Childlore

Childlore is the folklore or folk culture of children and young people. It includes, for example, rhymes and games played in the school playground. The best known researchers of the field were Iona and Peter Opie.^[1]

Overview

The subject matter of childlore includes the traditions of children between the ages of about 6 and 15 such as games, riddles, rhymes, jokes, pranks, superstitions, magical practices, wit, lyrics, guile, epithets, nicknames, torments, parody, oral legislation, seasonal customs, tortures, obscenities, codes, etc.^[2] as well as individual activities such as solitary play, daydreaming, fantasies, imaginary friends and heroes, collections, scrapbooks, model worlds, comic reading, mass media interests, dramatizations, stories, art, etc.^[2]

As a branch of folklore, childlore is concerned with those activities which are learned and passed on by children to other children. The stories and games taught by adults to children are not considered childlore except insofar as the children adapt and make them their own. In western culture most folklorists are concerned with children after they join their peers in elementary school or kindergarten. The traditions of childhood generally stop after the child enters intermediate school, which coincides with puberty and adolescence.^[3]

Iona and Peter Opie demonstrated that the culture of children is quite distinctive, often going unnoticed by the adult world around it.^[1]

Opie stated that the words of one game (Buck buck) had survived from the time of Nero.^[4]

It has been argued that the conservatism of childlore contrasts with the way adult folklore is rapidly modified to fit changing circumstances.^[5]

Nursery rhymes

A nursery rhyme is a traditional poem or song that's told or sung to young children. The term dates back to the late-18th and early-19th centuries in Britain where most of the earliest nursery rhymes that are known today were recorded in English but eventually spread to other countries.^[6] The tradition of children's nursery rhymes is largely considered a form of verbal lore, both written and oral, with traditional utterances of repetitive patterns that vary in style and tone.^[7]

History

The term "Mother Goose rhymes", which is interchangeable with nursery rhymes, originates from the early 1600s in relation to a collection of stories in a monthly periodical from a French critic, Jean Loret's "La Muse Historique". This contains the earliest reference to Mother Goose in the line "Comme un conte de la Mere Oye" translated into "Like a Mother Goose story".^[8] However, these stories weren't referring to any of the best-known Mother Goose rhymes that are most associated with the term, which instead have English origins.

Thomas Carnan, stepson of publisher John Newbery's, became the owner of Newsberry Publishing House following the death of John Newberry and was the first to use the term Mother Goose for children's nursery rhymes when he published "Mother Goose's Melody" and "Sonnets for the Cradle".^[9] This was the first known publication of the collection of Mother Goose rhymes in 1780, describing a compilation of traditional English nonsense nursery rhymes and songs each with its own black and white illustration and came from a variety of sources^[9] The term 'Mother Goose' has been linked with traditional children's nursery rhymes and songs in the English speaking world ever since.

In context

For generations, many young children have grown up learning and passing on these Mother Goose rhymes as a part of oral tradition, perpetuating the culture of childhood. The anthropological approach to this field of childlore emphasizes that the songs and rhymes that children teach one another and pass forward through generations are unique to children, differing from the nursery rhymes taught by adults.^[10] The works of Peter and Iona Opie brought significant contributions to this field of childlore, particularly in examining the traditions of children's nursery rhymes.

In the early 1950s, "The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren" offered considerable insight as the first known publication of ethnographic research in which children themselves were consulted about their beliefs and oral traditions, including songs and rhymes. Opie and Opie demonstrate that there are two classes of nursery rhymes that children inherit: those essential to the regulation of their games and their relationships with each other; and those which are "mere expressions of exuberance", repeated for no more reason than they heard it from someone else.^[11] The latter type exemplifies observations by Opie and Opie that children seem to find traditional rhymes funny and remarkable in themselves, and are often fascinated by the way they rhyme with repetitive patterns, styles and tones. For example, this popular English rhyme Opie and Opie heard from children at the end of a schoolday:^[11]

I'm a knock kneed chicken and a bow legged sparrow,
I missed my bus so I went by barrow.
I went to the cafe for my dinner and my tea,
Too many radishes—Hick! Pardon me.

This particular rhyme had little relevancy or meaning to adults. But Opie and Opie observed that it fascinated the children with its amusing tones and repetitive patterns. Additionally, Opie and Opie observed children using these nursery rhymes to communicate with each other when language is still fairly new to them and they have difficulty expressing themselves.^[11] Children often tell and sing these rhymes—unprompted—in unexpected situations, to fill awkward silences, to hide an unexpressed emotion, or out of excitement.

Impact

Communication and language development

One of the earliest ways children learn to communicate is through nursery rhymes. Earlier on, hearing nursery rhymes is how children begin to imitate sounds and learn to speak with a broad English vocabulary.^[12] Parents and children can speak and sing nursery rhymes together, and a child will start to imitate the sounds and pronounce the words. Eventually, the child begins to add words to their vocabulary, which they then can use when they want to talk or sing.

