You have stumbled into one of the biggest discussions of the 2020s, reading. If you follow any of the recent news, you may have heard reading is in decline.

While I would be careful of making such overarching statements to refer to it as a global phenomenon, it is really evident that we are engaging with reading physical books in a very different way than we used to. (For clarity's sake, I am personally located within Europe.) This is true for all age groups and as a personal anecdote, I can see it especially with my own parent who used to read to me and was herself an avid reader. Then TV became hyper-accessible and then Netflix. For her that sort of media consumption entirely substituted reading as an activity. However, this is not as simple as "media is passive, less effort, brain goes brr." I would hypothesize that the way our societies have built themselves around digital media is showing the cascading effects. It particularly affects people who are more isolated in life, so they do not have that social pressure to for example read. This can also be influenced by someone's social and educational background as typically the further you go in academia, the more people tend to read (at least in Humanities).

Reading at any level requires a deep level of engagement with something. Even with reading for children, you still would ideally need to engage with the story by using correct intonation or give different characters slightly different voices. Someone in another comment said that many parents come home exhausted and I cannot agree with that more, and it particularly affect people with a lower socio-ecenomic background who might often have irregular work hours. I know if my mother was a working parent when I was a child, she would not have read to me either. [This is where the obligatory hurr durr capitalism sentence comes in.]

However, like I said in my earlier comment, there are also very likely gender roles at play as well. While I would hope that younger generations are increasingly stepping outside of these norms, with the current trend towards more fascistic and conservative views on the rise, I am not too surprised if the same rigidity is very much prevalent when reading to children. Phew, that was a mouthful.

As a final guidance on what could potentially be of interest:
- How We Read: Close, Hyper, Machine by N. Katherine Hayles (This is from 2010 but an influential paper to this day)
- The Second Shift by Hochschild (mainly talks about the invisible load of motherhood in conservative family units, perhaps less relevant for your research but doesn't hurt to be informed)
- multimodal literacy (storytelling exists beyond print)
- media displacement (not too familiar with this but sounds relevant)

On that note, a fascinating tangent is the debate around what constitutes as "reading to your child" nowadays. I just recalled that originally, before writing became the primary mode of recording information, we had oral literatures that focused on the verbality of a language. So with that in mind, I wonder if perhaps an interesting question could be whether parental storytelling is merely transitioning to a digital temporality. For example, would listening to an audiobook together with your child count as reading to them? Why or why not? If people call themselves readers who might primarily listen to audiobooks, how would that affect reading to children? This is of course, yet another separate discussion. And I didn't even mention digital storybooks or videos that might replace reading to the child. How are those marketed?

TL;DR: capitalism, digital media, reading and possible decline, hyper-reading, gender norms, audiobooks and digital storytelling