Finally, this study aims to highlight the political and economic relationship between literacy research, literacy advice, and social policy. These inter-textual links are key to the production and reproduction of mothering discourses. The study thus attends to the often close-knit relationships among prominent parenting experts, the magazines for which they write, and their institutional and inter-personal alliances. Since the 1990s, it has also become important to attend to the relationships between the content of literacy advice and its publication and distribution by an increasingly concentrated group of multi-national corporations. This research also aims to highlight the ways in which research, teaching, and policy making also contribute to the reproduction of mothering discourses in literacy advice.

Research questions and methods

This thesis considers literacy advice to mothers from the mid-Nineteenth Century to 2000. The research questions are:

1. What discursive formations are associated with the “mother-as-teacher-of literacy”?
2. What discourse strategies are associated over time with the normalization of the mother-as-teacher of literacy?
3. What forms of literacy and of mothering are excluded within these discourses?
4. Who has gained power within the discourses of literacy and mothering?