An example is the saying "Sally go around the Sun". When speaking this nursery rhyme to the child, the parents have the option to change the word around to over, under or through, expanding the child's vocabulary and improving their language skills. Likewise, children eventually begin to learn to communicate using various styles of language, such as alliteration and onomatopoeia.

Practicing nursery rhymes effectively primes children for cognitive benefits. Nursery rhymes expand children's mental abilities by exposing them to new ideas and encouraging them to use their imagination.^[12] The simple, easily repeatable and satisfying rhythmic patterns appeal to children, which is significant as repetition is essential in language development. So if a nursery rhyme is repeated to a child multiple times, this repetition allows the child to increase their phonetic awareness and promotes spelling skills.^[12]

In 1987, an in-depth study found that children begin their phonetic awareness, before learning to read, through non-reading activities, and there is a strong relationship between knowledge of nursery rhymes and phonetic development.^[13] The ability to break down words into sounds and syllables is necessary for children to fully understand and use the alphabet,^{[citation needed]} and children develop these early literacy skills by learning nursery rhymes. This was observed, for example, in the nursery rhyme "A Sailor Went to the Sea":

My captain went to the sea, sea, sea
To see what he could see, see, see

Exposure to this nursery rhyme allowed children to learn homophones and how there are different meanings for the words sea and see, even though they are pronounced the same.^[14]

Social and emotional development

The nature of nursery rhymes serves as a tool for building and improving social and emotional skills for young children. Fundamentally, traditional children's nursery rhymes are a storytelling method with aspects like voice inflection and listener engagement, which help children to develop social and emotional understanding.^{[citation needed]}

Many children learn to make friends and build relationships with other children through nursery rhymes. Often, nursery rhymes involve cooperation and/or physical activity with the listener, which can be conducted in larger group settings—so children have the opportunity to work with one another through guided instructions, thus practicing effective and engaged interactions contributing directly to their social development.^[15]

For example, the nursery rhyme "Ring Around the Rosie" involves children dancing around in a circle as they recite a short and catchy rhyme:^[15]

Ring-a-ring-a-rosies
A pocket full of posies
Ashes, ashes
We all fall down!

Simply participating in these interactions in connections between movement and rhymes can allow children to engage with others, promoting social skills. Nursery rhymes tend to involve repeated interactions between characters of all ages, genders, shapes, and sizes, so a child develops acceptance and respect for diverse kinds of people.^[16]

Likewise, nursery rhymes benefit children's emotional development. Hearing nursery rhymes before falling asleep reminds children that they are in a familiar environment, so they feel safe and at peace. This might explain why non-parental child caregivers often rely on nursery rhymes to alleviate a child's discomfort and uncertainty when their parents are absent.^[17]

Some children's nursery rhymes involve conflict, which the characters within the nursery rhyme must resolve. This can involve reconciling negative emotions like jealousy, anger, or sadness.^[17] This facilitates discussion and teaching about adversity, and helps to build emotional management skills. Rhymes such as "Itsy Bitsy Spider" or "Jack and Jill" are commonly interpreted as conveying the value of perseverance in the face of obstacles. They have been shown to improve the social and emotional development of children.^{[citation needed]}

Cross-cultural observations

Nearly every culture throughout the world has nursery rhymes. Although the themes can vary across cultures, generally children's nursery rhymes are designed to convey similar types of messages and tend to have similar meter, rhythm, and rhyme.^[18]

Most nursery rhymes are meant to be told or sung to young children as a form of entertainment or as a means of learning certain lessons. To accomplish this goal, traditional children's nursery rhymes must take a simple form that can easily be learned and repeated by children.^[18] Specifically, they typically have a repetitive and predictable pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables, known as isochronic meter. This does not necessarily have to involve repeating stressed and unstressed syllables one at a time, but can leave as many as four unstressed syllables between each stressed syllable.^[18] The simplicity of isochronic meter allows for this variability in the stressed syllable pattern, so each poem does not have to take the exact same form and can still be easily read in a very similar manner across various cultures. An example of this pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables can be seen clearly in the style of poems in several languages including English, Chinese, Bengkulu, and Yoruba in Nigeria.^{[citation needed]}

Another significant aspect of nursery rhymes that tends to be fairly standard across cultures is the number of lines that occur in a poem. Typically, these poems contain four lines with four beats in each line. These beats, as mentioned above, occur in an isochronic pattern.^[18] In English poetry, it is highly uncommon to find a nursery rhyme that deviates from this pattern. In other cultures, these conventions may be different; in Chinese nursery rhymes, for example, there seems to be less rigidity in the requirement that poems have four beats per line. There are multiple examples of nursery rhymes that contain a first line—with six beats, followed by three lines containing four beats each. Some Chinese nursery rhymes have up to six four-beat lines.^[18]

Another convention that seems to be fairly universal in children's nursery rhymes is the pattern of rests before or after the lines. In English poetry, a rest is most commonly placed after the second and fourth lines of a poem, or after each line in a poem, while sometimes there will be rests after lines one, two, and four.^[18] Deviations from these three schemes can create awkwardness in the reading. Similar patterns are found within other cultures; rhymes in Bengkulu, for instance, often have rests at the beginning of each verse, which is slightly different from the pattern found in English, while rests in Chinese tend to be like those in English, with rests after each line.^[18]

Yet another cross-cultural similarity is in nursery rhymes' rhyme scheme, which tends to be an A-B-A-B pattern. There are variations, though they tend to be slight and few, as they make a nursery rhyme more difficult to read and understand—contrary to the intent that they be easy.^[18]

Notes

^ ^a ^b Bishop, Julia C. (2014-09-02). "The lives and legacies of Iona and Peter Opie". International Journal of Play. 3 (3): 205–223. doi:10.1080/21594937.2014.993208. ISSN 2159-4937. S2CID 144191529.
^ ^a ^b Sutton-Smith 1970:1–8.
^ Grider 1980:159–160
^ Opie: 1987.
^ Fine, Gary Alan (1980). "Children and Their Culture: Exploring Newell's Paradox". Western Folklore. 39 (3): 170–183. doi:10.2307/1499799. ISSN 0043-373X. JSTOR 1499799.
^ Galway, Elizabeth (2013-06-25). "Nursery Rhymes". Oxford Bibliographies Online Datasets. doi:10.1093/obo/9780199791231-0124.
^ McLeod, Norma; Dorson, Richard M. (January 1975). "Folklore and Folklife: An Introduction". Ethnomusicology. 19 (1): 145. doi:10.2307/849754. ISSN 0014-1836. JSTOR 849754.
^ Shahed, Syed Mohammad (1995). "A Common Nomenclature for Traditional Rhymes". Asian Folklore Studies. 54 (2): 307–314. doi:10.2307/1178946. ISSN 0385-2342. JSTOR 1178946.
^ ^a ^b Alchin, Linda (2013). The Secret History of Nursery Rhymes. Nielsen. ISBN 978-0-9567486-1-4.
^ James, Allison (September 1998). "Play in Childhood: An Anthropological Perspective". Child Psychology and Psychiatry Review. 3 (3): 104–109. doi:10.1017/s1360641798001580. ISSN 1360-6417.
^ ^a ^b ^c Archibald., Opie, Iona (2001). The lore and language of schoolchildren. New York Review Books. ISBN 0-940322-69-2. OCLC 45558860.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
^ ^a ^b ^c Kenney, Susan (October 2005). "Nursery Rhymes: Foundation for Learning". General Music Today. 19 (1): 28–31. doi:10.1177/10483713050190010108. ISSN 1048-3713. S2CID 143209721.
^ Maclean, Morag; Bryant, Peter; Bradley, Lynette (1987). "Rhymes, Nursery Rhymes, and Reading in Early Childhood". Merrill-Palmer Quarterly. 33 (3): 255–281. ISSN 0272-930X. JSTOR 23086536.
^ Bennett, Howard J. (October 2000). "Medicated Nursery Rhymes". Obstetrics & Gynecology. 96 (4): 643. doi:10.1097/00006250-200010000-00032. ISSN 0029-7844.
^ ^a ^b Mullen, Ginger (2017-09-27). "More Than Words: Using Nursery Rhymes and Songs to Support Domains of Child Development". Journal of Childhood Studies. 42 (2): 42. doi:10.18357/jcs.v42i2.17841. ISSN 2371-4115.
^ Kenney, Susan (October 2005). "Nursery Rhymes: Foundation for Learning". General Music Today. 19 (1): 28–31. doi:10.1177/10483713050190010108. ISSN 1048-3713. S2CID 143209721.
^ ^a ^b Music, Graham (2016). Nurturing natures: Attachment and children's emotional, sociocultural, and brain development (2nd ed.). New York, NY: Routledge.
^ ^a ^b ^c ^d ^e ^f ^g ^h Burling, Robbins (December 1966). "The Metrics of Children's Verse: A Cross-Linguistic Study". American Anthropologist. 68 (6): 1418–1441. doi:10.1525/aa.1966.68.6.02a00040. ISSN 0002-7294.

References

Grider, Sylvia Ann. The Study of Children's Folklore. Western Folklore 39.3, Children's Folklore (1980): 159–69.
Mendoza, Vicente T. Lirica Infantil De Mexico. Letras Mexicanas. 2a ed. Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Economica, 1980
Opie, Iona Archibald, and Peter Opie. The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren. Trans. Peter Opie. Oxford Paperbacks. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.
Sutton-Smith, Brian. Psychology of Childlore: The Triviality Barrier. Western Folklore 29.1 (1970): 1–8.
Burling, Robbins. "The Metrics of Children's Verse: A Cross-Linguistic Study". The Metrics of Children's Verse: A Cross-Linguistic Study1, University of Michigan, anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1525/aa.1966.68.6.02a00040.

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