The leisure culture among today's youth, Padan explains, doesn't include literature. There's an age at which they stop reading. Within a few years, they all came back to reading. At the same time, the child is dealing with the challenges of reading in first and second grade, as the books become increasingly difficult. The child gets tired and gives up.
Smart parents go on reading to their children even after the age of six.
The overall proportion of children who read is between 30 and 40 percent, and this was always the case. Neither television nor the Internet has changed these figures. Nonetheless, only 10 percent of all children are independent readers. The others read less and less. Publishing houses in Israel have concentrated in recent years on books for preschoolers, which the parents read aloud to their children, until that crazy Englishwoman Joan K. Rowling showed up, and changed the whole game just like that.