This description contrasted with a successful little boy, Thomas, whose mother was a former teacher and his father a doctor. Thomas’ mother took time to discover and stimulate his interests. She limited his TV watching and “took him to the library every day for an hour” (Trelease, 1995, p. 23). As a result, Thomas earned a degree from a community college one month before finishing high school. The moral of this tale, argued Trelease, is that “anyone who waits for the government or local schools to break the cycle of inequality within our communities or homes is going to have a long wait … but if you start in the home and begin with reading, you can change it in less than a lifetime” (1995, p. 23). Trelease highlighted the increased importance of mothers’ domestic literacy practices, as a cause of (and solution to) social inequality in the 1990s and 2000s. Pamphlets and promotional materials from the NCFL’s “The Power of Family Literacy” (2002) campaign contained photographs and images that reinforced this message. In these texts, family literacy is a mother — usually a black or Hispanic mother — who, with six children, will somehow return to school and get a well-paying job that will keep her and her family off welfare. Promotional materials explaining the “power” of family literacy claimed:

It’s about Sara who takes all six of her children to the front door one day and points to the mailbox. She tells them to look at that mailbox. She says there will never be another welfare check in that mailbox, because she is going to school right beside them. (NCFL, 2002)

Family literacy programs, according to that text, help women like Sara become good, responsible mothers. The practice of targeting family literacy policies towards those who are often most marginalized from the school system is another way in which families with the least resources and representation in the school system are encouraged to “take responsibility” for their situation.

Home visits emerged in the family literacy movement as an effective means to “reach hard to reach” families with important family literacy messages. This practice arose out of community health care models in small and remote communities where home visits are an important way to meet the health care needs of individual families who cannot drive long distances to urban centres. Often in such settings, educators and/or health care workers live and work in the same community with the families they serve and home visits are seen as natural and appropriate extensions of community solidarity. However, the meaning and context of home visits depends largely on their purpose and the relationship between the visitor and host. The following list-serv message from an Even Start educator in the United States, for whom regular home visits to participating families are mandatory, draws attention to the fine line between the use of home visits to reach out to isolated families and build interpersonal relationships, and the role of home visits in breaching family privacy by promoting surveillance and compliance.