One of the most important domestic literacy management roles in the 1990s was to worry that your children weren’t learning enough, getting enough stimulation, and weren’t being read to often enough to “love reading” for the rest of their lives. And one of the key roles of child-raising manuals in this decade was to emphasize the importance of early learning to children’s futures, and that parents “shouldn’t worry” in ways that stress out their children. As documented in Chapter Four, a significant theme in literacy advice in the nineteenth century was mothers’ roles as literacy models to their children, and as monitors of their literacy practices. This theme was also prevalent in the 1990s, where every act of mothering was associated with how it supported literacy, and mothers were called upon to monitor the performance of their children’s teachers.
Intensive mothering remained a pre-condition for children’s literacy
development, in the context of continuing malaise over the well being of the
“normal family,” documented in Chapter Six. The “Education
Agenda for the 1990s”
was featured in the September 1989 issue of Chatelaine,
in which Maynard drew on the 1987 Southam Report of the a “literacy crisis”
in Canada (Calamai, 1987), to warn parents that their children were also “at
risk” and required in the future many more skills than schools could provide:
Today Canada competes with Europe and the Pacific Rim, where workers boast better training and frequently for less pay. How can our schools meet the challenge? They will need the three R’s, but they will also need strengths rarely taught in traditional classrooms – creativity, flexibility and teamwork. It all adds up to a monumental job for the schools, but teachers’ energy is stretched to the limit. (Maynard, 1989, p. 57)
Citing immigration, AIDS, drugs, racism and sexual abuse as factors that prevented
schools from “teaching the 3-Rs”
, Maynard created the need
for new kinds of literacy advice, which involved much higher levels of parental
involvement in their children’s schooling. A 1990 Chatelaine
article marked the declaration of the United Nations’ International
Literacy Year with several features on literacy and schooling in Canada.
One such article featured photos of mothers reading to children, “sharing
the pleasure of reading and writing”
(Maynard, 1990a, p. 221). The author
articulated the statements that would come to dominate domestic literacy advice
in the 1990s, that story book reading is natural, it promotes mother-child bonding
and it is essential because teachers can’t do it alone (or can’t
be trusted to do it alone). Maynard claimed that, “Not even the most dedicated
teacher can provide the one-to-one practice that reading fluency demands or
the sustained encouragement that makes writing a source of personal pride”
(Maynard, 1990a, p. 221).This advice contained specific and detailed instructions
for teaching children to read at home. Reading was constructed as a one-to-one
activity requiring mothers’ “undivided attention,”
and mothers
were reminded to also give gifts that promote literacy, and to support “libraries,
schools and community groups”
(Maynard, 1990a, p. 221).