The tenet of intensive mothering that only biological mothers could be suitable caregivers could also be traced in advice for promoting children’s success in school and their “readiness to read.” In her article, “Can Babies and Careers Be Combined?”, Cameron (1959) defined babies as “any children from one week of age into the teens who need their mother’s presence, care and guidance” (p. 8). Cameron divided working mothers into those who need to work, and those who work by choice. A mother who “works by choice” was considered to have misunderstood “the mothering career” (p. 8). “She’s the gal who devotes her energies to making fine citizens of other people’s children and pays somebody to teach her own” (Cameron, 1959, p. 8). This advice equated reading readiness with the broader goal of “giving a good citizen to the country” (p. 9), two goals that relied upon women’s participation in the discourses of intensive mothering and domestic pedagogy.

Yet discourses of intensive mothering and domestic pedagogy could be traced to opponents of the reading readiness paradigm as well. Flesch (1955) was a vehement opponent of reading readiness, if not the ideals of intensive mothering and the normal family that bolstered it. In Why Johnny Can’t Read, he argued that the “look-say” approach to reading amounted to “word guessing” and required children to memorize long lists of words and suffer through inane and boring “controlled” texts such as Dick and Jane before they could read fluently. He advocated instead for a phonics approach, arguing that once children could recognize and decode the letter-sound combinations of the English language, they could read, and would no longer need to rely on guess work or memorization.

For Flesch, women’s domestic literacy work ideally involved asserting authority and control over “Johnny’s” education by demanding reform in school reading methods, and teaching their children to read at home since “schools just couldn’t get it right” (Flesch, 1955, p. 56). To this end, mothers were provided a list of fifteen specific instructional steps to carry out with “Johnny” every day. These steps consisted of strict adherence to a consecutive and repetitive set of drills.

Interestingly, Spock (1957) also criticized the “see-say” method of teaching children to read, yet he did so in the context of growing concern over boys’ reading difficulties:

Children learn that the word means dog before they know the letters that go into it. For most children this is a quicker and easier way to learn, and it has been adopted in many schools. However, a certain number of children, particularly boys, as soon as they have learned a number of words begin to be confused between “dog” and “god” and “was” and “saw” and “on” and “no.” …[T]he child with left-right confusion should be identified early and taught by the old fashioned spelling “phonetic” method. (p. 321)