This item is taken from PN Review 289, Volume 52 Number 5, May - June 2026.
Editorial
How concerned should we be? The Bookseller on 20 April was plenty concerned. ‘Nearly a third of children cannot use books when they start school, with some even trying to swipe and zoom on the pages, a survey from Kindred Squared has shown. The research was part of their school readiness survey earlier this year, where more than half of teachers cited children’s and parents’ excessive screen time as a key reason for children not being “school ready”.’
On the other hand, it is doubtful that even very little children have ever spent more time reading, gaming – and writing – than they do now with their iPhones and tablets. No wonder they are disappointed when pages need to be turned rather than swiped, and when they can’t blow up the text with their fingertips, enjoy animation in the illustrations, and turn the book off when they’re bored.
What they read and what and how they write are another matter. There are various resources not familiar or available to older readers – the world of emojis, for example, or of extreme abbreviations, though grown-ups have developed an acronym-emaciated language quite as infuriating as the rapidly morphing language of children. Some are familiar from relatively long use: PS, BTW, ASAP, ETA, BCC, FWD, FYI. Recent arrivals include WFH and PFA. Others puzzle us and can have two or three possible readings (not ambiguity but confusion): TL;DR, RR (not ‘Railroad’ but ‘Reply Requested’ or, in White House usage, ‘Reply Required’), LMK or simple ‘Let’, IMHO, HTH, FWIW, NRN or NNTR. The ‘e’ in e-mail replaces ‘electronic’, as does the ‘e’ in e-commerce, e-learning, part of the transformation of language into alphabet soup. For economy’s sake, someone once referred to himself as the ‘alpha and omega’, A+Ω: this may be a proleptic, pre-iPhone instance. (The Japanese word ‘emoji’ is etymologically innocent, the e (絵) is ‘picture’ + moji (文字) ‘character’.)
There is some invention in children’s and teenagers’ acronyms and abbreviations, usually brisk and cautionary: POS means ‘parent over shoulder’ and not ‘point of sale’, PRI means ‘parent in room’; there are number codes like 99 (‘parent gone’), 143, 182, and the teen codes with sexual meanings including 8, WTTP, TDTM, GNOC, IWSN, NIFOC… The purpose of this alternative language is to KPC (‘keep parents clueless’).
For those pesky parents and grandparents who this language is intended to exclude, acronyms are part of their alienation from the child world that has become entirely dependent on a technology that wrinklies find newfangled but which to youngsters is as much a given as pizza, taco, pelmeni, ramen, rendang and pho. Accepting these facts does not address the issue of some children’s inability to engage with books as objects of curiosity and pleasure. There may be no books at home, or the books at home may be on a high shelf and seldom opened in front of the children. NIFOTC. In reception classes some need to learn which way up the book is held, how pages work and turn, which direction to go in when you read. Yet many of them can express themselves in writing; their spoken and written language connects at an instinctive level. Unlike the children of yore, for whom the division between speech and reading-writing could be an ordeal rather than an adventure, push-button language develops into push-key language as a relatively direct process. Questions of letter formation are another (obsolete) matter, and the old disciplines of ‘parts of speech’ and grammatical correctness are almost impossible to communicate.
In the Bookseller, which explores this matter because the future of the book itself is entailed in these accelerating technological and cultural developments, Vicki Willden-Lebrecht of the Bright Agency, which works with children’s books, translates the problem into baldly commercial terms and speaks of the ‘marketing issues’ it raises. For her, children should not be led but consulted and followed. Like the Arts Council itself, the Agency has abandoned the word ‘reader’ in favour of the collective ‘audience’ and built out from that perspective, assuming a OSFA (One Size Fits All) approach. ‘We need to make rock stars out of our authors, so the kids want to read their books.’ The Bookseller adds, ‘When signing authors, she looks for people who think about their profile, who are “going to be doing shop fronts and are committed to the success of the book”.’ She declares, ‘I am interested in how someone sees their audience and how they’re going to connect to [them].’ She could be describing a successful contemporary poet.
It’s a kind of evangelism that makes some readers uneasy – the Rupi Kaur syndrome begins (and perhaps ends) here. Willden-Lebrecht insists that ‘reading needs to be branded as “cool”,’ and refers us to The Phoenix comic phenomenon. It is ‘a desirable product for kids. It’s in their world.’ This analysis and these priorities feel remote, so remote as to elicit an initial WTF from a long-toothed reader. The child is mother and father of the man now, but not in the way Wordsworth intended – or is it? More perhaps in the reductive spirit of the Beach Boys:
On the other hand, it is doubtful that even very little children have ever spent more time reading, gaming – and writing – than they do now with their iPhones and tablets. No wonder they are disappointed when pages need to be turned rather than swiped, and when they can’t blow up the text with their fingertips, enjoy animation in the illustrations, and turn the book off when they’re bored.
