This chapter argues that by the 1990s, advice for supporting infant and pre-school children’s literacy became equated with, and embedded in, the everyday tasks of mothering. Children’s literacy knowledge became a key indicator of emotional and cognitive development, and advice for supporting children’s literacy was developed and distributed by public librarians, public health officials, pre-schools and daycares, teacher associations, toy manufacturers, and the CEOs of major businesses and charity foundations. Highlighted in this analysis were the complex inter-textual relationships that shape literacy advice. Indeed, while much literacy policy and advice originated in the United States, similar policies and advice also circulated in Canada, both by literacy organizations that applied US-based advice to the Canadian context and by Canadians who developed “home grown” literacy advice in magazines and books published in Canada.
As this advice circulated and became increasingly uniform even as it proliferated, new strategies and themes emerged to support the discourses of intensive mothering, domestic pedagogy, and the normal family in the changing economic context of the 1990s. These included the view that children and families could be “at risk” to themselves and to society and that the solution to this was more maternal education for supporting their children’s literacy. In this way, mothers’ and children’s literacy were still thought of as dangerous, though it was mothers’ own literacy skills that were now considered the threat to the visions of the “new knowledge economy”. Working from these assumptions, a variety of interventions, through education and advice, were designed for families, and mostly mothers, of children between the ages of zero to six. In the next and final chapter of this thesis, the implications of these discursive themes and strategies are considered.