Why “Book-Shaming” Won’t Solve the Children’s Literacy Crisis
Ample research shows that passive content consumption among kids and teens is adversely affecting attention spans, language attainment, and other factors that help make deep reading both sustainable and fun. It’s all the more alarming, then, that forty-six per cent of teen-agers reported being online “almost constantly” in a 2024 Pew survey. Meanwhile, phone-addicted adults aren’t necessarily modelling reading habits for the young people in their lives. A 2025 analysis of the American Time Use Survey found that the proportion of people “who read for pleasure on an average day” fell from twenty-eight per cent in 2004 to sixteen per cent in 2023. And a 2022 Scholastic report found that only thirty-seven per cent of parents read aloud to infants before they turned three months old, a six-point drop in just four years.
Federal and state governments, too, appear to be inimical to children’s literacy. DOGE cuts to Americorps, the national-service program, have hampered tutoring and literacy programs in multiple states. Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library program, which mails free books to children from birth to age five, has also lost funding in several states, most recently Missouri, where the state’s education department announced that it will stop new enrollments of children in the program on July 1st.
In the midst of a reading emergency, librarians are the E.M.T.s. “We need to be talking to children about what they want to read, what makes them feel connected to literature, and how we can go about supporting their connections with literature,” Arlene Laverde, an elementary-school librarian in Manhattan and a past president of the New York Library Association, told me. School librarians are uniquely well-positioned to provide that support, she added, because of the ongoing nature of their relationships with students. Research shows that schools with librarians tend to outperform schools without them on standardized tests, and even that schools with full-time librarians get better scores than schools with part-time library staff.
Yet, according to the education magazine Phi Delta Kappan, the number of full-time school librarians in the U.S. dropped by about twenty-five per cent between 2010 and 2023. By the following year, thirty-seven per cent of school districts reported not having a librarian at all; previous research has shown that the proportion is even higher in the smallest districts, which tend to be rural. These trends predate the “grooming” hysteria of the Joe Biden era, when calls for book bans surged and school librarians were routinely harassed over false claims that they were foisting inappropriate material on students. Since then, President Donald Trump has signed executive orders to dismantle both the U.S. Department of Education and the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the federal agencies that provide major funding to school and public libraries, respectively.
It’s impossible to quantify all that is lost when schools lose librarians. But one place where their guidance and expertise can be pivotal relates to the phenomenon often called the “fourth-grade slump” or “decline by nine,” which refers to the steep drop-off in both reading interest and reading frequency that many children, especially boys, exhibit around age nine. Avoiding this cliff is more likely with the help of a librarian who understands her students’ likes and dislikes, who respects their autonomy and individuality, and who can use this knowledge to guide kids toward the texts they will love, regardless of whether or not they meet a subjective threshold of literary excellence.
“In my experience, many young boys don’t want to read narrative fiction unless it’s gruesome,” Laverde told me. These kids may need her help in seeking out informational texts, she said, perhaps in the form of a reference book or a technical manual; what they specifically don’t need is anyone saying that such books are flat or bad or unbeautiful. “As adults, we might say, ‘That’s not real reading,’ but it absolutely is,” Laverde said.
Among the fiction titles that do connect with kids in this age bracket, some of the biggest commercial hits are essentially entry-level graphic novels, such as Kinney’s “Diary of a Wimpy Kid,” Dav Pilkey’s “Captain Underpants” and “Dog Man,” Lincoln Peirce’s “Big Nate,” and Aaron Blabey’s “The Bad Guys.” These are “light, funny stories-with-pictures that can help uncertain readers make the leap from picture books to big-kid books,” Dan Kois wrote in a 2024 piece for Slate. (Some of these entries appear to prove Laverde’s “unless it’s gruesome” hypothesis; the titular Dog Man, for one, is sewn together from the remains of a cop and a canine who were grievously injured in a bomb explosion.) Books in this mold are nobody’s idea of high art—nor, for that matter, is Barnett and Harris’s similarly situated “First Cat in Space” series. The median parent (me) of a “Big Nate” and “Dog Man”–loving nine-year-old (mine) may wish that their kid was more inclined to the classic likes of “Charlotte’s Web,” “Where the Red Fern Grows,” or “Harriet the Spy.” But librarians and educators stress that what’s more important than matters of taste is keeping kids conditioned to reading at a crucial developmental moment.
