It’s been a tough year for our brains. Merriam-Webster dictionary editors chose “slop” as 2025’s word of the year. New York Magazine recently dropped its “Stupid Issue”, with a cover story exploring America’s collective “cognitive decline”. There are big problems in the humanities: reading test scores are down for students nationwide, and undergraduates cannot read full books any more.
Even storytime – a comfy couch, a cardboard book, a kid’s rapt attention as their parent reads them a story – is an endangered activity. According to an April report from HarperCollins UK, parents have lost the love of reading to their children, with fewer than half of gen Z parents calling the activity “fun for me”. According to the survey of 1,596 parents of children aged zero to 13, almost one in three found reading “more a subject to learn” than an experience to enjoy. Only a third of kids aged five to 10 frequently read for fun, compared with over half in 2012.
“It is boring,” one Reddit user wrote on r/books. “The books that my kid likes suck. But, like, that’s your job as a parent.”
Educators, parents and those who cherish getting lost in a good book are, understandably, worried. And while it is hard to compete with Ms Rachel or Bluey, there are ways to liven up old fashioned storytime. Ahead, parents share the unorthodox tactics they say get their young kids interested in reading.
Enlist ChatGPT
When Bri Ramos went to parent night at her kids’ elementary school in Oklahoma City, a first-grade teacher said something that stuck with her: “I can tell if you read to your child every night, or if you do not,” the teacher told her. “There is such a drastic difference in a developing child’s brain, and it’s just based on that 10 to 20 minutes of reading every night.”
After using ChatGPT to help find recipes to tempt her picky eaters, Ramos, who is 37 and works in marketing, turned her sights on its “talk” feature to help her read to them. Some nights before bed, instead of opening a copy of Mother Goose, Ramos asks ChatGPT to tell a bedtime story about a little girl who is a princess – or maybe a dragon fighter – on an adventure. Ramos named the character Camilla, after her six-year-old daughter, and told the chatbot to speak in a British accent, because that’s just fun. “It’s usually two to three minutes, and then we have it ask reading comprehension questions about the story afterwards,” Ramos said.
Since the stories are about Camilla, she tends to get “giggly and excited, and really listens”, as opposed to when she’s learning to reading during storytime and is so focused on getting the words right that she doesn’t fully grasp the larger plot. “When we’re reading from a book, it’s more technical,” Ramos said. “When we’re reading…
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