- Does your son read nothing independently (other than manga)?
- Does your son use most or all of his unstructured time for video games?
- Does he complain that he doesn’t connect with the books assigned by school?
- Do you struggle to find books that he enjoys, or struggle to get him to read at all?
There are a few fundamental reasons that boys don’t read. First, schools don’t teach the technical skills needed for reading, such as grammar, vocabulary, and logic. Thus, when boys do read, they read only texts with simplistic grammatical structures, such as manga.
Boys who have the verbal and analytical skills for reading run into a second problem. There just aren’t that many books written for boys today. Publishing is run almost entirely by women. Literary gatekeepers are also almost all women. For that matter, most English teachers are women. Thus, there is an endless supply of modern books for every personality type of girl, and nothing approaching that for boys. Even popular modern male authors, such as John Green, write books that are far more appealing to girls than to boys.
Boys can read books that were written decades ago, but at that time publishing was centrally controlled and there were far fewer books published per year than today. Many of those books are out of print, and none of them have modern references.
