Last week my oldest son turned eleven. He got a few books for his birthday. After some urging from me, he started reading the first book carefully. The other books are still untouched in a pile in his room. I think back to the time when I was eleven. Every week I would get large piles of books from the library, some of which I would read in one afternoon. My son prefers to sit in front of the TV, computer or iPhone. Reading a book? He hardly ever does that. How bad is that?
It's not that he can't read, he can actually do it very well. Thanks to a summer of reading Donald Duck, his AVI level shot up. At first only the short words and exclamations, then the short speech bubbles. But to really understand portugal phone number list the story, he also struggled through the longer texts. The next challenge was the subtitles on TV, which kept disappearing from the screen just a little too quickly. Thanks to Donald Duck and television, he is a fluent reader. But books? They don't really interest him.
Political questions
I see big differences with my own youth, but they are not all negative. My son may not read books, but before he gets out of bed in the morning, he has already read NU.nl and teletext on my discarded iPhone. While brushing his teeth, he can ask me what I think about the situation in Japan. “And how are things in Egypt, mom, I don't read anything about that anymore!”