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Last week, former elementary school teacher Spencer Russell posed a question to parents who follow his Instagram account, Toddlers Can Read: “Why aren’t you reading aloud to your kids?”
The responses, which Russell shared with the Guardian, ranged from embarrassed to annoyed to angry. “It’s so boring,” said one parent. “I don’t have time,” said another. One mother wrote in: “I don’t enjoy reading myself.”
Others reported difficulty getting their children to sit still long enough for a full dose of Goodnight Moon or Mother Goose: “He’s always interrupting,” or “my son just wants to skip all the pages.” They noted the monotony of story time, with one saying: “I love reading with my kids, but they request the same book over and over.”
Parents who struggle to read to their children tend to be younger themselves, according to a recent survey from HarperCollins UK. Fewer than half of gen Z parents called reading to their children “fun for me”, and almost one in three saw reading as “more of a subject to learn” than something to be enjoyed – significantly more than their gen X counterparts.
This mindset undoubtedly trickles down to their kids: the survey also found that only a third of five-to-10 year olds frequently read for fun, compared to over half in 2012. This could be because their parents are less likely to read to them before they turn five: 41% of parents of all ages reported doing so, a steep drop from the 64% in 2012.
‘Reading role models’
If parents are reading out loud to their children less, US educators can tell. Russell, who offers courses to teach literacy skills to kids as young as 18 months, regularly gets inquiries from parents of older children – some as old as 14 – who still struggle to crack open a book. There are other tell-tale signs. “We see children who can sit still and focus for hours on YouTube or Miss Rachel, but when you sit them down with a book, they move, wiggle, or scream and run away,” said Russell, who lives in Houston.
Gen Z parents inherited an economy racked by inequity and instability that makes child rearing all the more stressful. The cost of childcare in the US – roughly $11,000 a year on average – has skyrocketed since the 90s. It’s no wonder they might be too tired or stressed to read to their kids at night, even if they realize it’s important to do so.
At the same time, screens are inescapable – notably, gen Z parents were the first generation to grow up with them. “I don’t think we can divorce the role of technology influencing gen Z parents and their kids with the decline in reading out loud,” Russell said. “Screen time is replacing one-on-one, quality interactions between parent and child.”
Loads of evidence shows that excessive screen time can harm a child’s cognitive, linguistic and social-emotional growth, and doctors recommend that parents limit “non-educational screen time” for children ages two to five to about one hour per weekday, and three on the weekends. But you try getting a toddler to settle into story time without giving in to her demands to watch Bluey. Most parents see the iPad as a necessary evil.
America’s so-called “literacy crises” is well-documented; an Atlantic report from last fall found that many elite college students fail to complete English assignments, as they never had to read a full book in high school. The pandemic wreaked havoc on students’ performance in both math and reading, with scores in both subjects dropping to the lowest margin in over 30 years. On TikTok, teachers have taken to posting PSAs urging parents to read to their children with the caption: “I bet you I can’t tell who was breast-fed vs formula-fed, but I can tell you who has grown ups that read to them every night.”
Kids who don’t get a head start reading at home often have trouble catching up to those who do, says Dawna Duff, an associate professor of speech language pathology at Suny’s Binghamton University. “Books are a really rich source of learning new words, and if kids don’t have that experience reading at home, they’re likely to come to school knowing less vocabulary – and that makes a big difference in how successful you’re going to be throughout school,” she said.
But kids don’t just learn to read at school. Becky Calzada, president of the American Association of School Librarians, stresses the importance of parents as “reading role models”. Reading out loud to children not only helps them learn vocabulary, but it builds emotional intelligence, such as the ability to empathize and connect, Caldaza says.
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According to the HarperCollins report, more than one in five boys aged zero to two are rarely or never read to, while 44% of girls in that age group are read to every day. This comes as boys continue to fall behind girls in school – they are more likely to enter kindergarten behind girls, earn lower GPAs and not graduate high school.
Scaling back screen time
Russell acknowledges that books are “never going to compete with YouTube”, and that the pressures of parenthood in 2025 are immense. As one parent told him: “I just don’t have the energy to read to my kid. Me and my wife don’t ‘have a village’, so it’s hard to rest.” But there are ways to wean kids away from their phones. “Just scale it back a little, as much as you can at first.”
Calzada encourages parents who don’t like reading to their children to start slowly. “You don’t have to sit there for 20 minutes to an hour,” she said. “A two-year-old doesn’t have much reading stamina, but you can read them something that has maybe five pages, that’s mostly ‘the cow says moo, the pink says oink,’ and you gradually build up from there.”
Nor should parents give up if their children aren’t paying full attention during story time. According to Duff, “you shouldn’t feel like you need to read every word on the page, or even any words on the page.” Talking about the book’s pictures, or asking kids to tell the story in their own words counts, too.
“We know one of the most helpful ways to read books is by having a conversation with children about what they’re interested in,” she added. “Follow their lead.”
