this post was submitted on 19 May 2025
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me_irl
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Hi, millennial here. Do you know why some millennials and a large portion of gen z suck at reading? Because their boomer/gen x parents didn't read to them as a child.
I grew up on my grandmother's lap, with her actively making reading fun and encouraging me to read along - I was reading, and comprehending, YA novels by grade 2.
My little brother though, who did not have a parent/grandparent to teach them to love reading, can't read worth shit. He was well into highschool before he even attempted a book like animorphs, and still didn't really comprehend the plot any better than grade 2 me.
So no, this is not a generational/phones bad problem, it's just another example of how boomers and gen x let their children down when it came to raising them with life skills, and then making fun of them for it.
I'm also a millennial. I had a lot of classmates and friends whose boomer parents actively discouraged reading. I mean the whole stereotype of the weak nerd that just reads books and is being bullied for it is pretty old. A lot of my friends even back in elementary school had a TV in their bedroom the second cable/satellite TV became a thing here. I had classmates whose parents discouraged them from going to university or reading advanced books because that is for nerds and only working with your hands is real work. Matilda was written in 1988 and while the parents in that book were a caricature, I knew parents who'd scoff if their child read a book or dared talk about going to university.
The millennial children of these parents grew up to consume internet click bait and are now not teaching their kids to read books. The internet and smartphones definitely accelerated the problem, but it started much earlier.
Gen X. My parent and grand parents didn’t do shit. It’s not generational. They weren’t bad , just not great. That’s pretty universal.
They didn’t read to me, and I’m an avid reader.
I read to my kids, but they all lost interest in it pretty quickly. Only one of them does it as an adult.
It’s all situational my dude.
Same experience here as a GenXer - I don't recall my parents ever reading to me - they might have when I was really young, but they were also raising my brothers (6 and 7 years older than me), so I doubt they had much time.
I was the avid reader in the family. When I got married, I stopped reading as much, but I still do some reading when I find a book that interests me. I have three or four sitting on my desk at the moment that I haven't started.
As a gen-Xer, this hurt to read. If I knew my classmates were going to grow up to be such dipshit parents, I would have slapped some sense into them. I mean, a lot of them were already pretty awful as teenagers... but, that wasn't a phase? Man, I am sincerely, deeply sorry.