I suggest you begin to foster a love of reading and the printed word from the start. By four to six months, you can begin to read to your child. Get thick cardboard books so he can suck on them and drool all over them. Of course he isn’t interested in the pictures or story at this time. But you are laying the groundwork, as he learns to enjoy sitting in your lap, being close to you and sharing this strange picture book in front of you … I’d suggest you read to your child as often as possible, at least once or twice a day. Additionally, reading a bedtime story, or for older children, a chapter a night of a long book, is a wonderful bedtime ritual that promotes warmth, love and imagination. (Spock, 1998, pp. 467–468)

Penelope Leach’s third edition of the popular Baby and Child Care (1997) also featured revisions and extensions to its sections on “reading.” As discussed above, Leach expressed her skepticism of structured early learning experiences and the motivations of parents who pursued them (1979; 1989). In her 1997 edition, she joined Spock in warning parents not to live vicariously through their children, structuring their every minute to “compete” and to “qualify” for the best schools. But she acknowledged that, indeed, one cannot raise toddlers without a view to their future education:

Although our toddler seems to be on the go all day, it’s important to her future education that she begin to learn to enjoy play that demands more thought than muscle and to enjoy looking and listening without much doing. It’s adult participation that helps toddlers understand and concentrate. (p. 248)

In this manual, Leach (1997) raised the standard for the attentive adult accompanying the toddler on its linear journey through his or her development tasks. The adult (all the photos in the book picture women with children) was constructed as ready and able to assist the toddler in a more challenging set of development tasks, she argued, than faced the toddlers of the 1970s and 1980s. Thus, in the pragmatic tradition of best-selling, child-raising experts, Leach covered all the bases — responding to parents who are concerned their children have a “head start” in school, and protecting the child (since she still writes from the “child’s point of view”) from undue pressure. And while it was the social concern for the financial and economic consequences of children who did not arrive at school “ready to learn” that drove this advice, an important practice for mothers was to negotiate the fine line between demonstrating appropriate concern for their children’s literacy and school readiness, while not appearing to pressure them or to be “competitive”. These contradictory ideals for domestic literacy were mirrored in Hays’ (1996) observation of the deep cultural contradictions that shape mothering more broadly. Children must be prepared for success in school and in the market place, but they must also remain innocent, and “naturally” children. It is mothers’ domestic literacy task to navigate between these contradictory forces. This attempt to navigate this cultural contradiction represented an enduring but ever stronger theme in child raising advice manuals in the 1990s.