The justification for fair and supportive social policies for families, and literacy education for women, need not be based on the rationale that such policies help women fulfill their domestic literacy roles. As the findings of this research suggest, the more that mothering work is central to children’s literacy success, the more narrow the pathways to literacy become for diversely situated children and families. This has important implications for the increased regulation of mothering practices, particularly the mothering practices of working-class women. This point is made by Walkerdine who pointed out how social concern has shifted from the well-being of women themselves, to the abilities for women to mother well, in current public discourse on women and mothering:

Oppression as an issue in the understanding of the position of working class women has disappeared from the agenda (that is, if it ever appeared) and is replaced by the targeting of such women (only when they mother) as the psychopathological cause of the threat to the bourgeois political order itself. (Walkerdine, 1994, p. 4)

Moreover, the hope that if mothers are better supported they will be better able to carry out social ideals rests on an assumption that mothers alone can effect the social changes that are so desperately sought. These hopes rest on ideals of family life that no longer exist, if they ever did. Carrington and Luke (2003) made this point as they argued for more expanded views of family life, and of literacies in the Twenty-First Century.

It would be exceedingly naïve to assume that if we just wait long enough, we will experience a return to traditional values and practices. … [T]he presumption that home can and should be made to resemble school is increasingly problematic. It is not just a question of the dubious ethical position that the state, the institution, and the corporation can tell people how to raise their children, or how to configure their families, or whose cultural version of childhood should count. It is, moreover, a question of whether and how we can in good conscience reconfigure homes and communities in the image of an institution that is showing all the signs of becoming a creaky anachronism, in relation to new economies, cultures and technologies. (Carrington & Luke, 2003,
p. 250)