It is worthwhile, in this study of literacy advice, to attend to the parallels that may exist between the ideal para-professional relationship between mothers and their children’s doctors, and the para-professional ideal of mothers as “teachers in the home” that is articulated in family literacy and school parental involvement policies. In her influential book the Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood, Hays (1996) used the term “intensive mothering” to describe a form of mothering that has developed in the West over the past two centuries as the normal and natural way to mother. She defined “intensive mothering” as the ideology that holds that “proper” or “correct” mothering requires “not only large quantities of money but also professional-level skills and copious amounts of physical, moral, mental and emotional energy on the part of the individual mother” (Hays, 1996, p. 4). Hays argued that this dominant form of mothering is socially constructed. She cited Margaret Mead, who asserted that there is no support for the theory of “a natural connection between conditions of human gestation and delivery and appropriate cultural practices. …[T]he establishment of permanent nurturing ties between a woman and the child she bears…is dependent upon cultural patterning” (Mead, 1962, cited in Hays, 1996, p. 20). Hays focused her analysis of child-raising advice on texts directed to middle-class mothers, arguing that it is these ideals that often shape and direct the educational interventions designed for low income mothers. She found that across the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries,

[F]urther pieces were added to what has become a fully elaborated vision of intensive mothering…more and more mothers adopt ever greater portions of this model. The history of ideals about child rearing in the United States is not, as some would have it, a series of “pendulum swings” but rather a story of the increasing intensification of child rearing. (Hays, 1996, p. 22)