For mothers, teaching children to read was work best left to the experts. Instead, their roles in this process involved conforming to ideals of intensive mothering, domestic pedagogy, and the normal family. On the rare occasions when Spock addressed reading to children in his first three editions of Your Baby and Child (1946; 1957), it is in the context of readiness for school and concern for the damage inflicted upon the child’s psyche by “competitive” parents who push children to “read early.” As he stated, “[I]t often does harm and it never helps. It will only put him out of step with the other children and may make it more difficult for him to catch onto the school system of teaching these subjects” (Spock, 1957, p. 318). While Spock felt that the solution to reading difficulties was prompt and appropriate assistance at school, in a section entitled “Trouble with Lessons”, he articulated the newly popular “secure attachment” view that the cause of children’s reading difficulties could be attributed to psychological problems caused by poor parenting such as “severe deprivation of love” (Spock, 1957, p. 320), sibling rivalry, over-critical or nagging parents, and so on (Spock, 1957).

Just as in the 1940s, criteria for reading readiness emphasized more children’s emotional stability than their knowledge of, or interest in, print. One of the key sources of emotional stability necessary to learn to read was a mother’s constant presence in the home. Spock evoked in the first edition of his best seller the Freudian concept of “security” in the context of warning mothers not to work:

The important thing for a mother to realize is that the younger the child the more necessary it is for him to have a steady, loving person taking care of him. In most cases, the mother is the best one to give him this feeling of “belonging” safely and surely. She doesn’t quit on the job, she doesn’t turn against him, she takes care of him always in the same familiar house. (Spock, 1946, p. 460)

The concept of security was bolstered through Bowlby’s (1951) concept of “maternal deprivation.” Bowlby’s (1951) report on the mental health of children orphaned or lost in Europe in World War II was particularly influential in shifting the Freudian focus from children’s internal mental states as sources of emotional conflict to the effects of family relationships and mothering practices upon children’s “maladjustment.” Extrapolating his findings to typical families in North America, Bowlby was worried about the high social and emotional consequences of maternal deprivation, or even “partial deprivation,” which meant nothing less than “constant attention day and night, seven days a week and 365 days a year” (Hulbert, 2003, p. 205). The concept of maternal deprivation provided a new set of motivations and strategies for the discourse of intensive mothering evidenced in literacy advice from the middle 1950s onward.