The discourse of intensive mothering slides alongside that of domestic
pedagogy, which coalesces around groups of statements that normalize literacy
as an extension of women’s domestic work. Walkerdine and Lucey (1989)
defined “domestic pedagogy”
as the work of teaching children that
is intertwined with what is assumed to be women’s “everyday”
domestic work in the home. This work is constructed as “natural”
and thus not requiring “extra time,”
with the effect that it is
invisible as actual work. For the purposes of coding the data, the discourse
of domestic pedagogy will be identified in advice that embeds literacy activities
in domestic tasks associated with women’s work, and if images of literacy
in the home depict it as a mother-child interaction, or a mothers’ responsibility,
but does not acknowledge or provide rationale for this.
The discourse of the normal family is linked to Smith’s (1993) concept of SNAF, but is also evidenced in the work of Walkerdine and Lucey (1989) and Gleason (1999). The normal family privileges middle-class, English-speaking families, as the ideal environment for children’s literacy acquisition. The discourse often positions low income and new immigrant families as “at risk,” or as in need of social and educational intervention so they can more closely approximate the ideals associated with a normal family. The discourse of the normal family intersects with discourses of intensive mothering and domestic pedagogy, though it can also exist independently of them. Indeed although the children from “single parent families” are often deemed at risk for literacy failure, the parents who raise the children, most often mothers, are not exempt from the ideals of intensive mothering and domestic literacy. In coding the data, the discourse of the normal family will be in evidence if advice assumes and reproduces the “habitus” of the heterosexual, nuclear family; if it privileges middle-class, English-speaking families or compares forms of mothering and families that had the effects of judgment, division or exclusion.
Table 2 summarizes these discursive categories and proposes a discursive framework for analyzing literacy advice to mothers. The column on the right specifies statements associated with each discourse, which were used to code advice.