But the NCFL and other literacy organizations also attempted to educate the public about the “cause” of illiteracy. Continuing trends in the late 1980s, typical promotional materials in the 1990s and 2000s targeted illiterate mothers as the cause of the literacy crisis in Canada and the United States. New morality tales were woven into advice, in which women who improved their literacy also improved their mothering. Indeed it was the goal of helping women to mother better that was the focus of many family literacy campaigns. It must be remembered, however, that within the social context of actual family literacy programs, very different and perhaps more empowering messages and literacy practices may have been communicated. The discourses of family literacy advice did not necessarily reflect the practices of family literacy educators.
New child-raising manuals swamped the market in the late 1980s and 1990s, many of which focused on parents’ teaching roles in the home and their responsibilities toward schools. From a multi-vocal perspective, experts seemed to be responding to an assumption among policy makers that homes were void of any social interaction or reading and writing, and that encouraging social interaction, and more particularly, “bonding” through reading, was one way to address both concerns. The publishing industry was only too happy to respond to these perceptions with new advice and educational products.
Trelease published the New Read-Aloud Handbook in 1989, the third edition of his popular reading advice book. In the introduction, Trelease summarized what he believed to be the two biggest problems related to parents and reading in the 1980s:
First, parents most in need of help — young, poor, undereducated mothers and fathers — either won’t or can’t avail themselves of these [reading support] tools; and second, a growing number of affluent, fast-track parents are using education as a pressure cooker to produce instant adults. (Trelease, 1989, p. xxi)