First: I wanna clarify this. I know that loads of people read like 100 books a year, or read all the time. I know these people exist. I’m asking about people that are like… average. An average american who just… reads. Doesn’t track everything or sets goals of like 100, or never stops reading… Anyway, I’ve been searching this up, and i find answers like 15-50, even 100. I find this highly unlikely, especially for average US citizens. Half the people i know don’t even pick up 5 books a year, let alone 15! I just don’t believe these stats. I read somewhere that people read 8 a month on average? That can’t be right for an average person. That’s like 2 books a week… I know people do read this much, but still… For an average person? So be real… how many books do people actually read a year?
Average American? Rounds down to 0. Average American who reads sometimes? Probably 3-5
I read in a different sub that 2,000 people would be a representative sample size for the U.S. population (and YouTube’d the methodology). I bet if you could select 2,000 random adult American Citizens, from 18-80 (~natural lifespan), across socioeconomic and demographic groups, the mean “n books read for pleasure, start to finish in a rolling 12-month period” would round down to zero (so, 0.4444 or something similar). That would still imply ~889 books read in totality across that population.
Depends if you include children’s books or not. Even parents who don’t really read books for themselves often still read children’s books to their children.
In that case, are we also including the back of cereal boxes?
You would be surprised how many people don’t read to their kids. I had around 150 kids last year and about 5 said their parents read to them when younger on a survey. This was 6th grade.
I’m not surprised that 6th graders aren’t being read to. My parents read to us until we could read on our own, but even though they didn’t read to us I was a book addict. I had 3 bookcases full of books that I read myself.
This was asking about when they were younger though, not currently being read to.
Yeah but the survey was asking if their parents read to them when they were younger otherwise yeah my mom didn’t read to me much then she read to me some when i was younger but not much
Ah I missed that detail, but I wonder how many said no because they just don’t remember? I don’t remember much from when I was young enough not to be able to read. I can’t remember my parents reading aloud to me at all, but they told me they did and there’s pictures in family albums.
Right i was gonna say not cause from around 4 up i don’t remember my mom reading but i know i had her reading stellaluna over and over till her brain went to mush so she definitely did at some point
But you should still read to them. My 12 year old 7th grader has been reading since he was 4 or 5 and I had heard (from r/books) that what you do in that situation is choose a book that is a step beyond their current level. I’ve expanded that to books that are at his current level but outside of his range of interests, for example, poetry, as well as slower paced novels than what he might prefer.
My 12 year old seventh grader and I are currently reading All the Light We Cannot See. He wouldn’t touch it alone but is loving having it read to him.
Yeah, I wasn’t saying you SHOULDN’T read to kids once they can read by themselves, just that I am not surprised that many parents don’t. I also don’t think not being read to at that point will mean that kids won’t enjoy reading. I think that modeling reading (as in, if the parents read books themselves where the kids can see them) and having age appropriate books available in the home for them would help in making kids interested in reading too. My parents had many bookshelves around our house and I would just pick books off of them whenever I was bored, I read Lord of the Rings when I was in middle school because it was on my dad’s bookshelf for example. Just doing stuff like that will help advance their vocabulary a lot.
6th graders should still be read to believe it or not! Somewhere around third or fourth grade kids should read with their parents (every other page or chapter). Parents are able to hear their child’s fluency and clear up any confusing or dated references. Having a middle front seat may be bizarre to someone who sat in a car seat until 8, but was perfectly normal up until the early 90s.
A coworker said one of her fondest memories was reading the Harry Potter series with her daughter who did not like books. Her daughter fell in love with the series. They’d read together. By the time Half Blood Prince and Deadly Hallows were released her daughter was in college, but they talked about every chapter over the phone. Reading with your child also grants beautiful bonding moments.
This is one of my fondest memories too. I was in 5th grade when the books started coming out and I got the first Harry Potter book as a gift from my Aunt. Both my Aunt and my father read every single HP book along with me (not together or out loud, but at the same time as me) and we talked about them together. We would hypothesize what was going to happen in the next books. My dad and I went to midnight book releases with me as the rest of the series came out. When the movies started coming out we went and saw them all together too, some as midnight showings.
That’s so sad.
This makes me so sad. I can’t imagine not reading to my kiddo every night.
Oh man, if I included the books I read to my son in my yearly book count, I’d look like the most voracious reader on the planet. 🤓
Bro, what are you smoking and where can I get a lot of it?
Seconded. In this calendar year’s bedtime reading to our 7-yr-old, I finished The Order of the Phoenix, and read in complete The Half-Blood Prince, The Deathly Hallows, and Tress & the Emerald Sea.
I wouldn’t really count those as “my” reading on a survey, though. Even including graduate school work, I don’t think I’ll hit 10 books start-to-finish this year, and maybe only 4 that count as “for pleasure”, depending on how December goes.
This. I easily read 3-6 children’s books every day. But my own books for my own reading enjoyment, I read 1-2 every month.
Not just parents either. I usually read ~10-20 books each year to my nieces/nephews and I only see them a few times a year. They love story time.
Out of curiosity, what are you basing that on?
They were feelin it
Anecdata
Their sense of superiority from having an intelligent and rare hobby