The years 1969 to 1988 were characterized by significant discursive shifts
and discontinuities in literacy advice to mothers. This chapter documents these
shifts in the context of institutional responses to family and social change,
as well as shifts toward social constructivist theories, often referred to as
the “social turn”
(Heath, 1983; Street, 1984; Taylor, 1983)15 in the
study of early childhood and school aged literacy acquisition. Indeed, this
social turn drew attention to the broader class, race, and gender issues that
shaped children’s literacy acquisition, but it also had the paradoxical
effect of drawing greater attention on the part of educators and policy makers
to the family as a context for learning, and, more specifically, to mothering
practices.
It is within the rubric of social and educational change that the volume of literacy advice to Canadian mothers increased markedly in the late 1970s, even as its content remained uniform across a variety of commercial, government and popular texts. Indeed, the analysis in this chapter suggests a discursive shift between the late 1960s and early 1970s, when “extensive services” was the favoured approach for addressing academic achievement gaps among children in public schools, to the 1980s, when “intensive mothering” re-emerged as the desired solution to this persistent issue.
15 The social turn was part of a larger theoretical movement and held that reading and writing only make sense when studied in the context of social and cultural as well as historical, political, and economic practices of which they are but a part.