Interest in the ways in which SNAF permeates public policy discourse led Standing (1999) to explore how mothering work in schools is experienced in women’s everyday lives. Standing’s research is a good example of how the “normal family” is one strand of a mothering discourse that can be brought to bear on contemporary policy analysis. She conducted open-ended interviews with 28 low income and lone mothers to deconstruct the gendered assumptions inherent in Great Britain’s Blair Government initiatives surrounding parental involvement in British schools. According to Standing, parental involvement, as it is defined by educational policy and the schools in that country,

[I]nvolves a range of pedagogical tasks which articulate to the school…parental involvement means helping with homework, helping in the classroom as assistants, reading with your child, taking part in the activities and outings, and doing “extra-curricular” activities. It entails providing time, space and equipment (books, computers, etc.) for children to work at home, and supporting the school in various ways-attending meetings and school events as well as supporting the philosophy of the school. (Standing, 1999, p. 2)

Standing argued that “forms of parental involvement expected of mothers in the 1990s in the United Kingdom presumed the traditional nuclear family, with a stay-at-home wife and mother and breadwinner father” (1999, p. 2). The mothers she interviewed articulated stances toward their children’s schooling that ranged from social action and “taking on the school” to resistance in the form of “active non-participation.” These stances differed markedly from the parent involvement roles defined in school policies that expected parents to monitor their children’s school with respect to spending and governance, keep up with the latest research on children’s learning, provide academic support to their children inside and outside of school hours, and support the work of the teacher.

Wendy Luttrell, in her ethnographic study of working-class women’s identities and schooling, also found that a “mothering discourse” shaped the narratives of women’s own schooling experiences. She reported on interviews with women in her literacy class in this way: “The women’s stories illustrate the extent to which they measured themselves and their mothers according to what Griffith and Smith would call the intersecting discourses of mothering and schooling” (p. 92).