It is a Thursday evening in late November 2001 in Vancouver, British Columbia. A panel has been organized by the local teacher’s association to discuss ways of involving parents more in their children’s literacy development, in the years before and during formal schooling. The panel includes family literacy educators, school board employees, teachers and librarians. In attendance are parents, teachers, parent advisory council representatives, and local community educators. They are critical of the recent wave of cuts to schools, concerned about growing poverty among families, and eager to find new ways to reach out to families and improve educational opportunities for low-income children.
One of the panel participants completes her discussion of strategies for supporting low-income parents to be more active in their children’s learning. She highlights the importance of visiting people in their homes, making face to face contact, accompanying mothers to the library, reading with them and their children in the Laundromat. A woman in the audience speaks up: She is a kindergarten teacher working part time and has two small children, one a baby, the other three years old. She wants to be honest — she just doesn’t get time to go to the library. Juggling work and child care, and just keeping the household going, is all she can manage. She wants to know how others manage to find the time to read to their children, to do all the things she knows she is supposed to be doing for their literacy and their brain development, because she is simply overwhelmed.
Her comments are met with a brief silence. Members of the panel
begin to offer her time management strategies: “It doesn’t take
much — just 15 minutes a day.”
“Do literacy activities while
you are shopping, doing laundry, riding in the car.”
“Try to have
fun, don’t worry, make it part of your life.”
The family literacy forum described above, one of many that took place in
communities across Canada and the United Sates in the 1990s and into the Twenty-first
Century, was organized to assist parents. But this exchange can also be read
as a “moment in the practice of discourse of mothering”
(Smith &
Griffith, 2005), in which one mother struggled to negotiate the conflict between
institutionally-driven mothering discourses and her lived experience. No one
on the panel was able to suggest that someone else (perhaps the children’s
father?) share in supporting her children’s literacy development. There
was little discursive space to consider the factors that underpin the time crunch
she experienced in a society that expects women to contribute meaningfully to
the economy through work outside the home, while meeting the increasing expectations
for her children’s development in the early years. Feeling overwhelmed?
“Try harder”
was the inevitable answer.