Yesterday, I moderated a panel session at the (very good) The Bookseller Children’s Conference in London, then stayed around to see what other speakers had to say. One of the sessions is causing a bit of a rumpus.

It involved research firm Nielsen Book, which presented its latest stats on children’s reading and digital activities in the UK, based on a survey of 2,000 children and parents in June this year, and comparing the results with a similar one from 2012.

It found that 32% of children still read books for pleasure on a daily basis, not that far behind TV (36%) but ahead of social networking (20%), visiting YouTube (17%) and playing mobile games and apps (16%). On a weekly basis, 60% of children are reading for pleasure, and that goes up to 72% if you also count kids who are being read to.

But the rest of the session had a gloomy message: children’s reading appears to be shrinking. Only three activities increased in the last year: apps, YouTube and text messaging. Everything else fell – including reading, which was down eight percentage points over that period. Here’s the relevant graph (sorry about the awkward angle):

“I want to stress that most children are still medium and heavy book readers, but what we’re seeing is a really significant rise in the number of occasional and even non-readers in the children’s market,” said Nielsen Book’s Jo Henry, who later noted that “non-readers have risen from 22% to 28% of all children”.

I wrote this up for The Guardian pretty straight: usage of apps, YouTube and digital media is going up, and reading is going down. But there’s a big, important discussion to be had now about the extent to which the former is causing the latter; about how big a problem the fall in reading is; and about the role of parents in the technology use of their kids.

Thoughts bubbling around my head this morning:

Blaming tablets and apps is the wrong response, but one that fits into a historical pattern

We’ve had decades of worries about children watching TV or playing computer/console games instead of reading. The common thread? Parenting. It’s down to parents how much television and gaming their children get when younger, and also how much reading time they get.

It feels like we’ve evolved sensible attitudes to all this: TV and games aren’t bad in themselves – they can be really good – so it’s more about good parenting, ensuring they don’t crowd out other activities, from reading to physical play. And most parents (I hope) recognise that they have a role to play in what shows their children watch and what games they play, certainly in their earlier years.

Surely it’s the same for devices and apps. As parents, what apps are we downloading for our children? Are we involved in their digital play or using these devices to keep them quiet and out of our way? Do we have set ‘tablet time’ after which the device goes away? And the same applies to YouTube.

Apps can help children learn to love reading and storytelling

Nielsen’s presentation didn’t break out the kinds of apps that young children are using, but there was a slide on 14-17 year-olds that showed how a.) free apps are hugely more popular than paid apps, and b.) games are the runaway favourite genre, well ahead of book-like apps (from revision/study apps through to reference and story apps):

Thinking about younger children, though, there is a large and growing number of apps that I’d say encourage reading and a love of storytelling – both in terms of being told stories, and actually creating tales too. Quite a few of those apps are using techniques and technologies learned from the games world too: the idea that games and reading are two entirely separate, opposed camps in a battle for children’s attention feels a bit outdated.

But I don’t think this means we can sit back and not worry about what Nielsen’s stats were showing. Beautiful reading and storytelling apps may exist, but are they popular? Are parents buying them in big numbers? Do they even know about them? Tablets and apps can be used to get children reading and develop all the skills that come with that, but are they?

That’s hopefully a question for publishers and app developers and companies like Apple and Google to continue tackling: not ‘how can we stop children using apps and watching YouTube videos?’ but more ‘how can we use these devices and media that they love to stimulate a love of reading?’.

This is happening too, don’t forget. I’d defy anyone to take a look down the homepage of Apple’s new Kids category and not find a bunch of great reading apps:

Apple’s rivals are likely to follow suit, I suspect.

Things that aren’t reading aren’t necessarily bad

This sounds obvious, but still… Children are watching more YouTube videos, but what are they watching? It might be good stuff. Children are playing more games, but what kind of games?

To cite one example (which was mentioned a LOT at yesterday’s conference: Minecraft. A wonderful crafting game that engages kids’ creative instincts – and often their social skills too, as they talk to friends about their creations. And what’s more, a lot of them are watching Minecraft videos on YouTube to learn more. Or even making their own videos about Minecraft to post on YouTube, shot using a mobile device…

That’s a range of really useful digital media skills right there, which will serve children well in later life. Technology literacy is important, not just literacy literacy. And we should be wary of getting drawn into a battle between those two things: we should be thinking about how to ensure our kids grow up with both.

But also: play. That slide further up showing the “game apps” growing between 2012 and 2013, and “play with toys/games” falling. We have an entire category on Apps Playground called Playful for apps that don’t easily fit into our Education, Games, Creativity or Book-Apps genres.

Digital toys, you could call them (and, indeed, that’s exactly the phrase Toca Boca, one of the most popular and praised children’s apps publishers, uses to describe its products). The play may be digital rather than physical, but it may be helping children to develop some of the same skills, as well as some of those technology literacy ones. Which isn’t at all saying that playing with physical toys isn’t important. Which brings us neatly back to…

Parents!

The Apps Playground household (co-founder Alice and I, and our two sons) is pretty geeky. Multiple tablets, a constant flow of apps to try, and children who know exactly what YouTube and Google are for (i.e. looking at pictures of classic cars and wild animals, plus watching videos of goats singing Daft Punk).

And yet… we read (print) books to our children every night before bed. We play board games, go to the park, write stories on paper together – Octonauts producers, if you’re reading this, our six year-old has a few scripts to submit – lie with our noses to the floor pushing toy cars around, buy an endless supply of felt-tip pens to support our sons’ endless ability to wear them out…

We try to think about the balance of physical and digital activities, and reading is an important part of that. That doesn’t make us amazeballs parents, it just feels like our responsibility.

If more children are falling out of love with reading (or not falling in love with it in the first place), it’s surely parents rather than devices that we should be looking at. Although not to blame them – ahem, sorry about that headline – but to think about what support those parents need in order to support their children’s reading, and whether they’re getting it at the moment.

What do you think, though? Post your thoughts in a comment. And one final thing: none of the above should be seen as a criticism of Nielsen Book for its presentation. This is a super-important debate, and having some proper stats to talk about is really useful.