While the thesis is concerned with literacy advice to mothers, the scope of advice texts selected and the themes under study within the texts includes child-raising topics that contributes to the construction of the “mother-as-teacher” in broader terms. Topics such as language development, women’s organization of children’s and domestic time and space, and preparing for and supporting schooling, were included in the advice texts analyzed where these were deemed central practices for supporting children’s literacy development. The reason for this inclusion was both pragmatic and strategic. The vast majority of advice texts that refer to literacy are actually concerned primarily with children’s reading rather than writing, and, as I argue, promoting children’s reading ability has itself become increasingly embedded in general child-raising practices. Indeed, it is a finding of this thesis that advice to mothers about literacy is rarely only about their children’s reading and writing development — it is also fundamentally about the regulation of mothering practices.
Advice to mothers supporting their children’s literacy development represents a key strategy on the part of educational and governmental institutions to address persistent gaps in literacy achievement across socio-economic groups. However, findings of this study suggest that dominant advice discourses may in fact contribute to persistent gaps in achievement by privileging notions of ideal families and ideal literacies, while ignoring the material conditions of real families’ lives and the literacy practices embedded in them.
This study also opens avenues to consider family literacy programs and policies not just as innovative strategies for promoting academic success. They may also be considered as one of many maternal education campaigns in recent North American social history aimed at achieving desired social reforms. In this case, the reforms are in support of neo-liberal policies of parental responsibility for their children’s schooling success (David, 1998).