UK Edition
My teenage kids have fallen back in love with books during lockdown, but will it last?
It took a pandemic for Radhika Holmström’s teenage daughters to put down their phones and pick up a book
If it takes a village to raise a child, sometimes it takes a pandemic to get a teenager’s nose back in a book.
Had you told me a decade ago that my sweet little moppets would one day lose the love of reading, I probably wouldn’t have believed you. Actually, make that a mere five years ago, when my daughters were still head-down in books.
They haunted the excellent library at their comprehensive school and brought home tome after tome of gloomy dystopian young adult novels. (The new Hunger Games prequel would have put them into an uncontrollable frenzy of delight.) They had lives outside books, but books were a central part of their lives.
However, somewhere along the line books became less important. They still had the odd one on the go, but it was taken in small doses before bed, rather than in mad gulps at any given moment.
They were literate, all right, and academically they did just fine, including excellent English GCSEs. Yet reading for pleasure was overtaken by a host of other pleasurable activities, from online to real life. By the time they hit 16 and 19, reading was definitely down on their list of priorities.
They’re very different from me at the same age. Other people’s memories of 1970s childhoods are of roaming free outdoors; mine are of sitting hunched over books, a stubby child in peculiarly unfetching acrylic tank-tops poring over the page.
Books took me into other, more interesting worlds (I really didn’t get out much). And the love affair went on throughout my teenage years and beyond. I read my way through a couple of English degrees and eventually into a career as a journalist.
As a result, I sniffed smugly at the advice to model good reading habits to your infants – hell, the younger one, being a home birth, literally arrived into the world in a room that resembled a second-hand bookshop (with a distinctly chaotic shelving system).
They grew up in a house where their parents’ slightly eclectic collections overflowed the shelves and piled up untidily on the floor. We read. To ourselves, and to them. So when my girls stopped reading, I was more than slightly taken aback.
It turns out that I shouldn’t have been, though. “There’s a generally accepted rule of thumb that the actual readers of YA novels are usually in their early teens, rather than GCSE age or sixth-formers,” points out Dr Catherine Butler, reader in English literature at Cardiff University.
“All our research shows that it’s during the early teenage years when reading for pleasure tends to drop off,” says Fiona Evans, director of school programmes at the Literacy Trust. Friends who teach at secondary level definitely agree.
And the writer Frank Cottrell-Boyce – himself a father of seven – adds: “Reading demands a kind of singular, focused attention that switches off once you get a smartphone and a social media account. You’re writing an essay, responding to social media and looking something up all at the same time: you can’t read a book that way.” There are still kids like me out there, but they are much fewer in number.
But then, earlier this year, the world changed. Naomi, who is in the sixth form, stopped going out to school, and Miriam came home from university. The front door stayed shut: none of us were getting out much now. And a few weeks in, I came downstairs to find Naomi reading the ancient Penguin Pride and Prejudice that I pinched from my parents’ house when I went to university.
“I thought it was time I read it,” she said cheerfully as I boggled at her. Miriam reminded me that she’d been asking about The Handmaid’s Tale, and I tracked down the copy I bought when I was not much older than she is now.
It didn’t stop there. They even started buying books if we didn’t have them. Proper books: paper, not downloads. Normal People wasn’t too surprising, but then they asked about Brighton Rock, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and The Catcher in the Rye.
And from a highly unscientific survey of my friends, they’re not alone. One friend’s 18-year-old son has hit the Dickens and charged his way through Hard Times in 24 hours. Another lad of the same age is on A Confederacy of Dunces, and a third (slightly alarmingly for his parents) is trying The Bell Jar. It’s as if a strange infection of literacy is spreading throughout the youth of today.
So what flipped the switch? Some of it, of course, is just that there isn’t so much else to do. (It turns out that there is a limit to how much streamed TV the teenage frame can take.)
But perhaps it’s also that books are offering them a chance to escape the confines of their current reality. (My two definitely don’t want dystopic novels, on the basis that they’re living through enough dystopia as it is.)
“I think one thing we’re going to see from this lockdown is that people have been reading very much to preserve their own wellbeing,” says Evans.
And indeed, Gemma Moss, who is the director of the International Literacy Centre and professor of literacy at University College London’s Institute of Education, is firmly of the view that it’s preserving their educational wellbeing too.
“I think there’s too much of a panic about learning loss during the shutdown,” she says. “If young people are reading, they’re doing a lot to make that loss up.” It doesn’t matter so much what they’re reading, she adds (so much for my smugness about Jane Austen), as long as they are reading.
Will they keep the new habit up? Yes, they say, but it’ll be harder once other things start crowding in on their time. But even if they do let it slip, they’ll have learnt something about what reading can do. “If there’s a point at which you would want the world to go away, this is it,” says Cottrell-Boyce.
“It really builds resilience to have that sense of being in another time and place that you get through reading. You can shut down and send the world away. And I don’t think you can get the same thing through anything else.”
Getting teenagers back into books
Seven tips from the experts on getting teenagers into good reading habits that’ll last beyond lockdown.
- If they start a new book, suggest very strongly that they read at least three chapters of the book before deciding they don’t like it. And if they do want to stick with it, read at least a chapter a day.
- Recommend books – but also bear in mind that recommendations from their peers will carry a lot of weight. The Literacy Trust has a new reading website for this age group, launched by Bernardine Evaristo this week.
- Remember that young people use all kinds of different platforms. If they’ve seen the film or the TV series of a book, suggest they read the book itself. “It’s not a cop-out – it doesn’t matter how you came to that story,” says Fiona Evans.
- Don’t be too fussy about their choice of reading.
- Read the same books as they do, so you can talk about them. And even try reading aloud, Frank Cottrell-Boyce suggests. “There’s something very powerful about the human voice. If you’re reading the same book, read out the bits you’re enjoying the most.”
- On the same note, don’t discount audiobooks. They’re surprisingly popular with teenage boys, and all the research says that they engage the brain in the same way that words on a page do.
- Above all, if they were previously good readers, don’t worry too much. “The effort you’ve put in early will pay off,” says Evans. “You may well be surprised later.”