By the end of the 1970s, shifts in advice, and indeed in services available to mothers and families, suggested that social malaise surrounding changes in the family, and indeed economic changes that placed in question policies associated with the social welfare state, resuscitated mothering discourses. Indeed, they had never really gone away. Women’s domestic literacy work was re-discovered as important, though always potentially dangerous. Indeed, domestic literacy work was best performed discreetly: the “natural” abilities of middle-class parents to raise literate children meant that there should be no evidence of pressuring children to read. However, the literacy work of mothers deemed “at risk” of passing on “illiteracy” to their children became a topic of high exposure in the media, and was the rationale for the family literacy interventions created for women in the middle of the 1980s. The dominant view, though one strongly contested by many educators, was that low-literate mothers were a danger to their children and the inherent deficits in their domestic literacy work was a cause for societal concern (Auerbach, 1989)

The recruitment of the domestic sphere, and the focus on mothering practices, as the “magic bullet” for explaining children’s academic success, coincided neatly with a political and economical climate that was moving away from the concept of the “public” in education. Discourses of intensive mothering, domestic pedagogy, and the normal family were recruited in new ways to bolster such reforms. Mothers were always deemed responsible for children’s emotional health and happiness; it took a small but significant shift to extend these responsibilities to the inculcation of more complex literacy skills, learned earlier in the child’s life, with much higher stakes with regard to the academic and social consequences of not possessing school literacy knowledge in Kindergarten.

This analysis also suggests that guilt, shame, and fear remained strategies to normalize the perspective, inherent to intensive mothering, that biological mothers are best suited and responsible for domestic literacy, both in the home and in the public sphere of supporting libraries and schools. This supports the contention in this thesis that in literacy advice discourses, as in discourses more generally, a good deal more than language is present. Indeed it seems that literacy advice was often more directed to regulating mothering practices than to creating vibrant and inclusive literacy cultures. One conclusion that can be drawn here is that even as the 1980s ushered in the need for more complex and diverse uses for literacy, the representations of literacy in mainstream popular advice and media became increasingly confined to the iconic image of the mother-child literacy dyad.

The next chapter follows the trajectory of this literacy advice as it intersects with the neo-liberal economic policies and the “new” early brain research of the 1990s and 2000s. This chapter will focus not only on mothering discourses in literacy advice, but how these discourses were shaped by people’s resistance to them.