A Parents’ Guide to Children’s Reading offered lists of language games for mother and child to play, complete with detailed explanations for how each game contributed to reading readiness. Perhaps as an inter-textual reference to, and rebuke of, Flesch’s advice, these games should “never be like lessons or drills” (Larrick, 1958, p. 23) but rather occur naturally in the daily activities of the home. Promoting reading became associated with everything in the child’s, and indeed the parents,’ domesticated and exclusive world as the requisite stay-at-home mother was advised to support her child’s language by acquiring a pet, planting seeds, conducting visits to the supermarket, the dairy, the post office, the zoo, and for suburban or rural families, a drive in “dense city traffic” (p. 43). She recommended: “Give the child plenty of time to take in the sights and sounds and smells and ask all the questions he can think of” (Larrick, 1958, p. 43). Mothers were advised to make notes on their children’s best linguistic inventions.

To exclude any alternate views of the desirability or plausibility of carrying out such advice, the author insisted: “No matter how exasperating, this natural curiosity should be fostered” (p. 42). While ostensibly fathers may have been pressed into driving their children through dense traffic to stimulate their language development, it is the middle-class mother of the late 1950s and 1960s who was most likely to visit the supermarket and dairy, and inhabit the domestic time and space required to carry out these suggestions. Failure to comply with this advice could put the child’s reading abilities at stake. Larrick cautioned:

Your reaction to the curiosity of your four or five year old may influence him for the rest of his life. If you brush aside his questions, he may conclude that questions are bad and exploration should be discontinued. Yet these are the very things you wish to foster. (Larrick, 1958, p. 43)

An analysis of this statement from a multi-vocal perspective suggests that many mothers, as well as fathers and other caregivers of young children, perhaps even the author herself, have been known to brush aside children’s questions, particularly when they are constant and can’t always be afforded one’s “complete” attention. The view that anything less than full attention to all of children’s questions could damage them for “the rest of their lives” normalized the discourse of intensive mothering as it excluded, through threats, the possibility of any other mothering or child-raising practice, nor indeed the children’s agency to discover answers from other sources, in the spirit of the children who took themselves off to the library in the literacy advice of the 1940s.