Only 41% of kids under five get read to often. It was 64%.

There is a bedtime where you read the same book for the ninth night running and wonder whether it is doing anything. It is, and most kids are not getting it. HarperCollins and Farshore have tracked how families read since 2012, and their latest review says only 41% of children under five are read to frequently. In 2012 it was 64%.

The numbers, once

The drop runs through every age. Among five-to-sevens, 36% are read to regularly at home; among eight-to-tens it is 22%. The gap between boys and girls starts early: 29% of boys under two are read to every day against 44% of girls, and one in five of those boys is rarely or never read to at all. The study is British, run with NielsenIQ BookData, and the American surveys point the same direction, so treat the trend as the story and the decimals as approximate.

The reason parents give is the one you would guess. Fewer than half say reading to their child is fun for them, and the youngest parents are the most likely to call it a subject to learn rather than a thing to do. Which is fair at 7:40pm on a Tuesday, and also the whole problem.

The stat that matters

Children who are read to daily are almost three times as likely to choose to read on their own, compared with children read to weekly. That is Alison David at Farshore, and it is the line worth keeping. The point of the ninth reading of the same book is not the book. It is that reading becomes a thing that happens to your kid, on a couch, with you, and later they go looking for it without being told.

What to actually do

Ten minutes at bedtime, most nights, the same book if that is what they want. If you cannot face reading aloud on a given night, audio counts: a player and a story on the nightstand is not a screen and it keeps the habit alive. Put a small shelf where the kid can reach it, because a book they chose beats a book you chose. And read to the boys. The gap starts before they are two, and nobody planned it.

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