The “pedagogy of love” made different pedagogic positions available to women, depending upon their social location as working-class or middle-class mothers, new immigrants, or mothers who worked outside of the home. For example, Dehli showed how the Kindergarten movement opened up new avenues for the moral regulation of working-class mothers in particular. The moral structuring of love and pedagogy as united in the “good” mother shaped not only Kindergarten ideals but the expectations for good mothering in “public institutions and private venues, through the schools, charitable and philanthropic organizations, and through the family” (Dehli, 1994, p. 202). Moreover, the dissemination of the ideals of the “pedagogy of love” through consumer market products suggests the commodification of the ideal of the “good mother” as a theme to attend to in literacy advice.

It is through this history that contemporary relationships between mothers and schools can be understood. Griffith and Smith (1991; 2005) took this up in the context of their investigation into the “ruling relations” that govern schools’ dependence upon mothering work. In their 1991 study, the authors interviewed mothers about their experiences interacting with their children’s schools. Of interest in these interviews was not only their content — what the mothers reported as their experiences with schools — but the insights into the ways in which the “mothering discourse” (Griffith & Smith, 1991) governed the design of the interview questions and the interactions between the researchers and subjects during the interviews. According to the authors, the mothering discourse “sets up parameters for ‘normal’ child development and the parenting required to develop and maintain that normalcy. It is an organization of relations beyond the local settings of our interviews, ourselves as interviewers and the particular women we talked to” (p. 83). The authors thus interpreted the content of the interviews in the context of this mothering discourse:

The invidious comparisons among mothers, our own recognition of ourselves as defective mothers (by virtue of our being sole-support mothers), the curious moral structuring for the child’s behaviour in the school, unsupported by corresponding control, are moments in the practice of a discourse through which the educational roles of mothers has been and still is coordinated with that of the school. (Griffith & Smith, p. 86)