This raises the question of how access to “free time,” and control over time in the form of the ever-necessary “flexi-time” job, or the “stay-at-home” parent, constitutes a factor in the reproduction of educational advantage in the present education context that depends increasingly upon domestic literacy work in the home. The focus upon the regulation of domestic time in literacy advice discourses reviewed in this thesis, as well as the insights of Mace (1998) and Walkerdine and Lucey (1989), suggest topics for further study.

What forms of literacy and of mothering are excluded within mothering discourses?

Representations of literacy practices in low-income homes or homes outside of the “normal family” shifted across the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. In the Nineteenth Century there was little in advice to suggest that literacy was at all a part of the daily lives of “pauper” children and their families. Indeed, it was this absence of literacy that legitimized their poverty. “Cottage” families were in some ways idealized, as the family that lived and worked together also “learned” together. Martineau (1848) provided detailed and positive descriptions of literacy practices in “cottage” and “artisan” families that suggested pathways to learning, if not literacy, that were not dependent upon parents’ knowledge of print. She recognized that different lives made for different learning, although this ideal could not stand up to the movement toward democratization and universalization of knowledge in the Twentieth Century. Interestingly, ethnographic literacy studies conducted in the later Twentieth Century that documented rich forms of literacy in low-income homes (Heath, 1983, Taylor, 1983) were ignored in mainstream literacy advice that continued to proceed on the basis that without the intervention of parent education by professionals, literacy practices in low-income homes either did not exist or were counter-productive to the needs of schooling. The work of Trelease (1982, 1985) reinforced this message in his detailed description of the “chaotic” home life of a little African American boy named Darnell, who was raised by his grandmother.

This strategy of unfavourably comparing low-income, African American and/or new immigrant families’ literacy practices to those of “normal” families shifted in the late 1990s, when all families were considered to have “strengths” (Auerbach, 1995). The effect of this “strengths discourse” was that families with fewer resources needed to try harder to build on their strengths by practicing the discourse’s intensive mothering, domestic pedagogy, and the normal family regardless of the social context in which mothering and literacy was practiced.