Chapter Five begins the analysis of contemporary advice texts, focusing mainly on the years 1950 to 1970, with a brief but instructive review of literacy advice in the early- to middle-Twentieth Century. This chapter considers the discursive strategies that normalized the sensitive, stay-at-home mother as a necessary precondition for children’s success as readers. It is here that the ideals of intensive mothering become more systematically cemented into literacy advice. This chapter also documents the evolving role of mothers as para-professional reading teachers who supported, but never intervened, in the school teachers’ role as reading expert.

Chapter Six explores literacy advice in the 1970s to 1980s, a period which marks a notable shift and break in literacy advice discourses. In education policy and advice at this time, the need for extensive services for families appears more present than advice and policy about extensive mothering. This is a situation which would change rather abruptly in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Interestingly, it is only during the 1980s that the term literacy itself enters advice texts as an object of considerable media and policy attention in the context of the “literacy crisis” and the arrival of the “Information Age.” In this study, the emphasis in the analysis is on the ways in which the perceived literacy crisis was linked to concerns surrounding changes in the ideal nuclear family and women’s participation in the outside labour force. Such advice recruited earlier discursive constructs of intensive mothering to create family literacy advice and programming built around “normal families” and gendered divisions of labour.

Chapter Seven considers literacy advice to mothers in the 1990s and early 2000s against the backdrop of neo-liberal and neo-conservative social and economic reforms and the burgeoning family literacy movement. Of particular interest in this chapter is the uniformity of advice across a very broad range of texts. Here the theme of domestic literacy as a performative practice — a powerful social code — is crystalized, as increasing attention is paid in advice to the privileging of reading storybooks to children as a requirement for academic success, rather than as a culturally-embedded, meaning making practice. A second theme in this chapter is the surveillance of low income and minority mothers’ literacy and parenting practices as children’s literacy knowledge is equated with potential “risks” and financial costs.

Chapter Eight discusses the major themes that arise in addressing the questions guiding the research. It considers the implications of the research findings for current literacy education policy and practices, pointing to new alternative discourses and social practices that hold promise for embracing diverse forms of mothering and literacy practices within institutional and social settings.