What can I do? Almost angrily the young mother faced me across the narrow classroom desk.
“I’m so confused and I feel so helpless! I know Tommy isn’t dumb, yet ever since he started school he’s had trouble with his reading. And always you teachers have told me the same thing. ‘Don’t push him’ you say, ‘Be patient’. He’ll straighten out. Well, I haven’t pushed him. And I haven’t tried to teach him, though Heaven knows I’ve been tempted many times. But I know you’re right when you say that it is a job for an expert — and you’re the expert. But here is Tommy in the fourth grade and still behind his class in reading. Isn’t there something we can do at home that will help him?"[Emphasis in text] (Christopher, 1957, p. 32)I have two active little children who keep me hopping. There isn’t much time for rest or for myself but even though I try to eat well and sleep, I am always so tired. I feel like the day just goes on and on and I scream to talk with another adult. (Hilliard, 1954, p. 12)
One mother is frantic, another is exhausted and lonely. These voices, albeit filtered through the lenses of editors and authors of advice magazines, nevertheless show women negotiating roles as their child’s first educators that feel neither natural, nor particularly empowering. Tommy’s mother is negotiating the discourses of domestic pedagogy and intensive mothering that insist on her ultimate responsibility for Tommy’s reading abilities, while regarding her direct involvement in teaching him to read as potentially dangerous to his emotional well-being and his success as a reader. Her status and abilities as a mother were judged against her son’s reading abilities, even as her domestic literacy practices were regulated by the shared understanding implicit in these mothering discourses that “she is not an expert.” Tommy’s mother wanted more control. Or perhaps she just wanted the school to teach him how how to read.