This connects discourse strategies to the political economy of literacy advice. There is little to be gained by health and education institutions which produce literacy advice, or by the market forces that distribute it, in assuring families that the practices and values they bring to literacy are valuable and sufficient, or that there are multiple paths to literacy in the context of diverse family and caregiving structures. As pointed out above, the goal of advice is to maintain the status quo, and to reduce diversity, in order to minimize the real changes that institutions would need to make to reduce their dependency on women’s domestic literacy work. This may account for the fact that literacy advice was always located in the context of a new or impending social crisis. There was the crisis of new immigration and its threats to Western European settlers in North America in the late Nineteenth Century, the “reading culture crisis” in the 1950s, and the crisis in the family in the 1970s. Then there was the literacy crisis of the 1980s, and the crisis in skills and knowledge to perform in a “new knowledge economy” in the 2000s. As Luke (2001) pointed out, the marketisation of public education relies upon the continual creation of a “crisis” as a means for creating a demand for new pedagogical products. Markets place us in a continual state of “lack” and “becoming” (Luke, 2001, 8). Advice to young parents in particular, is based on another social marketing reality. As Anne Hulbert (2003) observed, the focus on the early years as a determinant phase in children’s lives is a field of research that is easily converted into a strategy to gain mothers’ attention at a time in the family life course when they are most likely to be open to advice, and to regulation.

There is a reason child-rearing advisers have always proclaimed the importance of the first three years, and it is not based on the latest brain research. Nor is it just the obvious fact, as Brazelton puts it, that “these ages … are almost the last ones in which parents can expect to play an undiluted role”. It is that the first three years are the experts’ best chance, too to make a mark on parents. (Hulbert, 2003, p. 370)

Once children have started school, the second child is born, and the complexities of daily life and its influences on children are recognized, parents soon realize there is no “fine-tuned scheme for shaping futures” (Hulbert, 2003, p. 370) in literacy advice, or in homes.