The purpose of Trelease’s book was to encourage parents to read aloud to children to “awaken their sleeping imaginations and improve their deteriorating language skills” (p. 11). His approach required of parents a desire to examine their parenting practices, their use of family time, and their commitment to their children, as well as to hone their read-aloud skills. Based on his visits to primary classrooms in the United States, he cited a dramatic decline in reading and literacy in the US since the 1960s that he hoped, through his book, could be reversed as parents, teachers, and librarians returned to the “old practice” of reading to children, and more so, make that reading “a habit.” Trelease did not provide evidence that children’s language skills were deteriorating. But Trelease emphasized this point nevertheless, connecting it to an issue that was a social concern: the quality of family life.

Like many reading advice books and literacy research, Trelease drew on his own experience as a parent to produce advice and models for other parents to emulate. He maintained that all it took to turn children into successful people who liked to read was fifteen minutes a day of a parent reading one-to-one with each child in the family. Drawing upon psychologist Jerome Kagan’s views on how to reverse children’s “verbal shortcomings”, Trelease recommended “intensified one-to-one attention,” emphasizing that “somewhere in that seven-day week, there must be time for your child to discover the special-ness of you, one-on-one even if only once or twice a week” (Trelease, 1982, p. 32). Indeed, an important theme in Trelease’s advice was to encourage parents to manage their time better: “I know first-hand how much time is wasted in a typical family day” (p. 26).

Quoting Dr. Brazelton, Trelease reminded parents that this focus on reading was not about promoting skills or intelligence, but rather a higher quality of learning in the home and at school. The reward of this learning, however, was children who naturally “teach themselves to read,” and children who were good readers were associated with parents who made time to read one-to-one with each children regularly, limited TV, made reading exciting (as exciting as TV) and supplied children with lots of fascinating books appropriate to their gender, age, and interests. Children’s struggles with reading were attributed to the neglect or ignorance of their parents. This dividing strategy, between children who are read to at home and those who are not, and between the children who get “one-on-one” attention and those who didn’t, rendered invisible the other forms of domestic pedagogy that need to be in place in order for that “15 minutes a day” to translate into years of academic success and national prosperity. From a multi-vocal analysis, Trelease’s emphasis on “making time,” “wasting time,” and “how little time” it takes to enjoy reading, suggested that indeed parents, even those who had a husband or wife to share the load, complained that their lives did not permit the kind of time and attention that was required to support their children’s schooling, not to mention their country’s economic health and prosperity. He described a conversation with a mother who came up to him after one of his presentations on reading to say that, “time is a rare commodity in her home. She works, her husband works, they don’t have a lot of time to spare” (p. 35). Trelease recounted that: