The project of re-interpreting and contrasting transcripts of working-class and middle-class families placed Walkerdine and Lucey (1989) in a familiar, yet difficult, position for feminist researchers. There was a risk of essentializing and perhaps overstating the differences between the experiences of working-class and middle-class mothers. The authors attempted to address this issue by visiting the families five years after Tizard and Hughes’ study was completed. They found that the income gap between the working-class and middle-class families had widened significantly, but even more distressing was that the achievement gap in school between the two groups was even wider. There was little correlation between the academic achievement of girls judged by Tizard and Hughes to have “sensitive” mothers and those that did not. Indeed, two of the daughters of the “insensitive” mothers were doing better than average in school, while daughters of “sensitive” mothers struggled. The distinguishing factor seemed to be teacher’s attitudes and expectations. The higher the teacher’s academic expectations, the more successful were the girls. In general, though, working-class girls faired far more poorly than their middle-class counterparts. The ambitions of working-class girls far outstripped the educational and career possibilities open to them.

Walkerdine and Lucey’s’ (1989) and Walkerdine’s (1994) identification of the working-class mother as both a relay of democratic ideals and thus a subject of regulation, suggests the need to attend to these dividing strategies in analyzing literacy advice to mothers. In addition, Walkerdine and Lucey named the many pedagogic tasks of the “sensitive mother” as indicative of a discourse of domestic pedagogy, which they define as the normalization of gendered divisions of labour by linking children’s learning to domestic tasks usually associated with women’s work. Along with the “normal family” and the “intensive mother”, “domestic pedagogy,” or perhaps more specifically domestic literacy, suggests a powerful mothering discourse that warrants exploration in the context of literacy advice to mothers.

Polakow (1993) is a critical psychologist who documented the relationship between the socially-constructed nature of motherhood and the institutionalization of poverty among single mothers. She also deconstructs assumptions surrounding mothers’ pedagogical roles through a feminist critique of the tenets of attachment theory. Yet her work reminds feminist scholars of the dangers of dismissing state interventions in mothering practices as “regulatory” and “oppressive.” She argued that these interventions nevertheless provide a framework for poor women in particular to gain access to material resources and social supports for their children that they would otherwise not have.