Within this broad rubric of extensive services to promote language development and learning was an effort to bridge a perceived divide between communities and schools. This was deemed important as educators, policy makers, and popular child raising experts tried to come to terms with academic achievement gaps along class and racial lines. While school-community rapprochement was desirable, what ascended in literacy advice was the parents’ role in bridging the academic achievement gap through domestic literacy work.

Canadian mothers continued to be urged, in the vein of Larrick’s advice (1958; 1964), into more “natural” pedagogic roles that placed the child’s needs at the centre of the home. As the Department of National Health and Welfare of Canada (1971) explained to mothers:

When you understand how your child develops best, you will find plenty of time to give him out of your busy day. The compromises you make now with such things as good housekeeping will pay dividends as your child grows up. You can manage to do a fair job of housekeeping and a good job of raising children, if you are sensible in accepting moderate standards of tidiness and cleanliness. Plan your work around your children’s schedule rather than on insisting on doing things at the usual, conventional time. (Department of National Health and Welfare of Canada, 1971, p. 67–68)

Mothers who directly taught reading at home were still perceived as “competitive,” although Spock changes the term “competitive” to “ambitious” in his 1968 edition of Baby and Child Care, in advising that parents who want to teach “the extra-bright” child to read are probably following their own vicarious desire for success and recognition, rather than their children’s “natural” interests (Spock, 1968; 1977). Brazelton (1974) similarly articulated the social malaise surrounding “pushy parents.” In Toddlers and Parents: A Declaration of Independence, Brazelton discussed reading in the context of the “whole question of early learning” (p. 185). He described a scenario in which Lucy, a three year old, and Mrs. Danforth, her preschool teacher, are locked in a power struggle over Lucy’s desire to read to her classmates. In the middle of story time, Lucy wants to “show off” the words she can read. This interrupts the group, and Mrs. Danforth tells Lucy she can read later; Lucy digs in her heels and screams to be able to read to the group. She is given “time out” and eventually, the power struggle is resolved when the caregiver leaves the other children to play and Lucy is allowed to read to her: