Continuing a trend begun in the early 1980s, more educators and lay experts (notably children’s authors) began writing parent manuals on reading and promoting family literacy in the 1990s.¹⁶ In Canada, this trend took place within the context of the “Common Sense Revolution” ushered in by the Conservative Government elected in Ontario in 1995 (Dehli, 1996). The proponents of this “revolution” evoked a mythical and romanticized view of the past where family harmony, economic prosperity, and fiscal responsibility were believed to have prevailed in simpler times when everyone just used their “common sense.”

The ideal of promoting literacy in family settings became a cornerstone of these social and educational visions in the USA, the United Kingdom, and Canada. The potential for understanding family settings as a lens into the socio-cultural nature of literacy, which was introduced by the social turn in literacy research described in Chapter Six, was all but erased as the concept of “family literacy” became associated not with a socio-cultural phenomenon but an educational intervention involving parents and their young children. The following definition, from the National Council for Family Literacy in the USA, reflected this shift, and the dominant mission of family literacy in policy and programs in North America: “At NCFL we prefer to define family literacy as a holistic, family focused approach, targeting at-risk parents and children with intensive, frequent, and long term educational and other services” (Darling, 1993, p. 3). Indeed the terms “intensive,” “frequent,” and “long term” denoted the application of educational interventions to interrupt the “cycle of illiteracy” that proponents of this approach believed was the cause of children’s academic difficulties in school.

¹⁶ See, for example, Paul Kropp (1995), a Canadian children’s author who became a promotional speaker for literacy groups, a contributor to Parents Today magazine on reading and schooling issues, and an advocate, in the late 1990s, for “boys’ literacy. Robert Munsch is the family literacy advocate for ABC Canada, a corporate funded literacy promotion agency based in Ottawa, Canada.