Children’s Folklore Recent Titles in Greenwood Folklore Handbooks Myth: a handbook

Th
e Folkgames of Children
(1972) includes an interesting essay on the 
effect of British colonialism on Maori play and games (317–30). Sutton-Smith’s 
more recent books 
Toys As Culture
(1986) and 
Th
e Ambiguity of Play
(1998) also 
offer important insights. Simon J. Bronner’s 
American Children’s Folklore
(1988) 
offers an excellent selection of children’s expressive behavior in social contexts, 
with particularly interesting samples of material culture. For more details on the 
work of Sutton-Smith, Bronner, and other scholars of the late twentieth and 
twenty-first century, see chapters 2 and 4.
During the 1960s, the hippie movement and demonstrations against the Viet-
nam War reminded Americans of young people’s power to disrupt adults’ social 
and political structures. After this period of unrest, traditional restrictions on college 
students’ behavior loosened on most campuses, and scholars with an interest in 
children’s and adolescents’ behavior took a closer look at young people’s sub versive 
behavior. Mary and Herbert Knapp devote chapter 4 of their 
One Potato, Two Po-
tato: Th
e Secret Education of American Children
(1976) to “resistance,” including 
parodies and shockers. Josepha Sherman and T.K.F. Weisskopf ’s 
Greasy Grimy 
 Gopher Guts: Th
e Subversive Folklore of Childhood
(1995) celebrates children’s joy-
ful inversion of adults’ rules. Performance theorists from the late 1960s to more 
recent times have examined children’s power dynamics in detail (see chapter 4).
Since the late 1980s, major changes have taken place in the world. Some of 
these changes have been political: the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, the Soviet 
Union collapsed in 1991, and civil war in northern Africa caused massive disloca-
tion of children and their parents in the early 1990s. Folklorists have documented 
the effects of some of these changes on children’s folklore. Marjatta Kalliala’s 
Play 
Culture in a Changing World
(2006) cites Margarita Lioubart’s research in Rus-
sian day-care centers in the early 1990s, when Power Rangers and Barbies took 
the place of governmentally sanctioned “militia play” (24). Felicia R. McMahon’s 

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8 Children’s 
Folklore
insightful 
Not Just Child’s Play: Emerging Tradition and the Lost Boys of Sudan
(2007) explores how DiDinga youths who immigrated from the Sudan to Syra-
cuse playfully use songs, dances, and art forms learned in childhood as strate-
gies for adaptation to their new lives in the United States. Rather than viewing 
themselves as victims, these young men take pride in sharing and preserving Di-
Dinga culture through public performances and gatherings with fellow refugees. 
McMahon’s book provides a model for further folkloristic studies of displaced 
children’s adjustment through performance of cherished folk traditions.
In their 1995 essay “The Past in the Present: Theoretical Directions for Chil-
dren’s Folklore,” Felicia R. McMahon and Brian Sutton-Smith ask “how it is that 
our adult culture so typically suppresses the power-related aspects of children’s 
lives” (308). Unfortunately, the massacre of 12 students and a teacher at Colum-
bine High School in Littleton, Colorado, in 1999 showed everyone how sud-
denly children could turn on each other and their teachers, with resultant loss of 
life. Since Columbine, teachers and administrators have feared sudden outbreaks 
of violence at school. Most school shootings have taken place in high schools, 
but some have occurred in middle schools and elementary schools. In 2002 the 
Children’s Folklore Review
devoted a special issue to the implications and effects of 
the Columbine massacre. Several essays in that issue are discussed in chapter 4.
Further anxiety has resulted from terrorist attacks on the United States on Sep-
tember 11, 2001. Before that date, American children and their parents felt rela-
tively safe from attack within their nation’s borders. As in the aftermath of other 
stressful events, children’s play has mirrored the difficulty of both children’s and 
adults’ adjustment to a change in worldview caused by unexpected violence.
Also noteworthy have been effects of the political correctness and risk-
management trends from the 1980s to the early twenty-first century. Efforts to 
eradicate racism and facilitate fairness to all have influenced people’s attitudes to-
ward some kinds of children’s folklore. Jokes that disparage certain ethnic groups 
and rhymes that include derogatory terms have fallen into disfavor. Since the 
advent of Anti-Social Behaviour Orders in England in 1999, police have ordered 
children to stop playing noisy ball games; earlier, some British schools outlawed 
conker (chestnut) battles, jump ropes, and paper airplanes because children might 
get hurt while playing with them. Conn and Hal Iggulden’s 
Th
 e Dangerous Book 
for Boys
(2007) has provided a counterweight to political correctness and judi-
cial control, explaining how to play with conkers, slingshots, and other “danger-
ous” things. This book’s best-selling status in both England and the United States 
shows how exciting old-fashioned games and playthings can seem when adults 
limit children’s entertainment. Similar accolades have greeted Andrea J. Buchanan 
and Miriam Peskowitz’s 
Th
e Daring Book for Girls
(2007).
Other changes in the world since 1988 have been economic and technological. 
Since the rise of the Internet in 1991, people have radically changed how they 

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Introduction 9
do business and communicate with each other. Thomas L. Friedman’s perceptive 
study 
Th
e World Is Flat
(2007) explains that the availability of cheap, instantaneous 
communication has made nations part of a closely connected realm. Technology 
specialists for Internet problems may not live anywhere near their customers; for 
example, a woman having problems with her Internet connection in Peoria, Il-
linois, may receive a solution from a technician in Bombay, India. Globalization 
of the world’s economy has profoundly influenced people’s expectations.
Children’s folklore has always reflected adult society, and it has certainly shown 
the influence of rapid changes in communications and marketing. One case in 
point is the development of legends and beliefs about the dangers of drinking 
Coca Cola and eating candy that seems to cause an explosion. In the 1960s and 
1970s, children told each other that placing a tooth in a glass of Coke would 
result in the tooth’s disintegration. L. Michael Bell’s essay “Cokelore” (1979) 
lists beliefs that Coke corrodes teeth and, in combination with aspirin, upsets 
stomachs; Gary Alan Fine’s essay “Folklore Diffusion through Interactive Social 
Networks” (1979) documents preadolescents’ legends about deaths as a result of 
eating Pop Rocks candy. Now such legends and beliefs have taken a new turn; 
kids tell each other that a combination of Diet Coke and Mentos mints will 
cause a huge explosion, as discussed by Trevor Blank. While this legend resembles 
the Pop Rocks legend, its transmission works differently. Besides hearing about 
Coke and Mentos in day-to-day conversation, kids watch combustible mixtures 
of these two ingredients on the television show 
Mythbusters;
they also watch seg-
ments of this show on the Internet. Any individual who has made a video of 
exploding Coke and Mentos can post the video on YouTube, where people find 
it quickly and easily. The most popular videos show huge jets of Coke exploding 
into high columns, which may reflect concern about terrorism; then again, they 
may simply show that young people (and some older folks as well) enjoy turning 
quiet bottles of Coke into impressive displays of chemical power.