure that books are the secondbest option available to stave off boredom. One way to do this, according to Dean-Michael Crosby, a teacher at a school in England who often advises parents on this issue, is to “litter your house with eye-catching titles.” He suggested leaving books lying around the living room, the kitchen, even the bathrooms.
Finally, it’s important to model good reading behaviour. “That almost goes without saying,” Willingham said. “If you’re nagging your child to read, and you’re just sort of on Instagram all the time, why in the world would they take that seriously?”