Five Nights at Freddy’s 2, Screens, and the Fear That Kids Don’t Read
I watched Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 with my oldest son today, mostly because he was not quite ready to watch it alone. Sitting in the cinema, half following the film and half watching his reactions, my mind drifted towards several broader trends I have been noticing.
To keep this post from turning into a book of its own, I will focus on one of them: children and reading.
Growing Up with Books and Screens
We put considerable emphasis on encouraging our children to read. Luxembourgish schools expose them to several languages, so we do not restrict reading to one. At home, English has become the main family language, although neither my wife nor I is a native speaker. Unsurprisingly, it has also become the language in which most of their voluntary reading happens.
When I was young, it was difficult to pry a book out of my hands. My wife remembers much the same. There were long stretches when I spent entire afternoons and evenings reading fantasy, science fiction, history or whatever else I could find. Two or three hundred pages in a day did not feel unusual, particularly at weekends.
It is tempting to compare that childhood directly with the one our children are experiencing. The competition for attention certainly looks different. Streaming services, games, phones and tablets offer an almost continuous supply of immediate stimulation.
I had access to computers relatively early, and later spent plenty of time playing Diablo, Civilization II and anything else my ageing PC could manage. Gaming competed with reading, but it never replaced it.
Still, memory is a selective archive. I remember the afternoons spent reading because they became part of the story I tell about myself. I remember less clearly all the time I wasted, the books I abandoned or the periods when some other interest temporarily took over. Comparing our children’s ordinary days with the defining memories of our own childhood is not entirely fair.
Reading Aloud Is Not the Same as Reading Alone
My own love of books was shaped directly by my mother reading to my brother and me almost every day. That experience eventually made me impatient to read independently, something I explored more fully when writing about how childhood reading shaped my later interests.
I now spend a great deal of time reading aloud to the younger children. My youngest regularly begs for “just one more chapter,” although I strongly suspect that literary enthusiasm and bedtime avoidance are working together.
What has surprised me is that enjoying stories read aloud does not automatically create a desire to read alone. The two activities demand different things. Listening is social and shared. Independent reading requires confidence, concentration and enough fluency that decoding the words does not overwhelm the pleasure of the story.
Environment clearly matters, but it is not a machine into which parents insert books and receive readers. My brother grew up with the same mother, the same shelves and many of the same bedtime stories, yet never developed the same appetite for reading.
The encouraging development is that my oldest son appears to have found his own rhythm. Without prompting, he began working his way through Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn books—hardly the lightest place to begin. The interest arrived later than I expected, but when it arrived, it belonged to him rather than to us.
The Fake Socrates Quotation
Discussions about children and changing habits often summon a familiar quotation accusing the young of “luxury, bad manners, contempt for authority.” It is usually attributed to Socrates.
Socrates did not say it. The modern wording grew out of a passage written by Kenneth John Freeman in 1907. Freeman was summarising complaints about young people found in ancient Greek sources, not quoting an ancient philosopher directly.
The correction matters, but it does not entirely destroy the point for which the quotation is normally used. Adults in ancient societies did complain about younger generations. Parents and teachers have apparently been worrying about declining manners, attention and discipline for a very long time.
What that history does not prove is that every modern concern is imaginary. The fact that previous generations worried unnecessarily does not mean screens cannot alter habits, attention or the amount of time available for sustained reading. A complaint can be old and still respond to a new environment.
The more useful lesson is that parents are poor neutral observers. We watch our children grow in real time, while remembering our own childhood as a compressed collection of significant moments. We compare their unfinished development with the completed story we have constructed about ourselves.
Letting the Interest Arrive
If Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 accomplished anything beyond entertaining my son, it gave me an excuse to reconsider what I mean when I worry that children do not read enough.
Reading aloud has value even when it does not immediately produce an independent reader. It builds familiarity with stories, language and the idea that books are part of ordinary family life. The result may appear quickly, slowly or not in the form a parent expected.
Seeing my son voluntarily pick up a substantial fantasy novel was a useful reminder that interests do not always develop on schedule. Our task may be less to reproduce our own childhood reading habits than to keep books available long enough for curiosity to find the right one.
Perhaps the real trend is not simply that children have changed. Perhaps it is that every generation of parents eventually begins worrying that the next one has lost something—and then goes searching for an ancient philosopher to agree with them.
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