Another key strategy in the normalization of discourses of intensive mothering, domestic pedagogy, and the normal family was the regulation of domestic time and space. Literacy advice was focused on ways for mothers to manage her own and her children’s time, and the physical space of the home, so that literacy, most often defined as homework, story book reading, and “doing chores with mom,” could take place. Recent studies and reflections on the nature of time offer support for the finding that the regulation of domestic time is a powerful strategy not only in regulating literacy practices but also in normalizing a middle class literacy “habitus”. For example, Daly (1996) defined time as both a resource and a currency. He distinguished between process time and linear time (pp. 10–11) to show how time is experienced in different ways, by different families, in different settings. For example, process time is associated with the work involved in caring for children and housework. It can take hours to feed and bathe a baby depending on its mood, hunger, whether there is food in the house, if the family has a car to go shopping, or must take a bus, if there are two parents in the family or one, and so on. Linear time is associated with chronological time, the measuring out of hours and minutes according to the clock. Linear time is associated with efficiencies: If mothers manage linear time then they can save time, find quality time, avoid wasting time, and hence enjoy that time to read to their children.

Yet there is a conflict between the process time internal to families in caring for children and the various and competing linear time demands of institutions such as work and school that include the need to “read to your child (preferably each one separately) for twenty minutes a day.” Pat Guy, introduced in Chapter One, and the mother and Kindergarten teacher introduced in Chapter Seven, were negotiating the conflict between the process time of mothering and the linear timetables of getting children to school (on time), supervising homework, reading to children at bedtime, making time for the library, and so on. Yet often the institutional response is that if parents really care they will “make time” (Trelease, 1995). Mothering discourses construct the “good mother” as one who is able to conform to the expectations of linear time. Relevant here is the observation by Walkerdine and Lucey (1989) that time is experienced differently by middle-class and working-class women. Mace (1998) pointed out that this recognition of the different ways in which families experience time provides us with a “picture of the differences between mothers in different circumstances” (p. 19). Mace built on this insight in the following:

The idea of a ‘natural’ mother capable of producing ‘normal’ children is founded on a failure to recognize different material conditions. Mothers in the middle-class households appear to have more time to talk to their four year- old children; but the appearance is an illusion. Working class mothers, with unskilled and low paid jobs and no-one at home but them to do the housework, are “chained to time” — hence their apparent “lack” of time to do the sensitive mothering which educationalists require of them. (p. 19)