Reading as a Source of Empowerment and Enrichment: The Benefits of (Book) Reading for Teens

This blogpost shares new research insights into the ways in which fiction book reading can support teenagers’ wellbeing, empathy, and positive sense of self, illustrating the value of supporting all teenagers to find books that are personally meaningful to them.

There is growing research interest into the empowering and enriching effects of reading fiction books for teenagers, and through a series of research studies carried out at the Literacy Lab, we have been centring young people’s voices to understand these in depth, in addition to identifying ways to support more young people to enjoy the benefits associated with reading books.

Reading and Wellbeing

In our research exploring the relationship between fiction book reading and wellbeing during adolescence (Currie et al., 2025), teenagers who read fiction books regularly have shared how book reading can positively support their emotions, opportunities for connection, and intellectual, academic, social and emotional development. For example:

“Usually just reading in general for me, just it’s peaceful. It’s a way for me to just calm down and just get away from the world.” (Male, aged 16)

“Me and my best friend… when we started reading together, we grew a lot, a lot closer, and now she’s like my best friend in the whole world.” (Female, aged 15) 

“Maybe because of the complicated backgrounds the characters might have had, and how they managed to work through that, to go past that. It sort of encourages me to keep on pushing hard.” (Male, aged 16)

“…it has got me thinking about the progress that I’ve made with, like, my abilities with, like, my dyslexia and stuff like that.” (Female, aged 16)

Reading and Empathy

In other research focusing specifically on whether, and how, fiction book reading can support both empathy during adolescence (Santi et al., 2025), we have found that teen readers not only empathise (affectively and cognitively) with fictional characters, but that this empathy can also extend to real life (both known and unknown) others.

“You live through your mind, but you don’t know anyone else’s. So, it’s kind of interesting to see how an author describes someone’s mind like that and their personality.” (Anonymised, aged 12-14)

“Some books, I just feel like really close to the characters, like, I feel emotions for them. […] in some books, when something sad happens, it sometimes makes me sad because, like, they’re having a hard time. And if they’re happy, they kinda make me happy.” (Anonymised, aged 12-14)

“My friend […] his grandma died. And when I was reading about Batman, it made me realise how much, how sad he must have been, and then I realised that it’s important for other people to try find out what other people’s lives are like to make sure they feel better and not go through a lonely phase.” (Anonymised, aged 12-14)

Representation in Fiction

Finally, our research exploring the importance of representation in fiction books has focused on neurodivergent (e.g. ADHD, Autistic, Dyslexic) representation, examining neurodivergent young people’s perceptions of the benefits (e.g. improved self-awareness, positive sense of self, feelings of belonging, expanding understanding, strategies for life) and potential harms (e.g. poor representation increasing stigma) associated with neurodivergent representation (Webber et al., 2024a).

“…it had an autistic main character and I think they handled that really well … because I could relate to a lot of the situations that happened in that book, like, accidentally hurting people, not being able to control emotions well. Yeah, I could relate to those situations.” (Autistic, male)

“if maybe in a book someone has some sort of tactic to remember something, I could try that out and that might work.” (Dyslexic, female)

“I know what neurodivergence I have, but I don’t know about what it’s like to have other neurodivergences, so I think I could benefit from that by learning about others that have similar things to me, but not the same as what I have.” (Autistic, male)

“My brother, he’s autistic, and I think if he was to see a character that was represented wrong I think it could be quite damaging. And it can be quite-, not just damaging for the kids that are reading them who are autistic, but just in general, it can put even more of a negativity towards it.” (Dyslexic, female)

I hope this blogpost highlights a range of rich and diverse benefits associated with reading books. Supporting young people to find books which meaningfully connect to their personal interests, goals, lives, experiences, purposes or aspirations is essential for these benefits to be achieved. Research-informed insights to support teenagers’ book reading practices is therefore essential. 

With thanks to the Leverhulme Trust and University of Edinburgh Challenge Investment Fund for funding this research.

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Sarah McGeown is Professor of Literacy at the University of Edinburgh. She works with children, young people, teachers, and literacy, library and education organisations to conduct her research, which seeks to better understand how to increase children and young people’s reading enjoyment and engagement, in addition to examining the benefits associated with book reading. Sarah is Director (Education) of the Literacy Lab at the University of Edinburgh, an interdisciplinary research hub focused on improving literacy engagement and enriching lives through literacy.

Website: https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/literacylab/

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For Conduit English resources aimed at promoting reading for pleasure, there is the ‘Building a Reading Culture’ series, starting with Personal Reading:

S1 Building A Reading Culture 1: Personal Reading

This After Reading Activity Series Resource Pack could be used to link personal reading to writing and analysis techniques in the classroom in a variety of engaging ways:

After Reading Activity Series Resource Pack

Finally, this What Not to Read Poster could be used ironically, for example a book that people shouldn’t read because it’s too good to share or a book that highlights a certain theme or issue… or literally a book they did not enjoy!

'What Not to Read' Poster