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In this paper we consider the place of early childhood literacy in the discursive construction of the identity(ies) of 'proper' parents. Our analysis crosses between representations of parenting in texts produced by commercial and government/public institutional interests and the self-representations of individual parents in interviews with the researchers. The argument is made that there are commonalities and disjunctures in represented and lived parenting identities as they relate to early literacy. In commercial texts that advertise educational and other products, parents are largely absent from representations and the parent's position is one of consumer on behalf of the child. In government-sanctioned texts, parents are very much present and are positioned as both learners about and important facilitators of early learning when they 'interact' with their children around language and books. The problem for which both, in their different ways, offer a solution is the ''not-yet-ready'' child precipitated into the evaluative environment of school without the initial competence seen as necessary to avoid falling behind right from the start. Both kinds of producers promise a smooth induction of children into mainstream literacy and learning practices if the 'good parent' plays her/his part. Finally, we use two parent cases to illustrate how parents' lived practice involves multiple discursive practices and identities as they manage young children's literacy and learning in family contexts in which they also need to negotiate relations with their partners and with paid and domestic work.

This interview-based study on middle-class Australian parents' involvement in young children's literacy found that reading to children (particularly in the preschool years) is a routine part of family life, a task shared between mothers and fathers. However, there were patterns of gender difference in the accounts. Mothers were more likely than fathers to emphasise the importance of the child's early exposure to books. They were also often reported to take a supervisory role in relation to their partner's story reading. Men were more likely to undertake reading at bedtime than at any other time and also more likely to report using various strategies to shorten the time spent on story reading. Fathers reading to sons appeared to take on a special significance related to masculine bonding and modelling.

Semi-structured interviews with 56 middle-class Australian parents, both mothers and fathers, were analysed using critical discourse analysis.The effects of three discourses of childhood are traced through parents' accounts of their children's literacy development: the discourse of individualism, the discourse of childcentredness and the discourse of developmentalism.The study finds that alignments between these discourses and discourses of gender produce certain ideal kinds of gendered literate girls and gendered literate boys even when parents explicitly subscribe to the notion of gender equality or gender neutrality.The association of literacy with femininity or with particular personality types which are associated with femininity; the notion of girls being developmentally advanced in key literacy-related areas such as speech; the absence of a taboo on directing girls' early learning; all of these elements have the potential to form a tight cluster constituting girls' literacy learning as natural and unproblematic. In contrast, the opposition between masculinity and literacy, or particular literacies; the expectation of developmental delay and the attribution of agency to boys in deciding (or not deciding) when they are ready to learn; these elements form another tight cluster constituting boys' literacy learning as problematic.

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