What Makes a Mother Goose a Mother Goose?

Reading

Since Mother Goose is associated with beginning reading, she is frequently seen reading to the young, as you may have noticed in some of the previous examples. Perhaps the inclusion of books and reading in illustrations of Mother Goose is a visual reference to the role of Mother Goose rhymes in children's emergent literacy. Sometimes this is very humorously portrayed as in the James Marshall illustration in which a goose is reading to a group of children and animals or William Wegman’s canine Mother Goose who appears to be reading to a rooster. Older images often show a human Mother Goose reading to both child and goose as in the final example below.