How To Raise a Reader in an Age of Digital Distraction

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How To Raise a Reader in an Age of Digital Distraction

Jessica Ewing on the Ways Parents Can Promote Thoughtful Technology Use and Sustainable Reading Habits

By Jessica Ewing, September 15, 2025

People make certain assumptions about you when you’re the CEO of a children’s book company. Some assume I must have spent my childhood summers in a hammock reading Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, or winters taking turns reading Little Women by the fire with my sisters. The reality is far more complicated, quite a bit less wholesome, and probably more familiar to most parents reading this.

The truth is I spent a good chunk of my childhood rotating between three game consoles—a Sega Genesis, a Gameboy, and a multitude of PC games, some featuring nudity and/or violence. During the school year, I had the entire TGIF television lineup memorized (and still do). My idea of a middle grade novel was Carrie, which I conveniently “borrowed” from my brother’s vast Stephen King collection.

That isn’t to say I didn’t grow up with books and even age-appropriate ones—just that I don’t recall my parents being particularly concerned about screen time. There was no cultural panic about technology rotting my brain. We weren’t unusual in this regard. Screens were alive and well in my childhood, just as they are today.

The real challenge isn’t technology itself, but how technology has evolved to actively compete with the very cognitive processes that reading requires.

The difference wasn’t the presence of technology in our lives; it was the nature of our relationship with it.

When I fired up Kings Quest VI, I committed. I guided Alexander through the Land of Green Isles, memorized the magic map, and worked my ass off to solve the puzzles at the Cliffs of Logic. The game didn’t ping me with notifications every few minutes. It didn’t track my behavior to sell me anything. It didn’t fragment my attention into bite-sized dopamine hits designed by teams of psychologists to maximize engagement. It was, in its own way, long-form content that demanded sustained focus—not so different from the mental muscles required for reading.

This distinction matters more than we might think, especially for those of us trying to raise readers in 2025. It’s easy to blame screens wholesale for declining literacy rates, but I find that both reductive and unhelpful. The real challenge isn’t technology itself, but how technology has evolved to actively compete with the very cognitive processes that reading requires.

The Unnatural Act of Reading
Here’s something that might surprise you: reading isn’t natural. Unlike speaking, which humans develop organically, reading is an acquired skill that literally rewires the brain. Neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf, whose research has fundamentally shaped my understanding of how children develop as readers, describes reading as “an unnatural act” that requires us to connect disparate neural pathways in ways evolution never intended.

Wolf’s work reveals something remarkable about the reading brain. When we read, we’re essentially performing a complex neural symphony. Our brains must coordinate visual processing, language comprehension, memory systems, and abstract thinking—all in milliseconds. This isn’t something that happens automatically. It’s built through practice, repetition, and what Wolf calls “deep reading circuits.”

Children who become strong readers develop these circuits through thousands of hours of focused attention on text. Their brains learn to process written language with increasing fluency until the act becomes as natural as breathing. But here’s the crucial part: these circuits are fragile, especially in the early years. They require sustained, focused attention to develop properly.

This is where our modern digital landscape becomes genuinely problematic. Not because screens are inherently evil, but because many of today’s digital experiences are specifically designed to prevent such sustained attention.

When Screens Turned Predatory
The screens of my childhood were fundamentally different than what our children encounter today. When I played Where In The World Is Carmen Sandiego, the game wanted me to stay engaged, certainly, but it didn’t have access to sophisticated behavioral data about what kept me playing. It couldn’t A/B test different reward schedules or generate feedback loops from my friends with every action I took. Carmen didn’t appear suddenly with a sponsored post that preyed on my insecurities and tried to sell me teeth whitening gel.

Today’s digital experiences are built on what tech insiders call “persuasive design”—interfaces deliberately crafted to maximize time on screen through intermittent variable rewards, social validation loops, and carefully calibrated frustration. These aren’t accidents. They’re the result of millions of dollars in research into human psychology and memory, designed specifically to capture (and fragment) attention.

The average child now receives their first smartphone around age 10 and spends over seven hours a day on screens. But far more troubling than the raw hours is how this time is spent: in short bursts, rapidly switching between apps, constantly responding to notifications and alerts.

This creates what researchers call “continuous partial attention”—a state where we’re always monitoring multiple streams of information but never fully focused on any single task. It’s the cognitive equivalent of trying to build muscles by switching between machines every few seconds before we can get in a single quality set.

And yet, here’s what gives me hope in the data: not all children are struggling. While average reading scores have indeed declined, the top-performing readers are actually doing better than ever before. This suggests that the challenge isn’t insurmountable—some families and schools are successfully navigating this landscape. The question is: what are they doing differently?

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