In this study I analyzed almost 300 advice texts published over a period of one hundred and fifty years. It was not an exhaustive account of all the advice texts published, nor a full explanation of how we got to the present dispensation in which mothers are asked to recite pasta alphabet letters as they feed them to their children. However, bringing together the traditionally distinct bodies of literature surrounding reading pedagogy with feminist histories and sociologies of childhood and schooling provided new insights into the discontinuities, and perhaps more prominently, the continuities in the common sense statement that “parents are their children’s first and most important educators” and the mother is the parent most suited to this role. This study found that the discursive formations of intensive mothering, domestic pedagogy, and the normal family are embedded not only in child-raising ideals, but also in the ideals surrounding mothers’ and children’s literacy practices. Often represented as a skill to be acquired, it became clear that literacy practices desired in young children were discursively linked to desirable mothering practices. “Good” mothering was inseparable from “good” literacy. This also suggests the ways in which reading pedagogy and the broader concept of “family literacy” is also profoundly a gendered practice of power, deeply embedded in its own, perhaps unexamined, cultural practices, and social goals. The historical lens provided in this thesis has made visible how contemporary views of literacy as pivotal to children’s academic achievement and social and economic success are associated with social visions that often have more to do with the regulation of mothering and family life than with promoting reading and writing.

Literacy advice from each of the periods examined in this study continues to yield many more insights and arguments. One of the biggest challenges in conducting this analysis was to decide when it was time to stop. But Phillips and Jorgenson (2002) remind us that “the end point of discourse analysis comes not because the research stops finding anything new, but because the researcher judges that the data are sufficient to make and justify an interesting argument” (p. 74). That time has come. In this final chapter I first reflect upon the research methods and lenses adopted in this study, the limitations of the study, and implications of these for the research findings. I then describe the research findings in light of the questions that guided this study. Within this discussion, I also identify the effects of mothering discourses in literacy advice on issues of gender and equality of education opportunity. Next, I identify new themes in the research that deepen and extend the original research topic. I close with some thoughts on the implications of this study for classroom practice, literacy and social policy, and for further research.