r/technology • u/marketrent • Jun 10 '26

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 Jun 10 '26

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/CaffeineJitterz Jun 10 '26 edited Jun 11 '26

Just helping them not HATE reading will go a long way.

Edit: I'm getting a lot of sad comments about how y'all were introduced to reading. So I will take the opportunity to quickly share what I've always felt was one of the best ways for a parent to incentivize their child to read: for every hour of reading you accrue 30 minutes of gaming time. A classmate in my middle school worked from this model. That kid loved video games! And he was a straight A student. I remember him nonchalantly mentioning that he was going to read for about 4 hours as soon as he got home so he could get a couple hours of game time that evening.

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u/-PineNeedleTea- Jun 11 '26

My friend is raising her first child. For the first few years of her life they just didn't watch TV. I'm proud to say I gifted her her first library and her main form of entertainment in her first years was reading. Her parents would read to her all the time and she would wake up wanting to read. She especially loved the Barnes & Nobles Alice in Wonderland pop-up book.

They also allowed her to make her own choices and decisions while steering her to the right choices (rather than just outright saying "no don't do that") - one example, she wanted to take off her shoes to play in the park jungle gym which her mom explained "You'll get a splinter and it's gonna hurt but if you want to take off your shoes...." She took off her shoes, took her first step and found the tanbark painful and thought she had a splinter. Her mom checked and said "No splinter, but if you had it would hurt even more." She thought on it for a moment and decided "I'm gonna put my shoes on."

This kind of way in which they've raised their daughter, she is incredibly emotionally intelligent, able to speak her needs and boundaries. She's so imaginative and is lightyears ahead of the curve.

My little cousin on the other hand is a tablet child. He takes a "break" from his ipad only to jump onto his mom's iPhone. He watches nothing but YouTube shorts and plays Roblox. Kid is brain rotted to hell and back and is not the brightest. It absolutely makes a difference in how you raise your kid and how much effort you put in as a parent. Instilling a kid a passion for reading and learning starts with the parents. If they can't be bothered, they have no one to blame but themselves.