Children reading more emails than books

A worrying trend has been revealed in a recent report, with industry officials claiming that the children of today, who are something of a broadband generation, are more interested in reading emails than they are books.

Many people of a certain age will remember there being no such thing as broadband, internet and emails when they were at school and the only reading that they did was picking up some real literature and enjoying their favourite books whilst they were on holiday from school or at weekends.

However, a worrying new trend has been highlighted amongst today’s broadband generation of children, with officials stating that they appear to be more interested in reading emails than they are novels. Research has shown that fewer than fifty percent of children aged between eight and seventeen read a novel outside of school each month.

Around eighteen thousand school children were polled as part of a survey by the National Literacy Trust and the conclusion was that kids were far more likely to read emails and text messages than books. Nearly thirty percent of kids said that they had between eleven and fifty books in the home but one in six said that it was very rare that they read any books outside of school.

There are concerns that these are the children that will eventually “grow up to be the one in six adults who struggle with literacy”. An official from the Trust added: “Getting these children reading and helping them to love reading is the way to turn their lives around and give them new opportunities and aspirations.”

Do you try and encourage your kids to read books outside of school?

Source – BBC