Reading allows children to live in a vibrant world, surrounded by fairies, elves and talking animals, transporting them to places where the impossible becomes real. But reading for pleasure also helps children learn more effectively and broadens how they view, interpret and interact with the world. It gives them a form of expression that fuels their imagination and empathy for themselves and others.
But the percentage of children who read for fun is declining.
Just 37% of 9-year-olds and 14% of 13-year-olds read for fun almost every day in 2025, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress. By middle school, just 1 in 7 kids say they read for pleasure each day.
The U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics has also tracked declines in kids and teens who read for fun, finding that in 2023, 14% of 13-year-olds read for fun each day, down from 27% who said they did so in 2012.
Slightly younger kids tend to read for pleasure a bit more. Approximately 39% of 9-year-olds said they read for fun in 2022, down from 53% of 9-year-olds who said they did so in 2012, according to the Department of Education.
This trend is showing up alongside another concern: stagnant reading scores, especially among teenagers. It’s tempting to treat those as separate problems. But as scholars of literacy, we don’t think they are.
Outside of schoolwork, a child can read anywhere from as few as 100,000 words per year to 10 million or more for the most voracious readers.
This gap can help explain why some children’s vocabularies grow so much faster than others.
Kids absorb words from context, over and over, across thousands of pages. One of us, for example, has a son named Andrew, who, at the age of 2, once absorbed and correctly used the word “viaduct,” without anyone defining it for him, after he encountered it in a book about trains.
Older kids and teenagers who describe themselves as committed readers tend to have families that read to them since they were young, kept books around as their interests changed and made reading together a genuine priority.
A well-selected book, in particular, has the ability to enhance a child’s reading pleasure and reading ability, allowing them to see and feel the world with fresh insight.
Research shows a connection between teenagers who read for pleasure as young children: They tend to score higher on cognitive tests that measure verbal learning, memory and speech development.
Reading for pleasure can also help build vocabulary and reading fluency while enhancing focus.
There are other benefits to reading that won’t show up on a reading assessment.
We believe that reading is empathy operating in its simplest form: imagining your way into someone else’s experience and understanding the ripple effects of their actions.
Reading for pleasure, especially the kind that starts on a parent’s or caregiver’s lap, is one of the earliest and most reliable places kids get repeated practice doing that complex work.
Reading with a caregiver often progresses into children reading on their own, whether with a flashlight in bed or in the middle of the day on the couch.
When children become immersed in a book series on their own, in particular, it can help them develop connections with characters they grow to know, love or scorn. They inhabit a character who isn’t them. They sit with an idea long enough to understand why someone acts the way they do.
Feeling emotionally invested in a character’s decisions can also influence how young readers decide how to engage with others and treat people with civility and kindness in real life.
This skill doesn’t arrive automatically with age. It is built through practice, and recreational reading in childhood is the main training ground for it.
Within the past 10 years, many schools have invested in evidence-based reading instruction, with a renewed emphasis in phonics instruction to improve students’ reading proficiency.
This shift has been an important and necessary step in helping students develop the foundational skills they need to become successful readers. At the same time, some classrooms have had fewer opportunities for independent reading and reading simply for enjoyment.
In 2024, literacy researcher Chase Young recalled asking a second grader whether a classroom reading activity had made him a better reader. The child responded, “No, because it’s fun.”
Already, that young student senses that fun and learning have been filed into separate categories at school. This highlights the real cost of letting effective instruction and engaging instruction drift apart, as though a teacher must choose between them.
This doesn’t mean abandoning structured reading instruction, which matters enormously for students who are learning to decode written language by connecting sounds and symbols. It means reading a book that a child actually chose, rereading an old favorite, and allotting time for a teacher to read aloud purely because it brings joy to the class.
This effort extends outside of a classroom. When children live in homes where they see books around, where their parents and siblings read together, and where their caregivers also read for fun, they are likely to see reading as enjoyable and not an item on a to-do list.
People who enjoyed reading as children are more likely to read books every day as an adult.
We each read to our children from when they were young and watched as they grew and developed their own love of books, ranging from the “Fantastic Four” comic series to the “Harry Potter” and “The Hunger Games” series.
Another one of us, Dee, has a daughter named Addie who remains an avid reader in her early 20s. She is currently reading the “Court of Thorns and Roses” fantasy series, among others.
And Andrew, the 2-year-old who once learned the word “viaduct” from a book, is still an avid reader. At 18, his shelves are now filled with manga and comic books, including a special section for “JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure.” His choice of genre and formats has evolved over the years, but his joy of getting lost in a story has not.
That’s the version of reading we’d like more kids to fall in love with – before school, however well meaning, might convince them that fun and learning have to live in different places.
This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit, independent news organization bringing you facts and trustworthy analysis to help you make sense of our complex world. It was written by: William Dee Nichols, University of Maine and Michelle Kearney, University of Maine
Read more: Children learn to read with books that are just right for them – but that might not be the best approach New reading textbooks, same problem: Why children’s reading scores in the US aren’t rising How do children learn to read? This literacy expert says ‘there are as many ways as there are students’
The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
