Folk Groups And Folklore Genres: An Introduction

Chapter 5. Children's Folklore

.:. .:. .:. .:. .:. Chapter 5 Children's Folklore Jay Mechling .:. .:. .:. .:. .:. Although each of us has a unique constellation of folk group affiliations and identities within those groups, the one thing we all share is that we were children once. This fact makes the study of children's folklore so attractive and, at the same time, so difficult. The white, male folklorist recognizes that he will never really know what it means to be a black woman, but we all think we know what it means to be a child. Studying the child, therefore, has layers of motive and meaning often not present in other folklore inquiry, since we tend to project our own childhood experiences upon others and may attempt to recapture an especially pleasant period in our lives. We may even search for an image of "the child" that confirms certain of our ideological biases. A look at the folklore ofchildren must begin, then, with a conscious stepping back from our preassumptions and emotional responses to the subject. This is not to say that we must ignore all that is fun in the study of children's folklore. The material itself is enormously attractive and exciting, often appealing to our childish selves. When the adult hears an eleven7ear-old girl recite a ditty, such as, I pledge allegiance to the flag, MichaelJackson is a fag. Pepsi Cola burned him up, Now he's drinking Seven Up. 91 Jay Mechling the adult likely responds with a mixture of disapproval and delight. l An adult might well appreciate the cleverness of the rhyme and the fun it has with current events in the popular culture scene, but it seems unlikely that adults will include this rhyme in their repertoire of stories and jokes told among adult friends. Adults love parodies and seem to share the same anxieties about homosexuality and disfigurement by fire as children do. 2 Yet, there is something about the folk rhyme that identifies it as children's lore. Figuring out what that "something" is will take us a long way toward understanding what is distinctive and perhaps unique about the folklore of children. Who are the "children" in children's lore? Children were among the first nonpeasant groups to be studied by folklorists at the end of the nineteenth century. These folklorists, guided by the Darwinian model that permeated social scientific thinking at that time, took seriously the cultures of children. They tended to see children as embodiments of an early stage in human and societal evolution. Consequently, the study of children had the same rationale as did the study of American Indian cultures - namely the collection and preservation of the representatives of the savage stage in human evolution. Yet, since this view was predicated on the notion of childhood as a simple, incomplete, uncivilized state, preparatory to civilized adulthood, scholars have also tended to "trivialize" childhood. Childhood is trivial, in this view, to the extent that it is merely an indication of the past or a potential for the future, not something whole and meaningful in its own right. This "triviality barrier" continues to plague the inquiry into the nature of children's folklife. 3 It is only recently that we have come to understand that childhood is not a universal category across contemporary and past human cultures. Our own notion of childhood probably emerged in the sixteenth century, linked to such forces as the invention of printing (and literacy), the Protestant Reformation, the beginnings of a technological, industrial revolution, and the appearance ofa sense ofindividualism. The category of adolescence was invented much later, appearing only at the end of the nineteenth century. Anthropological work since the turn of the century 92 FOLK GROUPS AND FOLKLORE GENRES similarly demonstrates that our American notions of childhood are quite ethnocentric. Enlightenment and romantic era portraits of the child still dominate our imaginations, leading us to believe that our category "childhood" is a human universal. 4 Our American commonsense understanding of childhood is thatit is a period of separation, protection, preparation, and innocence. In a sense we are "stuck" with this intuitive understanding of children, but we need to be cautious about projecting our own experiences and our own intuition onto others. What is true for our commonsense notions about childhood is also true for our"scientific" theories about the child. The various schools of child psychology and the classics from those fields (e.g, by Sigmund Freud, Jean Piaget...