But discourse strategies in literacy advice also worked to maintain the privileged status of this “normal” family by differentiating its audience along class lines. For example, while the primary message to “read twenty minutes to your child everyday” became the dogma of literacy advice in the 1990s, for middle-class families, literacy advice also began to include topics of school choice, the importance of monitoring their children’s teachers, and finding new ways to stimulate their children through home schooling. This pattern of directing different advice to different families is becoming more prevalent. Some families receive reader-friendly posters that prescribe: “Read to your children for twenty minutes a day, four times a week. Make the time. It’s your responsibility. If you do your part, we’ll do ours” (Regional Reading Council, 2005). While this blunt message is published in newspapers and on school bulletin boards, the Canadian Council on Learning distributed its advice to parents via email messages notifications of the latest “evidence-based” research on early literacy. Here parents are informed that “a shift towards greater and more structured in-home teaching is taking hold within families of young children” (Canadian Council on Learning, 2006). The study announced that, “laying the foundation for children’s literacy isn’t simply a matter of reading them storybooks in their earliest years. There are many more things parents can do to ensure their preschoolers get off to a good start on the road to speaking, listening, and reading” (Canadian Council on Learning, 2006, p. 1). While some parents are begged to read to their children 20 minutes a day, others are informed that story book reading is indeed not enough to promote their children’s success in school, and the more their homes operate like schools, the better will be their children’s chance of success. Hidden in these threats and promises are the implications of this advice for the domestic literacy work of mothers. This suggests that discourse strategies that normalize class and cultural advantage cannot be extricated from strategies that normalize gender inequality. This connects to McClintock’s (1995) observation:

Race, gender and class are not distinct realms of experience, existing in splendid isolation from each other; nor can they be simply yoked together retrospectively like armatures of Lego. Rather, they come into existence in and through relation to each other — if in contradictory and conflicting ways. (p. 356)

Silences surrounding the diverse conditions in which domestic literacy work takes place were thus powerful dividing strategies evident throughout this analysis. If time and space for prolonged homework supervision was an essential domestic literacy task, then how were families living in one room, working sixteen hours a day, to take up this advice? These silences served to define “good mothering” and thus to construct mothering that was somehow insufficient, once again reinforcing “how we are different to they” (Robbins, 2004, p. 82). Literacy advice changed to fit new circumstances, but it never altered the fundamental link between mothering, literacy, and the reproduction of social advantage and disadvantage.