“Now”, [sighs Mrs. Danforth], “read, Lucy, and show off all the words you’ve learned.” Lucy was elated, and she missed the edge in Mrs. Danforth’s voice. Doggedly she started to pick out the words she recognized. Mrs. Danforth realized that there were ten or more that Lucy could recognize and name. Although she was impressed, she began to wonder how hard the Camerons were pushing Lucy at this early an age. (Brazelton, 1974, p. 189)

Dr. Brazelton then offered a broad social commentary on the intellectual parents he met in his practice. Here he invoked his status as expert in asking:

Should parents of a child as driven as Lucy encourage her to learn to read? What, if any, are the deficits — particularly if the pressure comes from the child? I hear these questions often in my practice in Cambridge, Mass. where many parents are young intellectuals. In such a setting, their children are exposed to reading as a way of life, and as a way of “being like daddy and mommy.” Many of them show signs of readiness to read as early as two and a half and press their parents to teach them to read and to spell. They memorize familiar words in favourite books. They recognize how rewarded their parents are when they perform in this area. So it’s no wonder they are driven from within….[T]he cycle is set up for performance. (Brazelton, 1974, p. 54)

Interestingly, this “cycle of performance” that Brazelton worried about became the antidote to the intergenerational cycle of illiteracy (Nickse, 1990) that emerged in the 1980s as a threat to the school system and to the economic survival of US and Canada (United States Commission on Reading, 1983). Of interest, too, are the ways in which more antiquated views about reading were recruited in new discourses of ideal mothering. Brazelton wanted parents to “naturally” produce school-ready children without being competitive or blatant about it. His concerns harkened back to discourses of morality and the body of the Nineteenth Century which regarded some reading practices as unhealthy and thus dangerous. In a similar vein to advice documented in Chapter Five, literacy advice was linked to discourses of the body through the psychological lens of mental health, and the silent but strong implication that the blame for Lucy’s interest in reading may be attributed to maternal deprivation: