Previous chapters have described the close connection that has been made historically between mothering and children’s literacy. But as the forum described above suggests, this link took on new meaning in the 1990s as literacy came to be regarded as the social lever shaping children’s social, academic, and financial “success.” This is captured in the announcement by then Minister of State for Early Childhood in British Columbia that “family literacy programs prepare families to prepare their children for success in life — they address parents’ own literacy needs and their need to be able to help their children” (Bond, January, 2002).

This chapter documents the explosion of literacy advice to mothers in the 1990s as a product of the intersection of the social forces associated with education policy reform begun with the A Nation at Risk report in 1983. Of importance was the “discovery” of the literacy problem in Western industrialized countries and the fear that more children entering school were not equipped to attain the levels of literacy required of them by the “new knowledge economy.” In addition, a wave of parent education resources emerged commercially and in the public sector to bolster education reforms designed to institutionalize the “parent as educator” model as a key pillar of school accountability. This model implied both a re-dedication to supporting school readiness in the home from birth upward, and to “getting involved and staying involved” in children’s schools. Significant as well were the implications for parent education of the “new” brain research, whose slogan, “the early years last forever” (Canadian Institute for Child Health, 1997) was designed to grab parents’ attention and direct them to attend more closely to the quality of their children’s early literacy experiences, linked as they were to their long-term life chances.

Drawing on the conceptual framework described in Chapter Two, this chapter continues the analysis of literacy advice to parents offered in best-selling child-raising texts available in Canada, as well as popular parenting magazines. I contend with the vast increase in the amount of literacy advice directed to mothers, as well as its provenance from a diversity of new sources such as public health agencies, news agencies, toy companies, service clubs, and even national professional hockey and basketball teams.

The Internet emerged as a vital publishing source in the 1990s and represented a significant change to the means for distributing and accessing literacy advice to mothers. One has only to “google” “children’s reading” or “advice about children’s reading” to find thousands of sites offering (much the same) literacy advice to parents. However, the Internet also provides new insights into how mothers negotiate and resist literacy advice, constituting a source of data that was not available for analysis in previous chapters. A summary of the themes and discourse strategies associated with literacy advice in the 1990s and early 2000s is presented in Table 6.