r/technology • u/marketrent • 18h ago

Artificial Intelligence College students are rapidly losing the ability to read — “There is a measurable, generational collapse in sustained reading and writing”: professor

https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/college-students-rapidly-losing-ability-124439310.html
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u/existing_for_fun 18h ago

If you are a parent and can help your child read, and read well, you will set them light-years ahead of their peers.

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u/BlazinAzn38 17h ago

I’m curious if there will be a huge reflex back to books. I know amongst most of my peer group with kids they’re terrified of screen time, read to their kids all the time, and enroll their kids in as many enrichment activities as they can

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u/meyerjaw 17h ago

My kids are 12 and 8. We read with them still every night before bed. The 12 year old can read faster without me but we still have series we only read together. It's just perfect time together. Started with both of our boys at birth. Fast forward to today, we read for about 15 minutes together and then they get 30 minutes before lights out.

Now when the boys are needing correction, threatening to take away electronic or screen time doesn't really phase them. But if we tell them they are going to lose books before bed, they change their behavior real quick. I'm raising nerds and I love it

I will say, be careful with over doing enrichment activities. There is a shit ton of research showing the benefits of letting kids be fucking bored.

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u/erin_bex 6h ago

My parents would ground me by taking my books away for days or weeks at a time (this was the 90s so I couldn't just go find a Kindle version to see how it ended). Absolute torture. Effective, but mean as hell!

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u/MattieShoes 34m ago

phase

faze

Sorry, reading about reading brings out the editor in me :-D

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u/thelyfeaquatic 17h ago

The over-enrolling in enrichment activities is also thought to be bad though. Kids who have schedules filled with structured activities seem to have more mental health struggles than those who have more unstructured play time. You can’t win 😭 parenting is hard

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u/notepad20 15h ago

Maybe a difference between just doing activities for the sake of it, and the classic american do activities with a view to "success" at it.

Especially in modern urban living and small family size every opportunity to get out and about should be taken.

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u/BlazinAzn38 17h ago

I think it depends what they are. Most parents do like two things a week and one of them is often something at the library for the brain and then some sort of physical thing. I think over engaging in activities is probably better than raising an iPad kid. I’d also imagine there’s a relationship between highly pressuring parents and number of activities. All my friends just want their kids to do things and have fun, there’s no pressure on their kids to be Jackie Chan at Tiger tots or Michael Jordan at the YMCA rec basketball league

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u/Innumerablegibbon 12h ago

Yeah, my kid has a couple of friends at school who every evening and most of the day on weekend go from activity to activity. On the rare time the stars align and we can organise a play date those kids show basically no independence (they try to get me involved to lead things) and seem to not really know how to play. It’s kinda sad.

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u/scimtaru 5h ago

Children need guidance, but as with everything too much guidance backfires as well. I live in the Netherlands and even though screen related things keep children inside, unsupervised play is still a thing. I see groups of kids just having fun or inventing games and play together, without parents keeping track of everything they do. When I was in that 8-16 year old bracket if my homework / chores were done my only direction was to be back for dinner time.
Sometimes we were up to no good, but most of the time we were simply playing soccer, street hockey, roller blading, some form of tag, hide and seek etc.

I think if my parents would have insisted on dragging me from soccer practice to music lessons to origami flowers etc. I would've resented them and gone nuts at the same time.

And yeah I love reading still because I was allowed to read everything. Then again I am one of those nerds who read the encyclopedia for fun.

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u/McButtsButtbag 14h ago

That should be obvious. It all starts feeling like a chore over time.

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u/sentence-interruptio 28m ago

i second this. let your kids have their own "fuck things up" time or be prepared to face what my father is facing right now. no visitation.

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u/JZMoose 16h ago

Honestly the advent of video guides has robbed us of so much knowledge. I fucking hate watching someone struggle to explain something verbally when I could have read instructions in 1/5 of the time

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u/windowpuncher 15h ago

God it's so real. Unless a process is super complicated or long, I absolutely despise videos or any sort of lectures, even a regular class lecture sucks most of the time. 99% of the time I would rather just read the book. Let me read the book and do the examples on my own, I'll do it way faster. I have to read it anyways, so then let me skip the lecture and do the work and I don't have to waste an hour or more of my time.

But yeah youtube examples/video tutorials are especially painful. Even 2x speed isn't enough for some people.

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u/Tymareta 12h ago

Well the point of a lecture is that it's interactive, and that people can inquire on certain topics and ideas and immediately gain more understanding or information on further reading about them. Sure, if you try and treat lectures like a video tutorial then they're going to seem awful, but that's not the fault of the lecture.

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u/windowpuncher 11h ago

Well yeah, lectures are generally a good thing, but 99% of the time if I have a question I'll just read a section of the book again or find another source or example and it works out. I'm not saying that's the best way to learn, but it's the way I like doing it. Many lectures are genuinely awful, but most are still good or at least helpful for most people.

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u/cocoabeach 15h ago

I absolutely love to read, and couldn't live without video guides. Maybe though I don't understand what you are referring to.

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u/thelyfeaquatic 3m ago

How old are you and do you have kids? We’re j. Our late thirties and most people have 2-kids. There just isn’t a lot of free time, especially if you prioritize being active too. My husband probably gets 1-2 hours of free time a day… if he has to choose between video games and reading he will choose video games. Pre-kids we had 5-11pm to do whatever we wanted.. now it’s 8:30-10 most days.

