Why Teenagers Are Less Literate, According to the OECD – And What Parents Can Do About It
At the kitchen table, my son was doing homework. For once, he wasn’t on his phone. But he kept staring at the same paragraph, chewing the inside of his cheek. The essay was a short excerpt from a longer text about climate policy. His teacher had printed it out and attached three questions.
“This is so dense,” he said. “Can’t I just read a summary?”
“Sure,” I said. “What does the author think?”
He scrolled through his phone for a few seconds. “I don’t know. There wasn’t one.”
That moment stuck with me. It wasn’t that he couldn’t understand the words. He routinely read long, complicated things about soccer, video game design, and YouTube drama. What he couldn’t do was hold onto an argument when it wasn’t served to him in short pieces with pictures.
A week later, I sat in a parent-teacher conference and heard the same thing from his English teacher. She’s been teaching tenth grade for fifteen years. “They can decode,” she said. “They can define irony and metaphor. But if I ask them to read three pages of a memoir and explain how one memory changes the narrator’s view, a lot of them freeze. They’ve never had to do that.”
She told me about an assignment where students read a short opinion column and “talk back” in writing. “Some write one sentence: ‘This is dumb.’ I ask why. They say they don’t know, they just thought it was dumb. They haven’t learned to sit with a text long enough to get annoyed by it in a useful way.”
That phrase — “sit with a text” — stayed with me. The OECD’s 2022 PISA results, released in late 2023, showed reading scores among 15-year-olds dropping more than at any point since the tests began. About a quarter of students in OECD countries scored below the basic proficiency level. That doesn’t mean they can’t read a grocery list or a text message. It means many can’t read a dense paragraph and answer a question about the author’s main point. Or tell the difference between a claim and a reason.
The report didn’t blame any single thing. But if you watch a teenager try to read a printed article, you can see what’s happening. They start. They get three sentences in. Then their hand twitches toward a phone, or their eyes scan the page for something bolded. They’ve been trained by years of short videos, notifications, and infinite scrolling to expect the main point to arrive quickly. When it doesn’t, they assume they’re bad at reading. Usually they’re not. They’re just unpracticed at waiting.
I started to pay attention to my son’s actual habits. He could spend an hour watching a YouTube essay about why a certain game failed. That’s a kind of literacy. He could absorb a long transcript of a podcast and remember details. What he struggled with was reading something that didn’t have a voice attached, a visual, or a clear payoff every few seconds.
His English teacher suggested something simple: “Give him shorter things to finish, not longer things to start.” So I tried that.
One evening, I printed out a short article about how loot boxes are designed to be addictive. It was about a topic he actually cared about. I put it on his desk and said nothing. No instructions, no questions. Just “thought you might find this weird.” He read it in four minutes. Then he said, “That’s messed up.” We ended up talking about whether a game can be considered a trap and who is responsible when kids spend money. That conversation was analysis. He didn’t know he was doing it.
That’s the trick, I think: not to force books, but to create moments where reading and thinking happen together. It doesn’t have to be long. In fact, shorter is better at first. A one-page op-ed. A review of a movie he’s seen. A Reddit post about a topic he cares about, if you can find one that requires reading. The goal is just to get them to finish something and then react to it.
When he does homework now, we put his phone in the kitchen. Not in his backpack, not in his room. In the kitchen. That small distance makes a difference. The impulse to check is still there, but it isn’t automatic. He can finish a paragraph or two before the urge hits. Once he gets into something, he sometimes forgets to look for his phone.
I also stopped asking “Did you finish?” and started asking “What did you think?” That seems obvious, but I had been doing the first for years. Finishing is a compliance skill. Thinking is a literacy skill. If he tells me an article was boring, I ask him to read one paragraph and explain what makes it boring. That’s a judgment, and judgments require holding ideas in your head long enough to compare them.
There’s a temptation to panic and make a rule: no screens until every classic is read. That would fail in our house, and probably in yours. The more useful thing is to look for the places where attention already exists and build from there. If a kid can follow a complicated storyline over twenty episodes of a show, they can follow an argument. They just need an easier on-ramp than a five-page essay from 1984.
I don’t know if the OECD numbers will turn around. Maybe my son will never read a novel for pleasure. But last week, he sent me a link from a gaming news site — a long investigative piece, not a listicle. He said, “You’ve got to read this part.” It was a little thing. But he wanted me to stay with a text he cared about. That’s not nothing.
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