In Parents’ Magazine, two prominent educators sought to reassure parents about reading methods used in schools. They acknowledged that parents tended to feel ashamed if their “Johnny can’t read by the time he is seven and so blame the school for what they consider Johnny’s failure” (Beaumont & Franklin, 1955, p. 42). They commented on the ever-increasing and damaging competition among parents concerning their children’s reading abilities, reminding parents that the ability to read was complex and that modern teaching methods did indeed work. They did not provide advice about what parents should do at home to support reading — this was cast as the role of a good teacher. But the article closed with a hint that the “reading crisis” may have been about concerns over immigration and cultural diversity in schools, as well as the fall out from the USSR's launch of Sputnik. “Cultured homes,” in this context, may be read as a code for the discourses of difference that privileged the literacy habitus associated with Anglo-Saxon middle classes.

In spite of doubts over simplistic “cure-all” approaches to addressing children’s reading difficulties, in the years following Why Johnny Can’t Read many books and pamphlets appeared in the educational market to tap into parents’ concern for their children’s reading abilities. This rise in literacy advice paralleled a more general increase in child-raising advice provided in books, magazines and pamphlets in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Bruno Bettelheim, in his best-selling Dialogue with Mothers (1962), attributed this to “a growing market of concerned parents and even more concerned scientists and professionals, for the production of “well adjusted” children” (Bettelheim, 1962, p. 2).

Concerned parents of primary school children who were not yet able to read were still warned against trying to teach their child at home, though as one mother claimed, “heaven knows I’ve been tempted many times” (Christopher, 1957, p. 32). The most common advice still admonished parents thought to be competitive, and assured them that their normal middle-class home life would provide their child with everything needed to learn to read. Paradoxically, parental concern for their children’s reading was considered normal and appropriate. This concern indeed presented itself as an opportunity to market new advice books, and by extension, to circulate discourses of intensive mothering and domestic pedagogy. Laycock (1958) in recommending Nancy Larrick’s A Parents’ Guide to Children’s Reading, observed: