Of interest in the above passage is discursive strategy of distinguishing some children from others — there are those who watch TV and those who have been taught to love reading before school. The advice also distinguished (along the lines of Spock) between teaching children to read (not recommended before school) and teaching children to love reading. Parents were expected to intuitively understand and appreciate the difference. Learning to read was deemed “easy,” requiring no more than some primers and flashcards, but it was implied that children who love to read require a qualitatively different kind of experience — and the kind of parenting practices that will provide this. The authors offered extensive advice for how to “nurture” and embody such a love of reading that, while more detailed, varied little from the basic pieces of advice documented earlier in this chapter, and in previous chapters. From the perspective of embodied literacy practice, of interest was the recurrent them of “being cuddly.” “Children who come to associate reading with the cozy comfort of being curled up on Mommy or Daddy’s lap, almost always enjoy reading books later on” (Eisenberg, et al., 1994b, p. 102). Reading was associated with bonding, security, and the “sensitive mothering.” It becomes the main organizing principle of domestic life:

Children of readers are much more likely to end up being readers themselves. Try to set time aside each day for your reading -- even if you manage just a page or two at a sitting. If you can’t fit this into your schedule, or if you just don’t like to read, make sure your toddler sees you reading at least occasionally. Make reading material a fixture in your home; keep a book by your bedside (“This is Mommy’s [or Daddy’s] book”), magazines on the coffee table, newspapers next to your armchair. And minimize the amount of television that is watched by your toddler and by you. Studies have shown that families who watch less, read more (Eisenberg, Murkoff & Hathaway, 1994b, p.102).

This image of “a fixture” is interesting. The practices recommended lead one to wonder whether for the authors, reading is about making meaning from the world, or about the performance of “good parenting” and culturally appropriate practices. Indeed, reading the sections on “learning” and “reading” in these manuals, readers could be forgiven for thinking that reading to children and supporting their literacy is all mothers do. In The Mother of All Toddler Books (2002), Douglas, a Canadian author of child raising manuals, opened her five page section on reading with the cliché, “one of the greatest gifts a parent can give a child is a love of reading” (p. 134). Describing all the skills children learn by being read to, Douglas’ advice was firmly grounded in the assumption that “encouraging a lifelong love of reading” was a mother’s work. The icons and asides that decorated the text shared “mom’s the word” anecdotes, this one provided by “Rita, 37, mother of two”: