Hey, y’all!
This week from Austin Scholar...
Kids have stopped reading (but summer is the perfect time to get them to start)
How to get your middle schooler to pick up a book
Scholar’s Sources: What to put in front of them
About two months ago I wrote #216, about why summer reading matters and some ways to make it happen. However, a lot of the replies told the same story: the kid hasn’t touched a book in weeks, the library trip didn’t take, and reading has somehow become a fight.
As someone whose parents had to physically take books out of my hands, this is something I care deeply about fixing. So, if you have a middle schooler who just doesn’t seem to be into reading, this is for you.
Kids have stopped reading (but summer is the perfect time to get them to start)
Before anything else: if that’s your house, you haven’t failed at anything. A kid who reads on his own all summer is unfortunately rare now, and I want to show you exactly how rare, because I don’t think most parents have looked at these numbers recently.
In 2025, 14% of 13-year-olds said they read for fun almost every day. In 1984 it was 35%, and even in 2012 it was still 27%. Meanwhile, 31% of 13-year-olds now say they never or hardly ever read for fun, up from 22% a decade ago. So the never-readers outnumber the daily readers by more than two to one, and among the lowest-scoring kids, the never-readers are 42%. I’ve tried to find a gentler word for this than collapse and I don’t have one.
People like to blame the pandemic, but the scores started sliding years before COVID. On the 2024 NAEP, a third of 8th graders scored “below basic,” the largest share in the history of the test. And on the long-term trend, today’s 13-year-olds score one point higher than kids did in 1971. Ten points on that test is roughly a grade level, so the drop since 2012 means kids are finishing about a grade behind where the same kids would have landed ten years ago. Maybe they’ll bounce back. People keep telling me they will. Nothing in the data says so yet.
There’s also a timing piece that I think matters. Scholastic has surveyed kids about their reading habits for years, and frequency falls off a cliff at age nine. 57% of eight-year-olds read five or more days a week. Among nine-year-olds it’s 35%, in middle school 21%, in high school 15%. And it never rebounds. If your kid is somewhere between nine and thirteen and drifting away from books, this is roughly when it gets decided.
One more stat, take it for whatever it’s worth: Scholastic found that kids who rarely read report more anxiety than frequent readers (50% vs. 39%), more sadness (37% vs. 25%), and more loneliness (30% vs. 19%).
How to get your middle schooler to pick up a book
If you’re having trouble getting your middle schooler to read, you’re not alone. Pushing them doesn’t work because they’re eleven or twelve or thirteen, and at that age they’re reading you as closely as you’re reading them. When you push reading, what they hear is that you think they’re behind, and they take the pressure as a verdict and dig in.
Teenagers aren’t lazy or irrational, they’re wired to protect their status and to bristle at being condescended to (as discussed by Dr. David Yeager), and a parent playing enforcer trips exactly that wire. So don’t be the enforcer. Your job is to make reading the easiest, most obvious thing within arm’s reach and then get out of the way, which conveniently means the parent who does less tends to win. Every idea below can be done tired, on a random Tuesday, while you’re doing something else.
One thing to hold in mind as you read the list. If your kid spends hours on the wiki for their favorite game, or deep in a subreddit about a show, or reading every comment under a highlight reel, that kid is a reader. Maybe not the version you picture when you say the word, but every one of those pages is vocabulary and comprehension and background knowledge stacking up. So you’re not building a reader from scratch. You’re showing a kid who already reads for hours a day that a book can scratch the same itch.
1. Let them buy garbage.
Graphic novels. Dog Man. The novel based on the video game, the book spun off a YouTube channel, whatever they actually want. Veto nothing.
I know how this sounds, but reading doesn’t have to be good to count. The research is about words, how many and how often, and a graphic novel has words. A joke book has words. A manga about a kid training to be a ninja has words, and your kid will inhale four volumes of it in a week. Worry about taste later. Right now you’re building a habit, and the habit comes first. Your entire job in the store is to keep your mouth shut, which is harder than it sounds but is technically nothing.
2. Read chapter one out loud. Then leave.
Pick the book you’re hoping they’ll try and read the first chapter out loud, in the car or on the couch or wherever. Then stop, put it down somewhere they’ll see it, and go do something else. Don’t ask if they want more, and don’t hover.
Chapter one is the expensive part of any book. You’re meeting people, getting your bearings, and it feels like work right up until it doesn’t. If you pay that part for them, a lot of kids will pick the book back up on their own just to find out what happens. They won’t tell you that’s what they’re doing. They’ll just do it.
And if performing a read-aloud for a twelve-year-old is not happening tonight, fine. Play the free audiobook sample of chapter one on Libby while you make dinner. It does the same job, and a professional narrator handles it while you chop onions.
3. The bedtime loophole.
Tell them in the first week of summer: stay up as late as you want, as long as you’re reading.
That’s the whole rule. There’s nothing to check and nothing to enforce, and you go to bed at your normal time. The price of staying up is a book, and staying up is the thing they want most in the world right now.
Say it as a standing rule, not something you mention once and forget. They’ll game it immediately, midnight every night, bragging to their friends about it, and that’s fine. The 90th-percentile kid in that 1988 study was reading 21 minutes a day. One gamed bedtime doubles that. You come out ahead on this trade every single time.
4. Start the audiobook before anyone objects.
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