Also excluded in literacy advice was a sense that children could be agents in their own literacy practices. Yet there was everywhere in advice texts evidence that children pursued literacy interests that were connected to social worlds that their parents did not necessarily share. Vincent’s (2000) insights into the socially-situated nature of literacy in the lives of nineteenth-century children sheds light on this. He argued: “What children could obtain from learning to read and write was conditioned by what they thought the process was for, and where it stood in the process of learning and living” (Vincent, 2000, p. 61). A similar lens can be brought to the study of literacy in contemporary children’s lives. As discussed above, one strategy of literacy advice is to produce uniformity — in literacy practices and mothering practices — in the hope that uniformity in parenting and domestic pedagogy would promote uniformity in children’s academic outcomes. But this has the effect of erasing the ways in which social and historical contexts mediate literacies across gender, class, and race, and thus create diverse subject positions for children, just as it does for their parents. Galbraith’s observations with respect to the history of children’s literature, speaks to this:

An ideal reader response cannot be made to stand in for children’ actual reading experiences, that are irretrievable from history by means of current linguistic and cultural theories. The history of children’s literature must be linked to the history of the literary industry and to the agendas of the adults who wrote, produced and bought it. (Galbraith, 1997, p. 4)

Children’s agency as literate subjects with identities and motivations outside their mothers’ role modeling was considered dangerous to their moral and intellectual development and to society’s prospects for achieving its desired social visions. What, when, and how children and mothers read was a constant preoccupation in literacy advice. “Book List” features in magazines constructed ideal “boy” and “girl” readers and promoted ideal literacy as the reading of “good books”. Reading comics, watching TV, or reading and writing on computers were consistently represented as pursuits that took children away from “real” reading. As Gleason (1999) has shown, comic book reading in the 1950s was believed to pose threats to both children’s morality and to the hegemony of the middle class, in ways that draws comparisons between contemporary fears over the effects of email chatting and MSN to children’s “real” reading and civil engagement (Marsh, Brooks, Hughes, Ritchie, Roberts, & Wright, 2005). Evidence suggests that children and youth continued these literacy practices in spite of this advice. However, the possible effect of linking “dangerous” literacies to mothering practices, on children’s views of themselves as readers and on their potential for schooling success cannot be underestimated. For example, in their article “Reading, Homes and Families,” Carrington and Luke (2003) described how teachers of a little girl named Eve ascribed her reading difficulties to the fact that her mother didn’t live with her. Eve’s use of email to connect with her mother was not considered a literacy practice that could contribute to success in school literacy.