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It’s been a tough year for our brains. Merriam-Webster dictionary editors chose “slop” as 2025’s word of the year. New York Magazine recently dropped its “Stupid Issue”, with a cover story exploring America’s collective “cognitive decline”. There are big problems in the humanities: reading test scores are down for students nationwide, and undergraduates cannot read full books any more.
Even storytime – a comfy couch, a cardboard book, a kid’s rapt attention as their parent reads them a story – is an endangered activity. According to an April report from HarperCollins UK, parents have lost the love of reading to their children, with fewer than half of gen Z parents calling the activity “fun for me”. According to the survey of 1,596 parents of children aged zero to 13, almost one in three found reading “more a subject to learn” than an experience to enjoy. Only a third of kids aged five to 10 frequently read for fun, compared with over half in 2012.
“It is boring,” one Reddit user wrote on r/books. “The books that my kid likes suck. But, like, that’s your job as a parent.”
Educators, parents and those who cherish getting lost in a good book are, understandably, worried. And while it is hard to compete with Ms Rachel or Bluey, there are ways to liven up old fashioned storytime. Ahead, parents share the unorthodox tactics they say get their young kids interested in reading.
Enlist ChatGPT
When Bri Ramos went to parent night at her kids’ elementary school in Oklahoma City, a first-grade teacher said something that stuck with her: “I can tell if you read to your child every night, or if you do not,” the teacher told her. “There is such a drastic difference in a developing child’s brain, and it’s just based on that 10 to 20 minutes of reading every night.”
After using ChatGPT to help find recipes to tempt her picky eaters, Ramos, who is 37 and works in marketing, turned her sights on its “talk” feature to help her read to them. Some nights before bed, instead of opening a copy of Mother Goose, Ramos asks ChatGPT to tell a bedtime story about a little girl who is a princess – or maybe a dragon fighter – on an adventure. Ramos named the character Camilla, after her six-year-old daughter, and told the chatbot to speak in a British accent, because that’s just fun. “It’s usually two to three minutes, and then we have it ask reading comprehension questions about the story afterwards,” Ramos said.
Since the stories are about Camilla, she tends to get “giggly and excited, and really listens”, as opposed to when she’s learning to reading during storytime and is so focused on getting the words right that she doesn’t fully grasp the larger plot. “When we’re reading from a book, it’s more technical,” Ramos said. “When we’re reading from AI, it’s more fun and engaging.”
The family uses ChatGPT for storytime sparingly. “It’s very effective when [the kids are] burnt out or frustrated, or when we’ve read Sam-I-am 152 times and just cannot do it again,” Ramos said. “It just adds a nice little change into the routine.”
Outsourcing the demands of parenthood to large language models is understandably controversial; generative AI programs such as ChatGPT are not built for children. A recent study found that when adults used generative AI to come up with prompts for a short story, it increased their creativity but decreased the diversity in their collective writing output. In other words, material created by ChatGPT is narrow in its scope, while people read books, in part, to learn about and empathize with people or places that differ from them.
“It’s totally understandable that parents would use AI to create stories that involve their kids,” said Alexandria Abenshon, director of children’s programs and services at the New York Public Library. “I think it gives us a good jumping-off point to think about authorship, how we [as adults] can write stories that might involve our own kids. It’s a fine line, but I think it’s ultimately up to each parent to navigate that in a way that feels safe for them.”
For her part, Ramos always supervises her kids’ interactions with ChatGPT, ensuring they are “age-appropriate”. “I think it’s really important for parents to not feel guilty. Using technology as an asset and having your child read is better than not reading it all,” she said.
So far, she has yet to adapt a ChatGPT-style British accent for when she reads aloud to Camilla herself. “Maybe after a few glasses of wine.”
Grab a cookbook
Alliah L Agostini, a children’s and cookbook author from Montclair, New Jersey, has a 10-year-old daughter who is an “enthusiastic reader” and an eight-year-old son who is “a bit less so”. While working on her latest cookbook, Agostini noticed that her kids were always around to taste-test recipes, indicating they were just as interested in the process of cooking as she was. She decided to read a cookbook with them.
“I was like, ‘Wait a minute, this is just as much reading as anything else,’” said Agostini, 43. “I think a lot of people downplay reading cookbooks because there’s no story, but it’s fun for them to look at the steps, follow instructions and create something with a fulfilling end result.”
Now the family chooses interesting cookbooks to read while they work together in the kitchen. It is, as Agostini says, “sneaking in some reading” – but why judge something that works for a kid who is not naturally drawn to the library?
“Kids consume media a little bit differently than we did,” Agostini said. “Be patient with them. It’s not the smoothest ride to create a recipe, and it will probably take you twice as long as reading a book, but it’s fun and creates great memories.”
Pretend you’re Christopher Walken
Arjay Smith has been an actor for 32 years, and lives in Los Angeles where he is working on the procedural police drama The Rookie. You can also catch him playing the role of “dad who does dramatic readings for his kids” almost every night, using impressions of Christopher Walken, Peter Sellers as Inspector Clouseau, James Brown and Morgan Freeman, plus a “generic deep monster voice”, to narrate the books.
Smith enlists co-stars, too; his wife will read aloud while he acts out the plot, or one of his good friends, another actor, and will help him turn children’s books into two-person plays to perform for their kids when they vacation together.
“It keeps the energy high, but it also sticks with the children that much longer,” Smith, 42, said of the theatrics. “It has a greater impact on their life and how they connect to stories: now it’s not just words on a page, it’s words on a page that were brought to life, and each character has their own individual identity via your voice and vibration.”
Learn from a professional
Abenshon, from the New York Public Library, is not a parent herself, but she has spent countless hours reading to kids during her days as a children’s librarian. She encourages parents to “embrace all types of reading” – even if that means picking up a wordless picture book and working with a child to narrate it.
“It’s really about letting kids make the stories that are meaningful for them at that moment,” Abenshon said. Then, when the kids get older, let them chose what they read as they will naturally gravitate to what interests them.
Abenshon says she also makes a point of reading for her own pleasure in front of kids at the library. “It’s really just as simple as modeling,” she said.
Cultivating an appreciation for reading doesn’t happen overnight. “Build the habit,” Abenshon said. “Making sure that we have a time and a space to read are critical ingredients to building a relationship with reading. With kids, it’s so important to have a dedicated time that signals that reading is something worth doing.”
