Reading for Fun Builds Empathy, but Fewer Kids Do It

Reading allows children to enter a vibrant world filled with fairies, elves, and talking animals. It transports them to places where the impossible becomes real. Beyond this imaginative escape, reading for pleasure helps children learn more effectively. It broadens how they view, interpret, and interact with the world. This habit provides a form of expression that fuels their imagination. It also builds empathy for themselves and others.

However, the percentage of children who read for fun is declining. According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, only 37 percent of 9-year-olds and 14 percent of 13-year-olds read for fun almost every day in 2025. By middle school, just one in seven kids say they read for pleasure each day. The U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics has also tracked these declines. In 2023, 14 percent of 13-year-olds read for fun each day. This is a significant drop from 27 percent in 2012.

Slightly younger children tend to read for pleasure more often. Approximately 39 percent of 9-year-olds said they read for fun in 2022. This is down from 53 percent in 2012. This trend appears alongside another concern: stagnant reading scores, especially among teenagers. It is tempting to treat these as separate problems. However, literacy scholars argue that they are deeply connected.

Outside of schoolwork, a child can read anywhere from 100,000 words to 10 million words or more per year. This depends heavily on their dedication. This vast gap helps explain why some children’s vocabularies grow much faster than others. Kids absorb words from context, over and over, across thousands of pages.

One of the authors has a son named Andrew. At the age of two, he absorbed and correctly used the word “viaduct” without anyone defining it for him. He encountered the word in a book about trains. Older children and teenagers who describe themselves as committed readers often have families that read to them from a young age. These families kept books around as their interests changed. They made reading together a genuine priority.

A well-selected book can enhance a child’s reading pleasure and ability. It allows them to see and feel the world with fresh insight. Research shows a connection between teenagers who read for pleasure as young children. They tend to score higher on cognitive tests that measure verbal learning, memory, and speech development. Reading for pleasure also helps build vocabulary and reading fluency while enhancing focus.

There are other benefits to reading that will not show up on a reading assessment. We believe that reading is empathy operating in its simplest form. It involves imagining your way into someone else’s experience. It also involves understanding the ripple effects of their actions. Reading for pleasure, especially the kind that starts on a parent’s or caregiver’s lap, is one of the earliest and most reliable places kids get repeated practice in this complex work.

Reading with a caregiver often progresses into children reading on their own. They might read with a flashlight in bed. They might read in the middle of the day on the couch. When children become immersed in a book series on their own, it can help them develop connections with characters they grow to know, love, or scorn. They inhabit a character who is not them. They sit with an idea long enough to understand why someone acts the way they do.

Feeling emotionally invested in a character’s decisions can also influence how young readers engage with others. It encourages them to treat people with civility and kindness in real life. This skill does not arrive automatically with age. It is built through practice. Recreational reading in childhood serves as the main training ground for it.

Within the past 10 years, many schools have invested in evidence-based reading instruction. They have placed a renewed emphasis on phonics instruction to improve students’ reading proficiency. This shift has been an important and necessary step. It helps students develop the foundational skills they need to become successful readers. At the same time, some classrooms have had fewer opportunities for independent reading and reading simply for enjoyment.

In 2024, literacy researcher Chase Young recalled asking a second grader whether a classroom reading activity had made him a better reader. The child responded, “No, because it’s fun.” Already, that young student sensed that fun and learning have been filed into separate categories at school. This highlights the real cost of letting effective instruction and engaging instruction drift apart. It suggests a false choice between good teaching and enjoyable reading.

This does not mean abandoning structured reading instruction. This matters enormously for students who are learning to decode written language by connecting sounds and symbols. It means reading a book that a child actually chose. It means rereading an old favorite. It means allotting time for a teacher to read aloud purely because it brings joy to the class.

This effort extends outside the classroom. When children live in homes where they see books around, where their parents and siblings read together, and where their caregivers also read for fun, they are likely to see reading as enjoyable. They will not see it as just a task on a to-do list. People who enjoyed reading as children are more likely to read books every day as adults.

The authors read to their children from when they were young. They watched them develop their own love of books. Their interests ranged from the “Fantastic Four” comic series to the “Harry Potter” and “The Hunger Games” series. Another author, Dee, has a daughter named Addie. She remains an avid reader in her early 20s. She is currently reading the “Court of Thorns and Roses” fantasy series.

Andrew, the child who learned the word “viaduct” at age two, is still an avid reader. At 18, his shelves are filled with manga and comic books. He has a special section for “JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure.” His choice of genre and formats has evolved. However, his joy of getting lost in a story has not.

That is the version of reading we would like more kids to fall in love with. This love must be cultivated before school, however well-meaning, might convince them that fun and learning have to live in different places.