However, while the mental hygiene lens dominated child-raising advice, literacy advice remained sparse. Chatelaine magazine published only three articles on the topic of children’s reading and writing in the 1930s. In an article, “Teaching the Child to Read: There Is An Art In It and a Good Deal of Planning” (1929, p. 40), Marjorie Powell, a former teacher, drew on the tenets of mental hygiene to offer “a few simple rules” for parents to follow at home that constituted “good reading as a preventative medicine for the mind” (p. 40). Such rules included, first and foremost, not forcing children to read, but rather enticing them into the practice by placing desirable books next to a bowl full of shiny red apples, letting children see mother reading, selecting books at a higher level than their abilities, sending the younger ones out to play so older children can concentrate, producing new books on topics related to their school work, “sending them off to dreamland mounted on romances,” talking about books once they are finished reading them, and encouraging children to re-tell the stories they read (p. 40). Anticipating the possible reactions of busy mothers with little time and many children, and naturalizing the “common-sense” domestic literacy practices associated with the habitus of middle-class, Anglo-Saxon Canada, Powell assured her readers that, “[N]one of this is drudgery. In fact it will become your greatest joy, a sort of great game, by which you will forge an unbreakable bond” (Powell, 1929, p. 40).

Motivation for supporting reading in these ways derived from concerns to provide children with a “constant love” in times of “fad and fancies that pass each other in swift confusion” (Powell, 1929, p. 40). Just like the ideals of the family social reading seventy years earlier, reading in the home was considered a strategy for domestic accord and cultural continuity, a means of holding in place a changing world and wielding influence over children, who were presented with many more interesting activities than reading. Indeed, Powell claims that these “good” reading practices work as an antidote to the immensely popular but less desirable activities of “teasing to go to the movies or someone else’s house because there isn’t anything to do at home” (p. 40).