If our goal as a society is to create conditions for all children to have access to “powerful literacies,” then the definition and criteria for a “literate” child needs to be de-linked from mothering discourses and re-connected to broader literacy and learning opportunities in social settings. This requires a commitment to building social and cultural capital in the public realm and will be a long time in the making. One step along the way is to better integrate the fields of literacy research, and family literacy research in particular, with the expanding sociological and historical literature on mothering, and indeed to heed Griffith and Smith’s (2005) call for literacy researchers to take a much keener interest in the relationships between mothering, education, and social inequality. Another step is to include in instructional settings, and advice, a broader repertoire of “what counts” as literacy. This is central to broadening the paths through which children and youth participate in their culture and their community. This study has shown the many ways in which children’s reading practices, in all their shifts across the past century, have been considered a threat to the social order, to schooling, to learning and to “success”. In the digital worlds in which children are now born, “modernist” attempts to uphold the traditions of school literacy in the face of rapidly changing social worlds needs to be reconsidered (Luke and Luke, 2001). Work is already under way in this vein, in the scholarship of Marsh, Brooks, Hughes, Ritchie, Roberts, & Wright (2005) and the work of the Multiliteracy Project in Canada (Multiliteracy Project, 2005)

While education, whether in schools, adult or family literacy settings cannot be seen as the only strategy for addressing social inequality, it is nevertheless important to build upon the social and cultural capital that is created in participatory and inclusive education settings. Community-based literacy programs are places where literacy advice is circulated. But they are also vital sites for mediating advice, critically reflecting on the intersections between institutional expectations and situated experiences. Perhaps most importantly, these projects share with this thesis the hope of bringing women’s domestic literacy work out of the private domestic sphere and into the realm of debate and social action.