Raising Readers in the Digital Age

I still remember my grade school years. Immigrating to North America and enrolled in English-as-Second-Language (ESL) classes in Canada, I felt accomplished to just keep up with reading assignments, not realizing that they were greatly simplified for non-native speakers. Eventually, between the Hardy Boys and Goosebumps, I hit my reading stride, working my way up to fantasy series the likes of The Belgariad and Wheel of Time.

Admittedly, there were fewer distractions back in the 80s and early 90s. Phones were hardwired to the walls; the internet was still a closed network for facilitating conversations between academics; on-demand video largely consisted of WWF pay-per-view events. Novels were a cheap and plentiful source of entertainment, and our parents had helped us develop robust library habits in our formative years. I’m glad that this civic institution has not only survived in subsequent decades but has actively evolved to serve its communities.

When attempting to pass along this love of literature to the next generation, modernity presents an updated challenge . Since kindergarten, the kids’ teachers have emphasized the need to read at home, while they dedicate curricular efforts in the classroom. Some kids take to it naturally, but others struggle: some parents are busy, kids have different rates of learning vocabulary and grammar, and it gets harder in each subsequent year to keep up with the expected reading levels when they start falling behind. By the 3rd and 4th grades, books have to compete with YouTube and TikTok and video games1. Attention spans do seem to be getting shorter, and one of the popular current remedies is to ban phones on school campuses entirely.

For our kids, I’ve tried to take the “yearn for the vast and endless sea” approach. Screentime limits are still enforced, with one glaring exception: they get to use their Kindle e-readers as much as they want2. For this use case, the underrated Kindle Kids product fits perfectly. The same advantages that drive my preferences for reading on e-ink displays apply—less eyestrain, long battery life, and no apps to distract from its primary job of facilitating reading. An Amazon Kids+ subscription provides an on-demand library of kids’ books, and the 2-year replacement warranty provides some peace of mind given the kids’ propensity for electronics destruction. For lengthy car rides and plane trips, it’s a good alternative to the iPad mainstay.

Of course, e-readers aren’t the educational panacea to reading. The Kindle Kids+ collection has plenty of comic books alongside literary classics, and when given the choice, the kids end up picking books well below their reading level for comfort and entertainment. The portability works as a double-edged sword as well; we’ve had to confiscate the tablets a few times in grocery stores and restaurants3. We still frequent the library for paperbacks and physical books, and I make it a point to select some of their reading material, albeit to uneven levels of enthusiasm.

Tellingly, I’m catching them making the same types of pronunciation mistakes that I made as a kid. I don’t know if there’s a name to this phonemenon, but it’s a bit of a running joke in the SharpTech podcast: the hosts will occasionally mispronounce uncommon words, but it’s largely due to having learned the verbiage through reading and writing, as opposed to hearing it via audio or video 4. A term like “nadir” shows up in articles and books once in a long while, but slipping it in casual conversation is firmly bibliophilic.

I’d like to think that these innocent mistakes mean they’re expanding their vocabulary via reading, and that it’s introducing them to more complex topics while strengthening their mental muscles to maintain attention and interest. It takes me a little while to decipher a spoken trey-bucket (trebuchet) or cone-che (conch), but these are orthographic lessons I’m happy to give.


  1. To be completely fair, the majority of adults fell prey to the same flashy, attention-grabbing entertainment; it’s not just the kids getting distracted.

  2. When they first got their Kindles, the sense of getting any electronic time was a win.

  3. Ironically, there have been other parents who’ve complimented the kids on trying to read in the store.

  4. In this, English is especially tricky with its multitude of borrowed words from other languages, which creates this laundry list of one-off pronunciation rules.

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