For many children, reading is an important ritual before falling asleep – but fewer and fewer parents reach for the book in the evening. As the new reading monitor study shows, there has been a significant decline in recent years.
Fewer and fewer parents read to their children. Like the new “reading monitor”, only 61 percent of fathers and mothers do this at least once a week. According to the reading study, almost 40 percent of children up to the age of eight are rarely or never read to. Compared to the previous study in 2019, reading aloud decreased. Three years ago, 68 percent of parents read regularly and only 32 percent rarely or never. The study was commissioned by “Zeit”, the Reading Foundation and the Deutsche Bahn Foundation.
According to the current study, 40 percent of children up to the age of eight in Germany are rarely or never read to. 20 percent of the parents surveyed stated that they never read to their children. Eleven percent do this less than once a week, and another eight percent of parents only read once a week. 61 percent of the children read to them regularly – 32 percent several times a week, 17 percent once a day, 12 percent several times a day.
Compared to the 20 percent of parents who now never read aloud, it was only eight percent in 2019. The end of reading aloud when they started school was particularly noticeable: a majority of 51 percent of eight-year-olds are no longer read to at all; in 2019 this was still a minority of 28 percent.
The study identified the lack of availability of books as one reason for seldom reading aloud. The more children’s books there are in the household, the more regularly parents read to their children. The managing director of the “Zeit” publishing group, Rainer Esser, explained: “Only an improved availability of books and digital reading materials can help that reading aloud and reading takes place in more families.”
The educational requirements of the parents also have an influence on how often children are read to. More than half of parents with lower school qualifications rarely or never read to their children. Across all classes, many parents would start reading aloud comparatively late, at or after their children’s second birthday. When they start school, most of them stop reading aloud.