Indeed, as Larson (2001) has observed, “selling reading” became a new marketing opportunity for a whole range of social commentators, school teachers, and parenting experts in the late 1970s and 1980s, producing for the market a wave of “How-to-Books” and magazine articles directed at parents on the importance of teaching their children to read. Titles such as Your Child Can Read and You Can Help (Erwin, 1976), Help Your Child to Read: New Ways to Make Learning Fun (Forgan, 1975), Teach Your Child to Read in Sixty Days (Ledson, 1975), and Parents: Help Your Child Become a Better Reader (Wiesendanger & Birlem, 1982) suggested that, at least in the minds of commercial publishers and education institutions such as the International Reading Association (IRA), the Home and School Parent Teacher Associations, and the desires of the purchasing public, responsibility for teaching children to read had indeed shifted to parents, who required advice to carry out their renewed, if contradictory, roles. Wiesendanger and Birlem (1982) introduced the rationale for their book in this way:

Unfortunately, for years parents have been told not to interfere with their child’s learning. Parents have been afraid to help their children for fear they might damage anything that has been done in the schools. Recently, however, this viewpoint has changed. … Currently, the prevailing viewpoint is that parents should help their kids in any what that is possible, and that means that parents should work directly with their children. First, there is a feeling of closeness of warmth that is shared when a parent spend time with his child. [S]econd, children make the greatest progress when being tutored by their own parents. (Wiesendanger & Birlem, 1982, p. iv)

Fortunately for these writers, they did not need to provide detailed evidence to support their claims that children do better when taught by their parents. A generation of children and parents raised on Spock’s advice were told just the opposite. What was evident, however, was that a new generation of advice supporting parental involvement in reading had begun and research would be found to support it. Indeed, most books and articles on children’s reading followed a similar formula. The text opened with a discussion of the new-found importance of the parent’s role in helping children learn to read. There was often a requisite chapter or section on the threats of television to children’s reading and advice for controlling TV watching in the home, as well as how to choose and share storybooks with children. The importance of promoting children’s emotional security, and the connections between this and children’s success as readers, constituted another common theme. Prominent in advice was the view that mothers in particular should see themselves as co-learners with their children, with a commitment to developing the new skills and abilities now required to support their children’s reading. This impetus to self-regulation was supported in part by providing mothers with checklists. In an invitation for mothers to measure themselves against criteria for appropriate domestic pedagogy, Erwin, a teacher, described what she looked for when visiting her students’ homes: