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

AGGRESSION AND VIOLENCE
It is necessary to distinguish between mock-violent and violent behavior. In 
her essay “ ‘Sui Generis’: Mock Violence in an Urban School Yard” (1996), Ann 
Richman Beresin explains that mock-violent games include games of playful 
fighting, wrestling, tagging, and ball playing. At the racially integrated public 
elementary school in Philadelphia where Beresin did her fieldwork, fourth- and 
fifth-graders loved to play Suicide or Sui, a handball game that involved running 
fast to avoid being hit by a tennis ball. Players who got hit by the ball three times 
had to go into the “tunnel,” where other players could slam them with a ball. 
Beresin notes that Sui constitutes “a mixed genre, a ‘double-voiced’ form that 
is both ball game and a death drama, school yard game and institutional game” 
(33). Her analysis reminds us to avoid simplistic classification, as “mock violent 
games are one and many genres simultaneously” (33).
In schools and on playgrounds, bullying has caused severe anxiety for children 
and their teachers. Heather Russell’s “Play and Friendships in a Multi-Cultural 
Playground” (1986) includes reflections on the “darker” side of playground life and 
lore: fights and intimidation of some children by others. Observing children’s play 
at Hightown Primary School, Russell found that the school bully, a boy in grade 
six, “controlled, by way of force and intimidation, the activity of the upper grade 
boys” (83). When children told her a fight was about to happen, Russell felt com-
pelled to intervene to protect the children. Her role as a stopper of fights became 
problematic; she worried that some children might view her as the bully’s enemy 
and that the bully might punish “squealers” who told her that he was starting a 
fight. She stopped intervening in fights unless intervention was absolutely neces-
sary and identified herself as the “games lady” (84).
Young people’s assaults with guns have had tragic consequences. On April 20, 
1999, two male adolescents killed 13 people at Columbine High School in Little-

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Scholarship and Approaches 119
ton, Colorado, and then killed themselves. This horrifying massacre elicited com-
mentaries from people around the world, including concerned folklorists. In 2002 
the 
Children’s Folklore Review
published a special issue on the Columbine massacre 
and adolescence. Examining both folk traditions and popular culture, the authors 
of essays in this special issue express significant insights related to adolescents’ needs 
and cultural patterns. Bill Ellis’s “Hitler’s Birthday: Rumor-Panics in the Wake of 
the Columbine Shootings” puts rumor-panics following the Columbine massacre 
in historical and cultural context. Citing similar but less widely known rumor-
panics that occurred in 1987 and 1989, Ellis analyzes them as “an emergent form of 
folk narrative” (23). JoAnn Conrad’s “The War on Youth: A Modern Oedipal Trag-
edy” examines representations of youth as “the object of adult violence and rage, 
the object of adult moralistic anti-violence campaigns (violently implemented), 
and the object of adult desires” (39). Within the culture of high schools, certain 
behavior patterns contribute to outbreaks of violence. Allen Berres’s “ ‘Everybody 
Is Their Enemy’: Goths, Spooky Kids, and the American School Shooting Panic” 
closely examines Columbine High School’s “Trench Coat Mafia” and other rebel-
lious groups of adolescents. Recognizing the “environment of fear” engendered by 
school shootings and subsequent lawsuits, Berres suggests that adults will continue 
to worry as long as groups or cliques of adolescents resist societal control (52).
After terrorists’ attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001, children’s 
play and games reflected Americans’ struggle to come to terms with what had 
happened. Ann Richman Beresin’s “Children’s Expressive Culture in Light of 
September 11, 2001” perceptively analyzes how children played in Philadelphia 
shortly after the attacks occurred. Explaining that children’s folklore has “always 
served as a window into the anxieties and ambivalence concerning specific wars 
and tragedies,” Beresin discusses examples of post–September 11 play (331). Most 
of these forms of play build on traditional patterns. Four children, for example, 
make weapons out of iced-tea containers and pebbles. Forming two teams to 
shoot pebbles at each other, they call one team “Americans” and the other “Ter-
rorists” (333). A little boy playing blocks crashes a wooden block “missile” into 
tall “buildings” that he has built. Seven- and nine-year-old boys give the nursery 
rhyme “London Bridge Is Falling Down” new words:
World TRADE Center is FALLING DOWN
FALLING DOWN, FALLING DOWN
World TRADE Center is FALLING DOWN
Oh—ON TOP of US. (331)
Beresin argues that educators should recognize the importance of such creative, 
open-ended play, which cannot happen at school unless time is allotted for re-
cess. Her examples of children’s play after September 11 support her contention 
that “the boundary between the rational and irrational is finer than we often 

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120 Children’s 
Folklore
acknowledge, that violence has its rationale for those who perpetuate it, and that 
children’s irrational play indeed makes a lot of sense” (335). She also makes the 
interesting point that “cultures linked by hatred and cultures linked by play” 
converge at times of trauma (335).
In the years since the Columbine High School massacre and the September 11 
terrorist attacks, some adults have viewed certain kinds of children’s and adoles-
cents’ folklore as sources of danger. My article “ ‘Mean Girls’: The Reclassification 
of Children’s and Adolescents’ Folklore” (2002–03) gives examples of American 
school administrators’ prohibition of such forms of children’s folklore as slam 
books, pranks, insults, and graffiti. Since the fall of 2001, pranks involving fake 
bombs in middle schools and high schools have resulted in severe penalties, in-
cluding expulsion from school and jail sentences. A 
New York Times Magazine
article by Margaret Talbot, “Girls Just Want to Be Mean” (2002), brought the 
public’s attention to girls’ exclusion rituals that resulted in school administra-
tors’ hiring of professional intervention specialists. Soon afterwards, a number 
of books on girls’ traditional behavior, including Rosalind Wiseman’s 
Queen Bees 
and Wannabes
(2002), became popular among parents and teachers.
Since children’s folklore scholars understand the dynamics of children’s play 
and games, they can interpret the meaning of children’s expressive behavior dur-
ing difficult times. Knowing how children tend to respond to crises, they can 
reassure concerned adults that reactive play gives children an important oppor-
tunity to express themselves. In 
Th
e People in the Playground
(1993), Iona Opie 
invites readers to enjoy the “defiant light-heartedness” of children’s play. With 
refreshing insight, she observes, “The children are clowning. They are making 
fun of life; and if an enquiring adult becomes too serious about words and rules 
they say: ‘It’s only a game, isn’t it? It’s just for fun. 
I
don’t know what it means. It 
doesn’t 
matter 
’ ” (15).