Reading for Fun and How to Bring it Back by Sabrina Moyle

As a mom of middle grade and teen boys and author of over 25 children’s books and graphic novels, I have long been immersed in getting kids to read.  According to recent reports, reading for fun among kids and teens plunged to just 13% in 2023. Given that smart phone ownership jumped to 43%  of 8-12 year-olds and 88 – 95% of teens by 2022, it’s no surprise that in the competition for kids’ attention, books are getting clobbered by digital, social and streaming media.

This is obviously concerning. Reading for fun is correlated with academic success, the ability to focus, long-term memory, communication skills, vocabulary, and knowledge acquisition – not to mention the sheer joy of getting lost in a good book.  Most importantly, though, it’s essential to kids’ creativity – and their humanity. People are wired for stories. In a world where everyone is a content creator, you need to know how to tell good ones. In order to tell good stories, you need to read. How do you create great movies, TV shows, and video games? By having a vision, using your imagination, and communicating in clear, vivid, descriptive language!

Unlike other media, reading is the only medium that invites you into a deep, creative inner experience: seeing a world, feeling and smelling and sensing the environment, embodying the characters, reflecting on meaning, and drawing your own conclusions. Every word is a portal to the imagination.

So how do I, as a mom and children’s book creator, get kids to read? It’s easier than it looks!

First, my sister and co-creator, illustrator Eunice Moyle, and I always assume that parents and kids are reading our books together. Research shows that reading with your children in the early years stimulates language and cognitive development, but the benefits continue into later childhood. Bedtime is the natural wind-down, bonding, and reading time. I still read chapter books to my middle grade son at bedtime, just as our dad read classics like Lord of the Rings to my sister and I in middle school, arming us with sketchbooks to illustrate as he read. That same son recently had his first book acquired by the San Mateo Public Library and started a Substack about Patrick Rothfuss’s Kingkiller Chronicles, and my sister and I are now an author-illustrator team. Coincidence? I think not. If bed time reading is not an option, parents can also body double and read together, but separately, as a family.

This means that the books Eunice and I create need to entertain both kids AND parents. For our main kid readers, we pack our books with playful energy, hilariously flawed kid characters, juicy stories, funny jokes and puns, eye-candy visuals, evil villains you love to hate, and lots of heart.

For adults, we insert witty repartee, sly jokes, social satire, and nuggets of wisdom. As an example, in The Cosmic of Adventures of Astrid and Stella, our graphic novel series for early readers, Bobo, Astrid and Stella’s robot sidekick, plays a quasi-parental role, meditating, reading self-help books like “We Come in Peace: A Robot’s Journey” and chiming in with zingers like “Did someone call Whine-One-One?” (while wearing a siren on his head). Incensed by toxic poop-throwing in online games, Astrid and Stella also do battle with an adorable villain called Evil Screenius, inspired by certain tech moguls.

Our second strategy for engaging readers is technicolor, high-octane visual storytelling. Graphic novels are the perfect bridge from picture books and digital media to chapter books. The reader still has to use their imagination to draw inferences between the visuals and the text, hear the characters’ dialogue, and decipher words. As my teen describes it, graphic novels are like “watching TV without the sound and with the subtitles on.” I write every Astrid and Stella book like a screenplay.

Finally, we do not stray from complex ideas and big topics like AI, social media, toxic positivity, boundaries, fame and shame, and online gaming. Kids today are sophisticated. Case in point (not bragging): my 14-year-old learned how to make gourmet burgers with bacon-onion jam from watching YouTube videos, and his twin recently advised me that his three keys to a healthy relationship are “communication, boundaries, and showing affection.” Um, 14 going on . . .40?!  

From our board books to Astrid and Stella, we also focus on the fact that kids and parents alike care about personal improvement.  Whether reading self-help or tracking a character’s struggles to change, books are tools for personal transformation. My teens’ most recent read was Atomic Habits because, as many a TikTok influencer has figured out – many of whom are teens – they want to get better at life!  Astrid and Stella’s adventures include learning about SEL skills like teamwork, personal space, boundaries, feedback, social comparison, and personal responsibility (i.e. steering clear of the “Not My Problem Zone,” which Bobo defines as “a dark corner of the universe where EVERYTHING falls into a shambles of upside-down-backward-topsy-turvy-opposite-day CHAOS!”).

Finally, we try to make books that inspire kids to get creative. Not only does Bobo have a knack for inventing a hilarious gadget for just about every need, but in the latest book, Comet Together!, Astrid and Stella get creative, too, coming up with their own “comet books.” All hell breaks loose as they navigate the messy process of creative collaboration (aka being non-judgy and giving diplomatic feedback), channel creative ideas, and reveal the glorious output of their genius.

In sum, to combat the decline in reading, we need to make reading seriously fun, read alongside our kids, and engage kids as creators – of ideas, content, and their own lives (Dave Eggers is onto something with his recent opening of a library of books written entirely by children). We need sophisticated, exciting graphic novels to bridge the gap between picture books and chapter books. And we need glorious, beautifully written chapter books with stories that take kids’ breath away and cause them to be hooked for life. And let’s remember our core motivation – to help kids harness the power of their imaginations so that THEY can be the brilliant storytellers of the future!

Meet the Authors

Sabrina Moyle, along with her sister Eunice, is the founder of Hello!Lucky, an award-

winning design studio working with dozens of partners to create products, including the

bestselling children’s books My Mom Is Magical!, My Dad Is Amazing!, Super Pooper

and Whizz Kid, and Kindness Rules! Hello!Lucky is based in San Francisco. For more

info, visit hellolucky.com.

Filed under: Graphic Novels