I first learned about Maryanne Wolf’s Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World when a school parent forwarded me an article about Princeton University’s choice of the book as its summer read for the class of 2030. Although it was published in 2018, the book has gained new relevance as educators consider the impact of artificial intelligence on student learning.
Christopher L. Eisgruber, Princeton’s president, said he selected the book because he wanted students to understand why wrestling with long, challenging texts still matters, noting that even though AI can summarize books instantly, deep reading is the cornerstone of a college education. Deep reading helps build students’ cognitive and emotional sense of who they are as human beings. Whatever role AI may subsequently play in students’ adult lives, deep reading should be the north star orienting how students write, think, and reflect on who they are and how they interact with the world.
An Antidote to Screen Saturation
Reader, Come Home stands as a powerful counterweight to the warnings about children’s screen time issued in the U.S. Surgeon General’s recent bulletin “Harms of Screen Use.” The report reveals a glum reality: Adolescents now spend more hours on their devices than they do in school or sleeping.
The report links excessive screen time to poor sleep, weaker academic outcomes, attention issues, anxiety, and depression. Ultimately, it makes one central recommendation: Young people need to “live real life.” To support this, the Surgeon General recommends that schools and families dramatically limit screen time and instead promote athletics, time outdoors, hands-on activities, and reading.
Wolf is one of the world’s leading researchers on reading and a professor-in-residence at UCLA. Her work shows that when reading replaces screen time, kids increase their cognition, focus, memory, and empathy. As a self-described “reading worrier,” she warns that time online erodes children’s reading and critical thinking skills. She fervently believes, however, that if we can get kids reading again, we can address these problems.
Wolf begins her book by pointing out that human beings are not naturally wired to read. Unlike speech, reading is a cultural invention that must be intentionally taught and nurtured. Because the reading brain’s neural pathways are shaped by the medium we use, how we read really matters.
Wolf argues that digital reading inherently encourages skimming rather than the sustained attention cultivated by print. Online, readers often skim in a zigzag pattern, searching for key ideas while skipping over details. Wolf cites a 2016 study, “The Evolution of Reading in the Age of Digitisation: An Integrative Framework for Reading Research,” showing that readers using paperbacks were significantly better at reconstructing the plot of a short story than those reading on Kindles.
This discrepancy comes down to geography. Reading on paper provides spatial landmarks; words, sentences, and paragraphs have fixed, physical locations on a page. These visual anchors strengthen memory and comprehension, allowing readers to pause, underline, reread, and reflect—habits that online scrolling actively discourages.
The Erosion of Memory and Internal Knowledge
Beyond attention and comprehension, deep reading also strengthens memory. Readers must hold earlier ideas in mind while integrating new information. To follow a novel, they must remember characters, plot developments, and themes over several sittings. Yet technology increasingly conditions us to outsource memory. Why remember a fact when we can just search it? Perhaps because of this practice, “the average memory span of many adults has diminished by more than 50% over the last decade,” writes Wolf.
Wolf worries that children may become too dependent on external sources of information. “It is not that I prefer internal to external platforms of knowledge,” she writes. “I want both, but the internal one has to be sufficiently formed before automatic reliance on the external one takes over.” Reading slowly and thoughtfully on paper helps build that internal foundation—that warehouse of knowledge—in a child’s brain.
Although Wolf wrote her book prior to the explosion of AI tools like ChatGPT, her concerns perfectly mirror my own when it comes to introducing AI to students too soon. These technologies make it easy for students to bypass the productive struggle that deep learning requires. Kids still have developing brains and need to build the intellectual skills required to analyze, question, synthesize, and reflect independently. Those habits deserve cultivation and protection.
Wolf notes that since the internet started having an influence on reading, sentences in contemporary literary works are about 50% shorter than those in classics. Contemporary writers are increasingly producing shorter manuscripts with simpler vocabulary to accommodate the shallower reading practices we’ve developed through online reading. While there is nothing inherently wrong with accessible writing, students need opportunities to wrestle with complexity.
Wolf describes deep reading as a “use it or lose it” skill, so we should balance contemporary choices with older works. The classics force readers to slow down, grapple with difficult vocabulary and syntax, and interpret figurative language. Classics quite literally offer a workout for the cortex.
Cultivating Empathy and Balance
Deep reading is not only an academic skill but also an exercise in empathy, revealing that the world is “full of grays.” As readers encounter perspectives different from their own, they gain a deeper understanding of other people’s emotional complexity.
Wolf believes that empathy “is one of the most profound, insufficiently heralded contributions of the deep-reading processes,” as “we move from our inherently circumscribed views of the world to enter another’s and return enlarged.” Adolescents in particular are at the stage when they are trying to understand themselves and connect with peers, so gaining emotional intelligence through reading supports their development in significant ways.
Gaining empathy through reading feels especially important when paired with a 2011 study, “Changes in Dispositional Empathy in American College Students over Time: A Meta-analysis,” documenting a staggering 40% decline in empathy among young people over the past two decades, with the sharpest drop occurring in the last 10 years. MIT scholar Sherry Turkle attributes this decline to the displacement of real-world interaction by excessive screen time. In a world increasingly mediated by screens, reading may be one of the few remaining activities that consistently asks children to sit quietly inside another person’s thoughts and feelings.
None of this means we should reject technology altogether. Wolf does not advocate returning to quill pens and candlelight, and neither do I. Technology can empower students when it puts them in the driver’s seat: coding a robot, composing original music with GarageBand, or creating a documentary for their National History Day project.
The challenge is not whether technology is “good” or “bad,” but discerning when analog or digital tools best support a student’s development. When it comes to building a young person’s core reading circuit, we know that paper books offer clear cognitive advantages over technology.
A Summer Invitation
Wolf closes her book with a warning that feels remarkably timely: “We live in a historical ‘hinge moment.’”
Constant exposure to fast, easily digestible information may reduce motivation to think deeply. If we are not intentional, we risk raising children who consume enormous amounts of information but struggle to engage with it critically.
As conversations about AI continue to accelerate, schools and families will understandably feel pressure to ensure students are “AI-ready.” But before we rush ahead, we should pause to consider the fundamental intellectual and emotional capacities young people need first.
The ability to focus, reflect, empathize, question, and think independently will only become more valuable in an age of instant answers. To be AI-ready as adults, students need to avoid off-loading cognition to AI when they are still learning how to learn. Ultimately, they will be better users of such technologies in the future if they avoid using them today.
Whether as children or adults, reading is always in season—and it remains one of the most powerful ways to cultivate deeper, more reflective thinking. Wolf’s work offers a timely reminder that summer can be an opportunity for families to reclaim time for books, making trips to the local library to choose books of interest from the stacks and summer reading programs. Perhaps most importantly, it’s a time for parents to model the deep reading they hope to nurture in their children—the single most powerful way to raise a lifelong reader.
By putting down screens and picking up a book, families can help children step away from digital noise and into the deep, transformative world of their own minds.
