Since the 3-Rs are so much in the public eye today many parents are asking themselves,
“can my child read adequately? If not, what is wrong? What can I do about it?”This book aims to help the parent to find an answer to these questions. It deals with what the parent can do to get the child ready for reading, the crucial first steps in grade one, the gathering of momentum in grades two and three and progress on many fronts in grades four, five and six. (Laycock, 1958, p. 12)
In the context of the “crisis” in education announced in the late 1950s, educators, researchers, and commentators began to look to the home as the solution, and the cause, for children’s reading difficulties. This had important new implications for the regulation not only of children’s reading, but also of mothering practices.
Writing in Parents’ Magazine in 1957, Christopher resurrected domestic
literacy advice from the Nineteenth Century in the service of meeting mid-twentieth-century
goals for schooling and nation-building. She recommended that mothers orient
their domestic time to supporting their children’s language development.
She advised mothers to “play word games at home, label furniture and clothing
in big letters, keep a notebook of new words the child was learning, buy him
a picture dictionary and visit the library”
(Christopher, 1957, p. 33).
Similarly, Larrick’s’ Parents’ Guide to Children’s Reading,
first published in 1958, with a second edition published in 1964, heralded an
interest in explicitly combining women’s everyday domestic work with teaching
children “pre-reading” skills. This shift was slow and uneven across
texts and contexts, but it was a consistent trend in advice from the late 1950s.
A Parent’s Guide to Reading was one of the first projects of the United
States National Book Committee, “a non-profit venture to teach parents
ways to support children’s reading”
(Larrick, 1958, p. xx). Written
and published in the United States, it became recommended reading for Canadian
parents in Canadian Home and School, and sold over half a million copies in
Canada and the United States. The author explained in the introduction that
the advice contained in the book was endorsed by a broad range of institutions
and associations and represented the latest in research on reading. The view
that mothers were reading “helpers”
to both their child (referred
to throughout as a single, male child) and to the school was introduced in the
first part of the book, titled “How to help, day in and day out.”
Larrick’s main message was that a child who was “good at talking”
was also a “good reader”
and therefore the ideal domestic setting
revolved around stimulating his language development in the home in interesting
and creative ways, at every opportunity. Larrick also emphasized the link between
supporting her child’s reading and making him happy: “If you provide
him with continuing delight in reading, you are helping him to be a happy, self-sufficient
person”
(Larrick, 1958, p. 21).