Children's Games

Scholarly interest in children's games, as in much of folklore and folklife, sprang from the Romantic impulses of the 19th century. Early collectors like Alice B. Gomme (1894-1898/1964) in the British Isles and William Wells Newell (1883/1963) in the United States were inspired by the belief that children's folklore represented the only survivals of many ancient beliefs and practices. The late 19th and early 20th century collections of children's games available to us today owe much of their existence to the missionary zeal with which these early preservationists set out to document the last vestiges of an ancient lore they believed to be on the verge of extinction.

Today folklorists are hardly worried that children's folklore is an endangered species, any more than children themselves. In large part, we are indebted here to Iona and Peter Opie and their massive collectionsof children's folk culture, including games, in the British Isles in the 1950's and 1960's. Their Children's Games in Street and Playground, published in 1969, stands as a major landmark in the study of children's games, as well as influencing our perspective on childlore in general.

One of the Opie's important contributions was their demonstration of a remarkably persistent and dynamic body of traditional child culture, hardly in danger of immediate extinction. They found tenacious persistence in children's folklore over hundreds of years, alongside the constant variation, modification, and innovation characteristic of all folk culture—an apparent contradiction recently discussed by Fine (1980) as "Newell's paradox."

Another, perhaps more revolutionary contribution, was a very significant shift in methodology. Unlike most of the earlier collections, which drew heavily on the childhood memories of adults, the Opies asked children what they played and how. This may now seem like a rather obvious strategy, but we had to first reject the notion that children's lore represented a dying culture before we could abandon the assumption that the farther back in time we reached, the richer the tradition and the closer we came to "original" forms. The Opies helped shift our attention away from reconstructing a murky past to trying to understand something of an extremely rich and ongoing traditional process. They provided undeniable evidence that children's games were very much alive and kicking.

More recent collections of children's folklore, such as Mary and Herbert Knapp's (1976) excellent survey of contemporary American children's traditional culture, One Potato, Two Potato, have followed the Opies' lead, deriving their information from children themselves and emphasizing the constant renewal of tradition. On a somewhat more microlevel, Sue Parrott's (1972) article, "Games Children Play: Ethnography of a Second Grade Recess," presents an interesting example of what can happen when adults ask children themselves what they do, rather than rummaging through their own memories of childhood games. While hopscotch, jumprope and such may spring most readily to adult minds when thinking about folkgames, they may not be foremost in children's thoughts. Remember "chasing the boys" or "goofing off"? How about "bra-snapping" or "farting contests"?

At about the same time the Opies were pursuing the lore of English children, around the world another of the major researchers in children's games was pursuing a similar track. Brian Sutton-Smith set out to study the playgrounds of New Zealand in 1949-1950, drawing not only on the reports of adults in his communities and on historical evidence but also on systematic documentation of the doings of contemporary playgrounds (Sutton-Smith, 1972). This early work was to launch him on the most diverse and persistent career of any researcher in the area of children's games, weaving through a wide range of theoretical and methodological approaches, drawn from such traditionally disparate disciplines as developmental psychology, anthropology, and history. His Folkgames of Children (1972) presents a representative sampling of almost three decades of games study, and his edited volume (with Elliott Avedon), The Study of Games (1971), combines a sampling of both classic and contemporary games research with very extensive bibliographical material.

The work of Sutton-Smith and others has pointed to...