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Decline Nine

This essay makes for sad reading. Decline by nine is how it is described - the age by which kids stop reading for fun. The minimum bar for adults engaged in a child's learning and development is to make sure they love reading and are not afraid of math. If they can accomplish just that much, chances are the kid will figure the rest out on their own and quite successfully. 

Math was long rendered devoid of fun thanks to how it is taught in early years of school, so way too many kids are afraid of it when they encounter high school math. Now we've managed take the joy out of reading for young children. With two strikes like that, it will start to take a miracle for a kid to do well as an adult, something that had once been the normal turn of events for most. The reason for decline by nine is more tragic than the problem itself:

..middle-graders’ lack of phones created a marketing problem in an era when no one at any publishing house has any idea how to make a book a bestseller other than to hope it blows up on TikTok. “BookTok is imperfect,” said Karen Jensen, a youth librarian and a blogger for School Library Journal, “but in teen publishing it’s generating huge bestsellers, bringing back things from the backlist. There’s not anything like that right now for the middle-grade age group.”

“It’s not like we want these kids to have phones, that’s not the solution,” one executive in children’s books told me ruefully. “But without phones, we’re really struggling to market to them.”

Traditionally, middle-grade book discovery happens via parents, librarians, and—most crucially—peers. At recess, your best friend tells you that you have got to read the Baby-Sitters Club, and boom, you’re hooked. That avenue for discovery evaporated during the pandemic, and it hasn’t come back.

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