What You Don’t Know About Teens and Reading

Challenges Still Ahead
Although technology, library involvement, and new programs are keeping reading alive for teens, there are certainly still challenges. Programs that appeal to teens can be popular, but they’re much more difficult to put together than those created for adults. Mulligan notes that it doesn’t work to just create a flyer for a club and hope that teens will come. “Recruiting takes effort,” she says. To that end, Mulligan visits classrooms at local high schools to talk about library programs and encourage kids to come to discussions.

Programs that falter are usually those that don’t have enough teen input, Lowry says. Sometimes librarians or teachers develop groups based on what they think teens should be reading, rather than what they actually like, and that professional filter can result in empty discussion tables. “Libraries need to let teens dream up and plan programs that fill their interests and needs,” Mulligan says.

There’s also the question of the apparent decline in teens who read literature. What impact could it have? “The key question is whether kids will still have the ability to enter a different literary world and engage in fantasy, so that they can learn to entertain alternative ways of thinking about their own lived worlds,” Beach says. “The capacity to suspend disbelief is so important.”

Teens tend to focus on the “immediate world,” Beach adds, in which they communicate in real time through instant messaging and read blogs that have been posted just hours before. Drawing them toward fantasy worlds through literature, in which they luxuriate in different realities, can be challenging.

“Reading online involves a different set of conventions—for example, the non-linear process of selecting buttons or links on a website as opposed to a left-to-right linear reading of print texts,” Beach says. “What we need to understand better is how to make connections between different kinds of text.”

Technology, useful for bringing kids into libraries and driving them to reading, can also be something of a barrier  to personal development, believes Anastasia Goodstein. She publishes Ypulse.com, a blog that tracks media trends among Generation Y. “With so many ways to stay connected to friends, the conversations never end,” she says. “A big part of being a teen is defining yourself through your peers, but before text messaging and e-mail you were forced to have some time alone and you’d have to define yourself in your own way, like writing in a journal or reading a book.”

Another major issue just beginning to be addressed is the gender gap in reading, with recent studies indicating that boys are much less likely to read for pleasure than girls. “Of course it makes sense that there’s a gap,” Ryan says. “We haven’t responded to boys on their own turf. You have women librarians and women teachers who like a certain kind of literature and can’t understand why everyone wouldn’t want to read Anne of Green Gables.”

Libraries in the Hennepin County system are looking at what boys like to read, and trying to involve them in choosing more paperbacks, graphic novels, and magazines. One success is the Guys Read book clubs for pre-teen and teenage boys based on a program founded by author Jon Scieszka.

Despite the challenges of steering teens to reading, some believe the fresh focus will have a major impact on how kids read, write, and communicate. “Libraries are now packed with teens,” Ryan says. “It’s great to see.”