The even more alarming stat underlying the big decline in reading for fun
The percentage of Americans reading for pleasure fell 40% from 2003 to 2023, according to a new study, published in the journal iScience, that relied on data from the American Time Use Survey. While that’s an alarming trend, especially for novelists and aspiring novelists, the number that stunned me was how few parents are reading to their children.
In The New York Times’ story (gift article) reporting on the study, they said:
“The researchers also found that, while more than 20% of people surveyed had a child under 9 years old, only 2% of those surveyed read with a child—a finding that stayed largely flat throughout the study period but that could contribute to further declines in adult reading going forward, the researchers said.”
Our Favorite Children’s Books
As the parent who stayed home and worked remote part-time when our kids were young, I read to my boys all the time. But some books were more tedious than others to read for the 50th time. So, for parents and would-be parents who are looking for some great books, I wanted to share the books that we saved to read to our eventual (🤞) grandchildren.
You can see that we have a soft spot for the Elephant and Piggie book series by Mo Willems. You can pretty much pick one of those at random and be happy.
We’re also fans of Dr. Seuss, especially since we lived in Dr. Seuss’s hometown of Springfield when our kids were little. We routinely took our kids to Forest Park Zoo, where Dr. Seuss’s father was a curator. We also regularly drove past the factory that inspired the one in The Lorax.
A few other standouts for me were:
- Press Here by Herve Tullet
- Dragons Love Tacos by Adam Rubin and Daniel Salmieri
- The Day the Crayons Quit by Drew Daywalt and Oliver Jeffers
- The Pout-Pout Fish by Deborah Diesen and Dan Hanna
- Not a Box by Antoinette Portis
- Bear in Love by Daniel Pinkwater and Will Hillenbrand
- Stuck by Oliver Jeffers
- The Book with No Pictures by B. J. Novak
Happy reading!
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