Buffum took on a more austere tone, recommending that reading in the home be structured as “lessons” within finite boundaries of time and space “from which there is no escape” (p. 98). His advice underscored the ritualistic attributes invested in literacy, and its potential for regulating children’s behaviour.

Let it be an object to give them employments which they cannot evade — from which there are no means of escaping; something to be done, and not merely to be learnt. For instance, it will be better to set them so many lines to write, rather than to learn by heart. …children will also learn more readily when their lessons are regulated by established rules. If a child is uncertain how much to read, he will probably murmur when the portion is shewn (sic) to him. Rather let it be fixed, that, to read so much, to spell so many words, so many times, is to be the regular business of every day. (Buffum, 1826, p. 98)

Conversely, and as mentioned earlier, Martineau was careful to emphasize that a mothers’ priority should be her child’s happiness, and not her or his ability to read, because “the happier a child is, the cleverer he will be” (Martineau, 1848, p. 221). Indeed, Martineau reminded parents that children’s reading abilities is “no sign yet of a superior intellect…it is simply a natural appetite for that provision of ideas and images which should, at this season, be laid in for the exercise of the higher faculties which have yet to come into use” (p. 225). In other words, there was more important intellectual work to attend to in the early years than reading, and children would take to reading easily enough if opportunity was provided. Her advice was more concerned with moderating the “excesses” of too much reading, than with a concern that children may not learn to read.

Sometimes advice on desired literacy practices was directed to mothers through their children. In an article titled, “Paying off Mother” (Mothers’ Magazine, 1858), “little Alexander” was told that one way he could repay mother for her habit of “reading to him a good deal and a long time out of the Bible and Sabbath school book, and thus teaching him to read himself” (p. 64), was by “loving Jesus Christ and his work” (p. 64). In alluding to the likelihood that their mothers will die before they have reached adulthood, this advice linked reading to children to a future in heaven, in which “parents and children may meet together around the throne of the lamb” (p. 64). While the religious goals of reading to children were made clear, it was implied that children learn to read by being read to often, and for long periods.