I'm late to the discussion and I did not read the whole article. But I still feel a need to vent my opinion:) Literacy in America has been declining for a good long time, in part from the reasons mentioned earlier.

But do the experts have memories? The 8 and 9-year-olds of today were 4 and 5 during the pandemic. Many of them were not getting serious school instruction and then got tossed back into school with over-worked teachers and bunch of other kids who were behind. It may be that a significant number are just behind on reading and can't read middle-grade books yet.

That's true, Vijaya. We always had books around and we read books to our child and gave them books. As a result of that and the social isolation of living way out in the country, ours learned to read without a teacher. I, on the other hand, despite all the books in my house growing up, couldn't really read a whole sentence in the second grade. Not even a caption on a picture in a book--I tried, and I embarrassed myself. Pitiful, and yet I am a lifelong avid reader.

There's plenty of time for kids to read today while being dragged to the innumerable extracurricular classes and sports they're programmed into. They're not driving the car, after all.

Kids probably don't have as much time to read for fun now because of the relentless pursuit of other activities. Growing up in a small village without tv or computers,  I'm sure I used to read as much to fill in my spare time as for any other reason. However my two kids have always read a lot - and been read to - and as the younger one was exactly the right age to enjoy the Harry Potter books when they first came out, he is completely addicted to fiction and did a degree in English. The older one tended to read more non-fiction. I see my grandson surrounded by books and just learning to read for himself. I don't know what he will be like at 9 but my son reads stories to him every night so I hope he will carry on with it.

My mother took us to the public library and she bought us many books. Reading, literature, history, and languages were always big in our house--even though I'm pretty sure I watched every single Western TV series ever produced, too, and all us kids ran around outside all day and into the evening. So when did we have time to read? But we did read, because there always are moments when there's "nothing else to do."

School didn't deter me from reading; it introduced me to keeping my own reading list, which I have kept all my life (fiction only). Sometimes I look at the list and think I surely wasted my time on many unmemorable stories not particularly well-written. Now I make my own contributions to that genre.

My suspicion is that if that age group isn't reading for fun, then it's because either parents aren't bringing in the books to the house that the kids want to read, or the kids aren't being encouraged in a fun way at school (or in clubs) or even have access to reading they think of as fun. This is what comes of parents who want to control their kids and their activities, and what comes of schools and kids being dragged into the middle of culture wars by parents and governments who want to get in the way of kids' own discernment and ability to choose what they find fun and entertaining or interesting to read.

Surest way to kill a kid's interest in reading it to tell them what they should or shouldn't like.

So honestly I'm not surprised, and I wouldn't be surprised if it were true, and I also wouldn't be surprised if kids are actually finding and reading more books through pirating and other online resources that they can keep hidden from their parents than the people asking these questions will ever hear from the kids themselves.

Honestly, this is what my daughter did, before I found out and let her understand clearly that she could read whatever she wanted. I wasn't going to confiscate her tablet because of what she was reading. Then we talked about fiction and how important it is to remember that fiction is fiction and reality is something else and that part of the beauty of fiction is that very thing.

As for me, when I was in middle school, we had reading competitions. Who could read the most books from the school library? I scoured the library for anything I could find that I might remotely be interested in because I wanted to win. It was my first exposure to second person fiction, choose your own adventure books, and a lot of other genres I'd have never read otherwise.