Christine could be any mother in a literacy class, a doctor’s office or a parent-teacher meeting. Reminding her that her children are “precious” and require the bond of parent-child reading to succeed in life approaches the slim divide between insensitivity and oppression. This suggests the need for researchers, educators and policy makers to inform themselves, and base their work in, the situated experiences of mothering rather than in the abstract and discursive realm of the ideals they hope to achieve by changing mothering practices to effect a more desirable social future.
As Gee (2001) has suggested, the impetus toward research relevance and the tradition within literacy education to regard instruction (of which advice is one form) as a solution to persistent social issues needs to be reconsidered. Reading storybooks, training parents to support early literacy development and promoting parental involvement in schools may be beneficial to some families in some contexts. But these activities are a small aspect of a much broader cultural struggle over what it means to be a family, what it means to be educated, and what it means to be literate. Researchers, educators, and policy makers need to seem themselves as part of this cultural struggle and not benign commentators of it.
Robbins (2004) concluded in Managing Literacy, Mothering America, that as
easy as it may be to critique the moralistic and effervescent femininity contained
in nineteenth-century advice literature, these writers nevertheless recognized,
and sought to communicate, that women’s domestic literacy work has important
individual and social consequences. The findings of the present study suggest
that from the 1930s, and the institutionalization of universal public education,
women’s domestic literacy work had become invisible as “real work”
in the home, though none the less important for the social and cultural reproduction
of advantage and disadvantage. Robbins hoped that Twenty-First Century mothers
would reclaim this important role when they make decisions about their child
raising approaches and work-family balance, and that governments would reconsider
policies that mandate mothers receiving social assistance to return to work
when their children are 18 months old.18 I invoke the distinction between mothering
as institution, and mothering as experience, to differ with Robbins’ conclusions
for addressing the “cultural contradictions”
embedded in literacy
and mothering.
18 Robbins here referred to US legislation brought in under George W. Bush government that required women on social assistance to return to work when their children turn eighteen months old. Similar legislation was introduced in British Columbia in 2001, requiring mothers to return to work when their children turned three years old. This mandate does not take into consideration the quality, affordability or availability of child care that would be open to these families, nor the discrepancy between the average hourly wage and the cost of living in British Columbia.