Nineteenth-century connections between reading and the body contained in the axiom that “you are what you read” were particularly powerful in shaping the view of mothers’ and children’s literacy practices as dangerous. Gleason (2001) argued that attending to embodied regulation, or the regulation of children’s and adult’s bodies in discourses, offers insights into “educational, cultural, historical, and institutional practices...” (p. 191). There are many examples in the literacy advice texts of embodied regulation. Indeed it was primarily women’s bodies that defined the ideals of the domestic sphere, of intimacy, nurturing, bonding, and caring, the “nest within a nest” (Hall, 1904), which became intimately associated with children’s literacy acquisition. Effective story book reading is said to occur when a child sits on his or her mothers’ lap, her arms wrapped lovingly around the child. It happens when mothers talk to their babies as they are breast feeding, or model appropriate literacy by “letting their children see them reading.” There were few examples in literacy advice for teaching children literacy by work associated with men, such as unfolding a car engine or playing soccer. One potential explanation for this may be the naturalization of the female body as a site for nurturing, and thus literacy.

Beliefs that women's bodies were naturally nurturing gave rise to associations between story book reading and mother-child bonding. This theme entered literacy advice in the 1950s with the introduction of the concepts of “attachment theory” and the “sensitive” mother to child psychology, and were taken up in emergent literacy research in the 1970s and 1980s that linked children’s literacy acquisition to child development more generally. Literacy research designs and methods have contributed to the normalization of this idyllic literacy image by studying mother-child story book reading practices for clues to “effective” (and ineffective) domestic literacy practices. As this study has shown, “read to your child” is one of the most common pieces of literacy advice even though the efficacy of the practice for children’s schooling success has been questioned. For example, in their meta-analysis of empirical studies of storybook reading, Sarborough and Dobrich (1994) concluded that story-book reading contributed much less to children's early literacy development than is believed. Indeed, Anderson, Anderson and Shapiro (2005) found that parent-child storybook reading interactions did not predict the acquisition of reading skills that is often believed, and that many other practices in the home and community environment account for children’s literacy knowledge. Gregory, Long and Volk (2004) similarly found that social interactions involving literacy with siblings, grandparents and others caregivers and community members constituted important opportunities for children to be “apprenticed” into school and community literacies.