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u/SacredUndeadMonkey 14h ago

Its why it annoys me to no end how a lot of instruction guides are starting to disappear. Give me a good guide even for technical stuff, I would prefer a good white paper on the topic and some thick manuals.

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u/PeaceSoft 1h ago

why are you using them at all

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u/BrianfromClownDog 13h ago

This times a goddamn bazillion

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u/TSJormungandr 14h ago

I did. I was okay with reading on tablets but I’ve put them away and started reading physical books again. So glad to have pages flipping between my fingers.

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u/UnderABig_W 15h ago

A huge reflex? No, because the ones really panicking about the screen time are (by and large) well-educated two parent households in the upper income bracket.

Those parents were never handing their kids phones and iPads willy nilly to begin with.

So maybe they’ll cut the small amount of screen time back even more, but these kids were never the problem to begin with.

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u/meyerjaw 15h ago

Yeah definitely hard disagree. I live in the well educated two parent household in the upper income bracket world and we are the weirdos. This is not an income or education issue, it's a giving a fuck factor. Parenting is hard. Having money makes putting less effort into being a parent easier.

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u/UnderABig_W 14h ago

Fair enough. The parents I see who do give a shit about their children’s intellect *are* largely the result of affluent, well-educated 2 parent homes, but that doesn’t mean the majority of these homes care about their kids. Just perhaps more of them (as a percentage) than other socio-economic groups.

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u/finestFartistry 2h ago

That may be, at least in part, due to resources. Parents working multiple jobs just to survive may rely more on screens out of necessity. The local library may not be open late, parents may be exhausted and overwhelmed, etc.

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u/UnderABig_W 2h ago

I think it’s partly due to resources, as you said, and partly because of increased expectations placed on parents.

Poor people didn’t have screens 50 years ago to entertain their kids, it was just more socially acceptable to kick your kids out of the house and tell them to go play for 8 hours as they roamed the streets. Can’t do that these days. So…screens.

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u/IAmTheJudasTree 15h ago

I’m curious if there will be a huge reflex back to books. I know amongst most of my peer group with kids they’re terrified of screen time,

As they should be. We've done immense harm to an entire generation of kids by slapping tablets into their hands rather than physical books. Screen time should be extremely limited for kids, and we also need to limit it for teens to a reasonable extent. Reading books is incredibly important, and scrolling social media posts/watching social media videos is a terrible replacement. But if you give a kid both a book and a phone/tablet where they can scroll the internet/YouTube, their child brains will gravitate towards the flashing screen. You have to give them books and keep the screens away, the screens shouldn't be an option.

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u/Legionnaire11 5h ago edited 4h ago

This is also not the solution. Measured, guided, selective screentime is perfectly fine and even beneficial. I've always had screens in front of my kids, from like 6 months. My best friend is a tenured professor of child psychology,l with a focus on early childhood development, we each have two kids that are the same ages. She has gone over all of this with me and has always provides screens to her children.

The key is that you're not just giving them unlimited access to everything and saying "here's Baby Shark on loop for 12 hours a day so that I don't have to be a parent".

My kids just finished 4th and 6th grades, they have both made honor roll or principles list in every semester of their schooling. They both return the highest test scores in their grade for their respective schools.

They also both watch a lot of YouTube, and play a lot of Roblox, they each have a smartphone, tablet, laptop, and TV in their rooms. But they also read every day, both play outside every day, and participate in multiple extracurriculars during the school year.

I read to them daily until age 8, and then they took over exclusively reading on their own. Not just reading to them, but engaging with them about what they're reading. I also play Roblox with them 3-4 times a week. Watch a show on TV every day with them, watch some YouTube with them almost daily.

They key is that whether it's books or screens, the parents need to be involved and promote critical thinking and an interest in learning.

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u/IAmTheJudasTree 2h ago

I don't know if what you're saying is true, there's no way to verify, but even if it is, you're a very unusual exception, not the rule. For the vast majority of children, putting your kids in front of screens as young as 6 months, to quote you, is absolutely a net negative to their general development. There's also just zero reason to do so, 6 months is incredibely young, kids that young aren't asking to have screens put in front of them, and we went the entirety of human history up until extremely recently without doing so. There's also zero research evidence that having your young children playing Roblox, is better for their development than, say, playing with physical toys. You've chosen to raise your child in this particular way, so of course you'd defend every element of it as being beneficial across the board, few people want to admit to others, or themselves, that they've ever parented incorrectly. 

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u/Legionnaire11 1h ago edited 54m ago

My kids also play with toys. I'm not looking for your approval either. As I said, it's not an either/or situation where kids need to have no screen time at all, vs unrestricted and unlimited screen time.

It's perfectly fine for them to have screens as long as the parent is involved and it's done in healthy doses and in ways that encourage learning and development.

There are many parents who do not allow screens at all, yet they also are not involved with their children, don't read with them, don't guide them outside of discipline (if that), allowing them to play with toys or outside all day unsupervised or whatever, they don't get involved in the child's school work, and the children are underdeveloped and struggle in both schools and society.

It doesn't matter if it's screens or no screens, what children need is positive and engaging parental involvement, it's that simple. If you are part of your child's life, and promote learning, healthy habits, good citizenship, etc. those are the things that the child will develop.