Knowing What Children Believe: Believing What Children Know

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C. W. Sullivan III

Abstract

Children's Folklore is an age-bounded folklore which circulates among children up to about age twelve. The official study of American children's folklore is generally considered to have begun with W.W. Newell, a president of the American Folklore Society and an editor of the Journal of American Folklore. Early studies by Newell (Games and Songs of American Children, 1883) or Alice B. Gomme (The Traditional Games of England, Scotland, and Ireland, 1894-1898) and those who immediately followed focused first on games and game rhymes, and the study of children's folklore expanded slowly from that beginning. In the second half of the twentieth century, however, the study of children's folklore has expanded more rapidly and now includes examinations of all of the genres or sub-genres identified as folklore and has also expanded to include the folklore of adolescents. But the collecting of children's folklore presents some problems unique to that subject matter and the informants from whom it is collected, problems which stem from the fact that, for the most part, it is adults who are doing the collecting.

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