What they read and what and how they write are another matter. There are various resources not familiar or available to older readers – the world of emojis, for example, or of extreme abbreviations, though grown-ups have developed an acronym-emaciated language quite as infuriating as the rapidly morphing language of children. Some are familiar from relatively long use: PS, BTW, ASAP, ETA, BCC, FWD, FYI. Recent arrivals include WFH and PFA. Others puzzle us and can have two or three possible readings (not ambiguity but confusion): TL;DR, RR (not ‘Railroad’ but ‘Reply Requested’ or, in White House usage, ‘Reply Required’), LMK or simple ‘Let’, IMHO, HTH, FWIW, NRN or NNTR. The ‘e’ in e-mail replaces ‘electronic’, as does the ‘e’ in e-commerce, e-learning, part of the transformation of language into alphabet soup. For economy’s sake, someone once referred to himself as the ‘alpha and omega’, A+Ω: this may be a proleptic, pre-iPhone instance. (The Japanese word ‘emoji’ is etymologically innocent, the e (絵) is ‘picture’ + moji (文字) ‘character’.)
There is some invention in children’s and teenagers’ acronyms and abbreviations, usually brisk and cautionary: POS means ‘parent over shoulder’ and not ‘point of sale’, PRI means ‘parent in room’; there are number codes like 99 (‘parent gone’), 143, 182, and the teen codes with sexual meanings including 8, WTTP, TDTM, GNOC, IWSN, NIFOC… The purpose of this alternative language is to KPC (‘keep parents clueless’).
For those pesky parents and grandparents who this language is intended to exclude, acronyms are part of their alienation from the child world that has become entirely dependent on a technology that wrinklies find newfangled but which to youngsters is as much a given as pizza, taco, pelmeni, ramen, rendang and pho. Accepting these facts does not address the issue of some children’s inability to engage with books as objects of curiosity and pleasure. There may be no books at home, or the books at home may be on a high shelf and seldom opened in front of the children. NIFOTC. In reception classes some need to learn which way up the book is held, how pages work and turn, which direction to go in when you read. Yet many of them can express themselves in writing; their spoken and written language connects at an instinctive level. Unlike the children of yore, for whom the division between speech and reading-writing could be an ordeal rather than an adventure, push-button language develops into push-key language as a relatively direct process. Questions of letter formation are another (obsolete) matter, and the old disciplines of ‘parts of speech’ and grammatical correctness are almost impossible to communicate.
In the Bookseller, which explores this matter because the future of the book itself is entailed in these accelerating technological and cultural developments, Vicki Willden-Lebrecht of the Bright Agency, which works with children’s books, translates the problem into baldly commercial terms and speaks of the ‘marketing issues’ it raises. For her, children should not be led but consulted and followed. Like the Arts Council itself, the Agency has abandoned the word ‘reader’ in favour of the collective ‘audience’ and built out from that perspective, assuming a OSFA (One Size Fits All) approach. ‘We need to make rock stars out of our authors, so the kids want to read their books.’ The Bookseller adds, ‘When signing authors, she looks for people who think about their profile, who are “going to be doing shop fronts and are committed to the success of the book”.’ She declares, ‘I am interested in how someone sees their audience and how they’re going to connect to [them].’ She could be describing a successful contemporary poet.
It’s a kind of evangelism that makes some readers uneasy – the Rupi Kaur syndrome begins (and perhaps ends) here. Willden-Lebrecht insists that ‘reading needs to be branded as “cool”,’ and refers us to The Phoenix comic phenomenon. It is ‘a desirable product for kids. It’s in their world.’ This analysis and these priorities feel remote, so remote as to elicit an initial WTF from a long-toothed reader. The child is mother and father of the man now, but not in the way Wordsworth intended – or is it? More perhaps in the reductive spirit of the Beach Boys:
(Child, child, child, the child, the child)
Father of the man (Father of the man)
Easy, my child, it’s just enough to believe
(I believe, I believe, I believe)
Out of the wild into what you can’t conceive
You’ll achieve
This item is taken from PN Review 289, Volume 52 Number 5, May - June 2026.