“Literacy” in the Nineteenth Century was overwhelmingly represented as book reading, but this reading had social, more than didactic purposes, as in the “family social reading” in which family members and friends read aloud to one other. The ideal of the mother-child bedtime story would not appear until the 1950s in literacy advice, amidst concern for the “reading culture crisis” and the implications of more culturally diverse classrooms for “reading standards.” This led to contradictory advice. Children’s reading abilities were considered an indication of women’s mothering practices. However, mothers were told not to actually teach their children to read nor to interfere in this process because this was the job of professional teachers and mothers could do much damage.

The study documented a dramatic increase in the quantity of literacy advice from the late 1970s to 2000s in mainstream best-selling child raising texts in general, and literacy advice in particular. This accompanied a shift toward higher expectations for children’s literacy attainment at the onset of schooling. By contrast, the late 1960s and 1970s witnessed a slump, or decline in literacy advice in the selected sources, a feature perhaps of the intense social debate about the purposes of schools and the roles of women in North American society. The study revealed how these broader social contexts shaped the content of literacy advice, but also how that content was “normed” (Edmonston, 2001) over time through inter-textual relationships among institutions, individuals and readers. This had the effect of reproducing mothering discourses even when social contexts rendered these discourses obsolete or untenable.

For example, discourse strategies normalized English-speaking upper- and middle-class, nuclear families as providing the ideal setting for supporting children’s literacy. As noted at various points in the analysis, literacy advice was powerfully invested in maintaining and privileging this particular literacy “habitus” as both normal and natural. Indeed it also implied that if families and cultural groups somehow changed or transformed their literacy habitus to resemble that of the middle-classes, they too could benefit from the social and economic privileges enjoyed by the middle classes. Since habitus is acquired in the “process of living our everyday lives” (Lemke, 1995, p. 33), discourse strategies in literacy advice worked to promote uniformity in “everyday” practices of literacy.