I say this as the father of a 17-year-old who once read 200 books per semester in elementary school, winning school and city reading awards. This year in high school, she’s read maybe a couple of short stories at most. She’s grown up surrounded by bookshelves in every room, but now she has no inclination to even glance at the spines, much less open a book.
We read aloud together every night for years, usually books well beyond her grade level, which was already advanced. I exposed her early to Bergman, Antonioni, Kurosawa, Mizoguchi, and other great directors. Now her media diet is mostly TikTok and gaming YouTube videos. Musically, she’s remained open to everything from classical to oldies, fortunately. As for technology, despite learning quite a bit of Python and JavaScript starting at 10-11, she’s currently uninterested in and actively hostile to understanding anything about AI architecture or underlying systems.
Is this a teenage phase? Maybe. I’m hoping with everything I have that it is, and that the curiosity I modeled for her will resurface eventually. You can create the ideal environment, model the behavior you want, and do everything you can as a parent. But once kids develop autonomy and see what their peers are doing, they make their own choices. Sometimes those choices look nothing like what you hoped to cultivate.