Until this episode, I was convinced that my critical faculties as a literacy educator and as a doctoral student studying literacy in family settings had protected me from the anxiety that often accompanies the warnings from schools, literacy research, and parenting advice texts that as my daughter’s “first and most important educator”¹ (Government of British Columbia, 2003; Ross, 1995), I am responsible for my child’s schooling success and, more specifically, her quest to become a “fully literate” child.

I share the perspective of literacy as socially-situated practice (Barton and Hamilton, 1998; Barton, Hamilton & Ivanic, 2000). The literacy practices that Maya and I share as daughter and mother are “embedded in broader social goals and cultural practices” (Barton, Hamilton & Ivanic, 2000, p. 12). Indeed, one of these social goals is expressed in the statement described above that “parents are their first and most important educators.” Yet this statement creates for me complex subject positions. I wanted to find ways to support Maya’s literacy even if at that moment this did not feel particularly natural to either of us. I was tired and distracted; she was sitting in the back seat, hot and bored. Given my understanding of literacy as socially situated, the dynamics of this literacy event surprised and interested me. What might have compelled me to twist an innocuous conversation with my daughter into a contrived pedagogical experience? Why would I persist in this vein even when Maya resisted? Where does this press to relate to my daughter as a literacy teacher come from? These questions arise from an uncomfortable place where the dynamics of my private life intersect with the public ideal of a “good mother” (Ruddick, 2001). This good mother is found in the powerful cultural image of the smiling, calm, patient, attentive, and sympathetic caregiver. She is “involved” (Delhi, 1996), always teaching, guiding, helping out at the school or play group. She is an ideal against which tired and cranky mothers like myself measure ourselves, and forever find ourselves lacking.

This event in the car, and the questions it spawned about the place of the good mother in literacy advice, marked the beginning of this study. In the following section I elaborate upon the social and policy context that shaped literacy advice and mothering work during the study.

¹ This statement appears across a wide variety of texts to provide rationale for initiatives designed to involve parents more directly in their children’s formal learning, usually in the context of supporting children’s early literacy and brain development, parental involvement in their children’s schools, and participation on school governing bodies.