Reading Aloud Statistics How Often Parents Read to Kids — and the Age Most Families Stop

📉 The Reading-Aloud Cliff, Age by Age

Near-daily story time is the norm for babies and preschoolers — and the exception by the tween years.

Start with the good years. Among babies, toddlers and preschoolers (ages 0–5), 51% are read aloud to at home five to seven days a week — at that age, reading aloud is simply part of the daily routine, like baths and bedtime. By ages 6–8, that share is down to 37%. By ages 9–11, it is 16% — about one in six kids. These are the headline figures from Scholastic's Kids & Family Reading Report, 8th Edition (2023).

The biggest single step down comes between ages 6–8 and 9–11, when the share of kids read to most days falls by more than half. And the staircase is not new: Scholastic's 5th Edition (2015) measured almost the same shape — 54% of ages 0–5, 34% of ages 6–8, 17% of ages 9–11. Two surveys, eight years apart, same cliff. This is a durable pattern of family life, not a one-year blip.

The fade now starts earlier, too. Parents who began reading aloud before their baby was three months old fell from 43% in 2018 to 37% in 2022 (8th Edition, 2023). Kids' own reading slides in parallel: in the same 2023 report, the share of kids who read books for fun five to seven days a week drops from 46% at ages 6–8 to 15% at ages 15–17.

Here is the twist: families are not dropping story time because they think it stopped mattering. In the 2023 report, 92% of parents and 86% of kids agreed that reading aloud is a special time in their relationship. The ritual is valued — it just quietly gets retired. The next two sections look at when and why it stops, and how kids feel about that.

🙋 Why Do Parents Stop Reading Aloud?

Scholastic asked parents directly in the 5th Edition of its report (2015) — the most recent edition to publish the reasons.

Nearly one in four parents of kids ages 6–17 — 23% — said their child had stopped being read books aloud at home before age 9 (5th Edition, 2015). By the later elementary years it becomes the majority experience: in the same 2015 report, 41% of kids ages 6–8 and 60% of kids ages 9–11 were no longer read to at home at all.

Asked why reading aloud ended, those parents gave reasons that cluster around a single idea — independence:

Reasons given by parents whose child stopped being read to before age 9. Source: Scholastic Kids & Family Reading Report, 5th Edition (2015).

All three top reasons are really the same reason: the child can read now. Story time mostly ends because it worked — the years of reading together produced a reader — and reading together gets filed away with the other baby things. Whether it has to end there is a different question, and it is the one the kids answer next.

💛 What Kids Say About Being Read To

The same 2015 Scholastic report asked the kids — and their answers are the part of this story most parents never hear.

Among kids ages 6–11 who were no longer read to at home, 40% said they wished reading aloud had continued — including 48% of ages 6–8, the very group whose parents most often stop around then (5th Edition, 2015). Even among ages 9–11, about a third (34%) wanted it to keep going.

And while it lasts, kids love it. 83% of kids ages 6–17 who are or were read to at home say they love(d) or like(d) it a lot (2015). Their number-one reason, picked by 78%, was not the stories themselves — it was that reading together is a special time with their parent. Fun came next (65%), then the relaxing wind-down before sleep (54%), then getting to hear books too hard to read on their own (48%).

Parents, for their part, seem to sense something is being lost. In the newer 8th Edition (2023), 80% of parents of 6- to 11-year-olds said resources to support their child's reading would be helpful — the appetite for a way to keep reading together is there, even as the habit fades.

🌎 The Bigger Picture: Reading at Home in America

Federal data paints the preschool years in brighter colors — partly because it sets a lower bar. The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) found that in 2019, 85% of 3- to 5-year-olds not yet in kindergarten had been read to by a family member three or more times in the past week. Three-plus times a week is not the near-daily rhythm in the Scholastic figures, which is why this number looks higher. The same NCES data shows the wider reading environment thinning out: only 37% of those preschoolers had visited a library with a family member in the past month, down from 42% in 2012.

The pandemic then knocked the habit down, and it has not climbed back. A nationally representative study from NIEER at Rutgers (reported September 2026) found that frequent shared reading with preschoolers ran at about 85% in 2019, but from April 2020 through September 2025 it stayed below 75% — five years without recovering. One detail in that study is pure encouragement for book lovers: for every 10 print books in the home, the odds of shared reading were 8% higher. (E-books in the home showed no such effect.)

And habits respond to a nudge. Reach Out and Read — the program where pediatricians hand families a book at checkups and coach parents on reading aloud — reports that its parents are 2.5 times more likely to read to their children and twice as likely to read three or more times a week, with children's language development improved by 3 to 6 months across more than 24 peer-reviewed studies. The cliff is a pattern, not a destiny.

🔍 Method & Sources

Every statistic on this page comes from one of the published reports below. Where a number comes from an older edition, this page labels it with that edition's year — because the newest report does not always repeat the older questions.

If you cite these statistics, please credit the original reports above — and link back to this page so your readers can trace every number to its source.