“Decline by 9”

In “Not Lost in a Book” (Slate ), Dan Kois writes about a decline in children’s reading:

It’s called the “Decline by 9,” and it’s reaching a crisis point for publishers and educators. According to research by the children’s publishers Scholastic, at age 8, 57 percent of kids say they read books for fun most days; at age 9, only 35 percent do. This trend started before the pandemic, experts say, but the pandemic accelerated things. “I don’t think it’s possible to overstate how disruptive the pandemic was on middle grade readers,” one industry analyst told Publishers Weekly. And everyone I talked to agreed that the sudden drop-off in reading for fun is happening at a crucial age — the very age when, according to publishing lore, lifetime readers are made.

Kois describes the causes as numerous: screen time, lack of screens (no marketing via BookTok), a decline in word-of-mouth reading recommendations during the pandemic, test-focused teaching with an emphasis on excerpts not books, and the defunding of libraries.

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