The gist of literacy advice in the 1960s was that middle-class homes needed to contribute much more to supporting children’s reading than merely their “culture” or normal family life. Story book reading was but one, though central, practice, in an expanding repertoire of recommended domestic literacy activities. In addition to children’s authors, psychiatrists and developmental psychologists offered literacy advice in popular magazines. They made links between the stages of story book reading and the stages of development in young children (Neisser & Piers, 1962, p. 55) and considered the problem of the “bookworm” who may consume too much “junk” reading (p. 84). There were repeated calls for parental involvement in the school reading program (Secrist, 1959) and a need for mothers to pay more attention to their children’s reading abilities (Eng, 1959). Across these texts, solutions to these “reading problems” included more monitoring of children’s reading practices, more interaction between children and parents in the form of language games and purposeful mother-child conversation, more trips to the zoo, and more one-to-one story book reading in the home. In short, more work for mothers, and more surveillance of her mothering practices.

Yet the most enduring form of advice to parents was storybook reading. This practice was emphasized in the second edition of Larrick’s Parents’ Guide to Children’s Reading (1964) and was central to advice strategies which relied upon the regulation of mothers and children’s domestic time and space:

Few activities create a warmer relationship between child and grownup than reading aloud. It is deeply flattering to be read to and have the undivided attention of the adult. Many parents plan a regular time for reading aloud each day. Just before nap-time and just before bedtime are traditional choices. Whatever the hour, be sure to make it the same each day so the child will look forward to it as he does lunch or supper. (p. 30)

The bedtime story or “read aloud time” became a “sacred hour” (Larrick, 1964, p. 31) for Peter and his family, and was represented in other advice as an opportunity for parent-child bonding. Yet we have come in this advice a long way from the images of the family social reading of the Nineteenth Century. The parent-child bedtime story had become in 1960s literacy advice a private, didactic experience which took place “upstairs” and away from guests or other family members. In spite of the protestations in advice that parents shouldn’t pressure their children to read, the detailed attention to children’s reading in this advice suggests a very different message. The publishers and marketers of parenting magazines and books were aware that raising a child who could read before the age of seven was a significant marker of social status for parents and an indication of good mothering. The representation of reading in advice as a private performance and an individual achievement reinforced this status, even as the same advice frowned upon “competitive” parents who pressured their children. This tension between the social status accrued to the parents of “good” readers, and advice to support but not pressure children in this process, is perhaps most stark in the work of Glenn Doman.