In a study from 2023 about reading rates, 33% of the participants said they had increased the amount of reading they were doing during COVID-19.
Quarantine led to more free time, which led to people trying new hobbies, including reading, with social media groups helping guide their book journey.
In many people’s experiences, they loved reading as a kid but stopped around middle school or their teenage years. The increased workload, of homework, jobs, and extra activities, led to them reading less and less over the years. But, the recent pandemic helped them rediscover their enjoyment of reading.
With everyone staying home during the beginning of COVID-19, it gave students lots of extra time to do whatever they wanted, which meant they could read.
Some students may agree that quarantine helped them read more, with The 9th grader, Matias Garmendia, having a general answer that many people would agree with.
“Yes, to be honest, as I was able to have more free time than I needed, so I started reading,” Garmendia said.
On a more personal level, he added, “My parents didn’t let me get social media, so I didn’t use it, but I used the internet to read a lot, especially in Spanish because I didn’t know a lot of English.”
While this free time could’ve been used just for reading, many people also used social media, like TikTok. This carved many different paths for teens to start to read more. The first route was “BookTok.”
According to an article in a high school newspaper, #BookTok was a trend on Tiktok with billions of videos. BookTok was a place where anyone, including celebrities, would give book recommendations. When people saw these, they started to join along and read and share their thoughts about some recommended books, also making their own recommendations to others.
According to an article in another high school newspaper, this made reading more of something fun, outside of homework required for school.
With all of this combined, people had lots of free time to be able to balance reading and their social media while being able to do it in the comfort of their own homes.
Students also started to realize the negative effects of social media, finding themselves scrolling for hours on end. When the students noticed this, they started to steer away from social media and discover new hobbies in their free time, which in a lot of cases was reading.
Now that COVID has mostly faded away, the amount of reading teens do has fallen greatly, due to people’s balance in reading and being online getting out of hand. According to an article from 2022 talking about why kids are reading less, “Students spend seven to 10 hours a day using online media.”
Kids’ attention spans have declined from all the media they are taking in, and now they do not want to read as much with their free time. The positive sides of social medias have faded away from teen’s media, with new “brainrot” overtaking things like BookTok that had previously helped guide the students to read more.
In conclusion, the amount students’ were reading went up from the extra time during the COVID-19 pandemic, but has made it’s way back down since then because of additions and changes in social media, and also student’s every day lives being busier.