2 Children’s
Folklore
that comprise children’s folklore. Study of this field began in the late nineteenth
century, when scholars began to record and analyze children’s games and songs
in England and the United States. After the British scholars Iona and Peter Opie
published their groundbreaking
Lore and Language of Schoolchildren
in 1959, a
new era of children’s folklore study began. The most recent book-length surveys
and analyses of children’s
folklore have been
American Children’s Folklore
by
Simon J. Bronner (1988) and
Children’s Folklore: A Source Book,
edited by Brian
Sutton-Smith, Jay Mechling, Thomas W. Johnson, and Felicia R. McMahon
(1995). The present handbook attempts to bring children’s folklore study up
to date, with a sampling of representative texts and an overview of scholar-
ship. The range of material covered here does not diverge radically from that of
other recent surveys, but it puts more emphasis on nature lore and imaginative,
dangerous, and sexually oriented games than some other surveys have done.
Like other children’s folklore surveys, this one includes material gathered from
children at school and in their home neighborhoods.
Many examples come
from countries where people speak English; non-English examples appear in
translation.
Children’s folklore, created and shared by children, differs from folklore
for
children, sometimes called nursery lore, which adults deem suitable for the young.
Teenagers in Maine practice the ritual of levitation in the summer of 2007. Photograph by
Martha Harris.
Introduction 3
The clapping game Pat-a-cake, for example, comes from British oral tradition of
the seventeenth century. Parents teach this game to their young children (Opie
and Opie,
Oxford Dictionary
341– 42). When children
grow old enough to play
with each other, they learn games and rhymes that do not come from adults. One
popular rhyme, for example, includes the lines “Boys are rotten, made out of
cotton / Girls are sexy, made out of Pepsi” (see chapter 3 for the rhyme’s full text).
Parents and other adults would not generally teach children this rhyme, which
represents girls’ increasing awareness of boys. Because the rhyme has subversive
appeal, it moves rapidly from one group of children to another.
In contrast to children, who respond to their peer groups’ traditions, some
adults seem minimally aware of this kind of communication: a strange situation,
since these adults were once children themselves. In “Psychology
of Children,”
Brian Sutton-Smith coined the term
triviality barrier
for adults’ insensitivity
to children’s folklore. If adults view children’s pursuits as trivial, they will make
little effort to understand them. Part of this attitude comes from adults’ reluctance
to accept children’s enjoyment of subversive, ribald, dangerous, and otherwise
unacceptable material that teachers and parents would not usually recommend.
Striving to teach children to be good, productive citizens, teachers and parents
may forget that they once participated in subversive activities themselves.
Adults who
observe their children closely, however, gain considerable respect
for their youngsters’ communication skills. Recently I heard about an Ameri-
can couple who traveled to Kazakhstan to adopt a child, bringing along their
eight-year-old son, Stephen. While waiting for the adoption to be finalized, the
parents took Stephen out to play in a park. Quickly getting acquainted with sev-
eral Russian children there, Stephen played Hide-and-Seek, Tag, and Leapfrog.
Although the children spoke to each other in their own languages, they commu-
nicated primarily through gestures that signaled the kinds of games they wanted
to play next. This interesting example reminds us that
games and other nonverbal
lore can circulate easily without words of explanation.
On Halloween, the joyous festival of supernatural and dramatic events that
takes place on October 31, children’s folklore gains adults’ attention in various
ways. Besides attending parties and trick-or-treat expeditions organized by adults,
children create costumes, play pranks, and recite traditional demands such as
“Trick or treat, smell my feet, give me something good to eat!” In some commu-
nities, a traditional “Mischief Night” the night before Halloween gives children
a chance to play pranks. Some teenagers’ pranks,
such as dropping pumpkins
off highway overpasses, cause damage and concern, but many pranks, such as
soaping windows and writing rude words on streets with shaving cream, cause lit-
tle trouble. Jack Santino’s
Halloween and Other Festivals of Death and Life
(1994)
traces the evolution of this important holiday, which allows children to express
themselves rudely and exuberantly within traditional limits.
