As surely as you are your child’s first and most influential teacher, your child’s ideas about education and its significance begin with you. You must be a living example of what you expect your children to honor and emulate. Moreover, you bear a responsibility to participate actively in your child’s education. You should encourage more diligent study and discourage satisfaction with mediocrity and the attitude that says “let it slide”; monitor your child’s study; encourage good study habits; encourage your child to take more demanding rather than less demanding courses; nurture your child’s curiosity, creativity and confidence; and be an active participant in the work of the schools. (United States National Commission for Education, 1983, p. 35).

In the Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries, mothers, as well as other caregivers, were deemed appropriate role models for their children’s literacy by virtue of their moral standing and their proximity to childlike emotional states. In the 1950s and 1960s, the dominant literacy advice discourses warned mothers against being “too competitive” or pressuring their children to read too early. Reading experts provided mothers with advice based on the assumption that mothers required considerable professional support and services to carry out their domestic literacy work effectively. However, in the early 1980s, it was the mother who didn’t read to her child, or couldn’t read well, who was considered the greatest “risk” to the project of schooling and economic reform. This discursive shift was noted by Flesch (1981) in his revised edition of Why Johnny (Still) Can’t Read. A chapter of this book appeared in Family Circle magazine in 1979, and the sequel to the 1955 Why Johnny Can’t Read was published in 1981. While the bulk of the book was dedicated to reiterating his arguments for a “phonics first” program, he also dedicated one chapter to criticizing the reliance of the “look-say” or whole language movement upon parents’ teaching in the home. Noting that this “look-say” research rarely mentions fathers’ role in teaching children to read, he argued that a “phonics first” approach need not rely on mothers’ work in the home and had similar results for children of all socio-economic groups. Perhaps this argument explains the enduring appeal of Flesch’s advice among parents to the present day. Moreover, his main message remained that parents should not trust teachers or schools, a message that connected powerfully to the message of A Nation at Risk.