Mothers were provided with detailed information on the latest in reading research and equally detailed instructions on the complex process of choosing picture books appropriate for their children. Her instructions bear quoting in their entirety as they will be reproduced in similar forms by other child-raising experts and parenting magazines that join in the promotion of pre-school children’s reading in the 1980s.

He needs three kinds of book [sic]. Picture books are important. By “reading” pictures he prepares himself for reading words later on. Both are symbols after all, the words are just a further abstraction from the pictures. Look at them with him. Help him to mine each illustration of its last detail. How many birds are in that tree? What is the little boy in the background doing? Try to find him books with big, colorful, detailed illustrations rather than the sterile conventional A is for Antelope type. Highly illustrated story books are important too. If you chose good ones, he will be able to follow the story you are reading him on the picture pages, or at least stop you in mid-sentence to study the highlights of the plot. You have read about the children getting ready for the party. Now on this page he can study the party itself, discover what the children wore and had for tea….[Y]our books are important too. He needs to get the idea that books are important to you — to the adult world — as well as to children. If you read for pleasure anyway, this will happen automatically. If not, try sometimes to look up the answer to one of his questions in a book, or to find him a picture of something that interests him. Help him to see them as useful as well as fun. (Leach, 1978, p. 432)

This professional-level knowledge of how to choose books, read them to children, and use one’s own time to model literacy behaviour can be seen as disciplinary strategies that have the intended effect of orienting mothers to intensive mothering as a precondition for their children’s literacy development and “success later in life” (Leach, 1978, p. 432). As evidenced in the analysis of Larrick’s (1958; 1964; 1975) literacy advice, the ideal role for mothers as domestic literacy supporters in Leach’s Your Baby and Child was one of a “language learning helper” where a mother’s constant verbal engagement with her child was a prerequisite for the reading skills he would need when he started school. It was also, however, a cultural practice that normalized gender roles in the home and the literacy habitus for the “normal” family. Leach instructed: