For middle-class, English-speaking mothers such as myself, advice and reminders from popular magazines, schools, government ministries, and literacy organizations on how to carry out literacy work in the home is often considered an adequate form of intervention. Embedded in these curricular and policy thrusts is the assumption that parents have complete influence and control over their young children’s literacy development and that parental involvement in children’s literacy and formal education is a key lever for achieving social and economic equality. Yet the more that mothers’ labour is offered up as the solution to social inequality, the more we need to question the assumptions on which such assertions are built.
The increased demands placed upon parents to support their children’s
literacy at home and to oversee the school system are presented as a way of
“empowering”
parents to be involved “beyond the
bake sale”
(Raham, 2002, p. 5). However, as this study suggests, demands
upon parents’ time, material resources, literacy and advocacy skills,
and the inevitable privileging of the perspectives of those parents who have
these resources and skills, are not fully considered in advice to parents or
in educational policy reforms. In contrast, as Pat Guy’s comment suggests,
parents negotiate literacy advice from the everyday, often lonely struggles
to conform to mothering discourses in the context of shrinking resources and
services available to mothers, families, and single parent-led families in particular.
In this way, “Johnny’s reading”, mothers’ domestic literacy
work, and society’s social and economic visions come together in literacy
advice and constitute key themes in this study.
This study seeks to understand how the work of mothering is discursively implicated
in ideals surrounding children’s literacy acquisition. The study identifies
in literacy advice the discursive formations that connect “ideal”
mothering and “ideal” literacy practices in the home, and the strategies
that help to keep these discourses in place. This builds on work of Griffith
and Smith (1990; 1991; 2005) who identified a “mothering discourse”
that organizes mothers’ relationships to schools, and indeed mothers’
own perceptions of their roles as their children’s first and most important
educators. The historical and institutional shifts that have shaped Griffith
and Smith’s concept of the mothering discourse is elaborated in Chapter
Two, but Griffith and Smith summarize it thus: “In all its varieties,
the mothering discourse has this in common — it requires the subordination
of women’s unpaid labour and the conditions of her life to the ill-defined
needs of her children’s development and of their schooling”
(Griffith
& Smith, 2005, p. 39).