It was a real fight, and I do mean literally, getting my boys off to school. There were three pairs of socks, shoes, three clean shirts, three pairs of pants. “What is today? Gym? Brush your teeth, let me brush your hair. Wash your face yet?” In the back of my mind, I would hear the answers to the question, “Why can’t Johnny read?” (p. 24)

Pat Guy illustrates the cultural contradictions (Hays, 1996) between the high social expectations for appropriate child-raising and literacy achievement on one hand, and the everyday lives and material conditions that shape mothering on the other. However, as the findings of this thesis suggest, literacy advice texts exclude these situated experiences of mothering and instead promote the ideal of the good mother as a necessary precondition for raising the ideal literate child. “Ideal” mothering and “ideal” literacy practices are represented most commonly in the image of the “relaxing, warm and pleasurable” (Morrow, 1989, p. 23) event of a mother reading a story to her child who is sitting on her lap and wrapped in her arms. In this image, there is usually little sign of the other work that mothers engage in every day: the siblings who need diaper changes, the dishes in the sink, the dinner that needs to be cooked, or the laundry that needs to be done. When these everyday domestic realities are rendered visible, they are often maddeningly represented as further opportunities for mothers to stimulate their children’s literacy development, as suggested by ABC Canada: “Make every day a learning day. Ask your children to make a shopping list, read recipes together or help them make a calendar of their weekly activities” (ABC Canada Literacy Foundation, 2003).

While this advice is located in the domesticity of everyday life, these recommended literacy practices are a means to the ends of achieving school readiness, academic success, and appropriate brain development that are considered essential to achieving broader economic and social visions (Government of British Columbia, 2003). Within the iconic image of a mother-figure reading to a child, we can see the outlines of common discourses of mothering and literacy that rarely take into account women’s lived experiences of mothering, the role of fathers in children’s literacy learning, or the diversity of family structures and child-raising practices which give meaning and context to the literacies of everyday life. Indeed, like most aspects of women’s domestic and child-raising work, literacy work in the home only becomes visible when things go wrong — when her child fails to learn to read by age five or seven (depending on the jurisdiction) or is deemed “at risk for reading failure” (Lyon, 1999) because the family lives in poverty or does not speak standard English as a first language (Burns, Griffin & Snow, 1998, p. 133). In these circumstances, mothers are asked to participate in family literacy interventions designed to teach them to carry out their domestic literacy work more adequately. Shirley Bond, former Minister of Advanced Education in the British Columbia Government, captures this in her observation that “[f]amily literacy programs prepare families to prepare their children for success in life — they address parents’ own literacy needs and their need to be able to help their children” (Shirley Bond, January 31, 2005).