Are children reading less?

Children’s literature is partly championed in the UK by the children’s laureate, recently announced for 2024-2026 as Frank Cottrell-Boyce. This is a role awarded on merit, and the laureate’s task is to improve opportunities for reading for all children in the UK – as the NLT survey shows, this is a desperate priority for 2024. Each laureate takes on a specific area of children’s literacy, including poetry, reading out loud and promoting libraries. According to the BBC, Cottrell-Boyce will specifically focus on “starting a much needed national conversation about the role books and reading can play in transforming children’s lives”. Previous laureates include many of the children’s literature titans: Michael Morpurgo, Michael Rosen, Jacqueline Wilson, Julia Donaldson, Malorie Blackman.

I spoke to Lauren Child, children’s laureate 2017-2019, about the responsibilities of the role. She said: “I really wanted to get us all to think about childhood and the purpose of it – and the idea that childhood stays within us because it becomes part of the bones of us and who we are. All of our early years experiences are very powerful.” She used the position to nurture children’s creativity and to encourage “dream time and allowing ourselves space to think” in order to practice writing. Regarding the decrease in children’s enjoyment of reading, Child said, sadly, that she thought it was somewhat “inevitable” and she connected the NLT’s findings to a broader reliance on screens (not just among young people). She said “this lack of focus that so many of us are experiencing now – that really worries me”. In terms of reading, she warned that “we’re all losing something that’s incredibly nourishing”.

Child’s latest novel, Smile, deals with anxieties about climate change. In June 2024, the charity Action for Conservation found that almost two thirds of children between 11 and 16 suffer with eco-anxiety. In Smile, Child’s beloved character Clarice Bean is fighting to save the trees on her street from being uprooted, which would make the pavement seem tidier and less bumpy. The entire novel takes place within Clarice’s community, but the at-risk trees stand in for more existential anxieties faced by children who cannot feel optimistic for the future of their planet. Smile is about finding solutions, no matter how small, even when everything feels impossible. Child considers it her role as a children’s writer to strive for a balance about telling the truth to children, because they have “natural antennae” to pick up on what’s really going on, but also not to leave space for feelings of despair. When I asked what it means to her to write for children rather than adults, she described it as “having a responsibility to give hope”.

Child told me that the story was born out of her own anxieties about the state of the climate. She explained, “The only thing I could write was Smile because I was feeling kind of desperate and I transferred that worry to Clarice because I couldn’t solve it … It was really interesting looking at something through a character’s eyes and thinking ‘what would she make of this?’” Twenty-five years on from the first Clarice Bean story, Smile’s themes tie in with the developments in children’s characters to have broad and realistic ranges of experience: children’s literature seems to reflect children’s lives more than ever.

Read my review of Smile in this week's TLS: