Why Did We All Have the Same Childhood?

This sacred communal knowledge, along with other ephemera of youth—the blueprints for a cootie catcher, the words to a jump-rope rhyme, the rhythm of a clapping game—is central to the experie

nce of being a kid."

When children are together, they develop their own rituals, traditions, games, and legends—essentially, their own folklore, or, as researchers call it, “childlore.” That lore can be widespread and long-lasting—the mind boggles to think how many generations of children have played tag, for instance.

Also like memes, where childlore comes from is arguably less important than how it spreads and why it gains traction in the first place. The main way childlore spreads is, perhaps obviously, by children teaching it to one another.

As Iona and Peter Opie, two pioneers in the childlore field, wrote in their 1959 book, The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren, “The scraps of lore which children learn from each other are at once more real, more immediately serviceable, and more vastly entertaining to them than anything which they learn from grown-ups.” And some information—such a

Our nostalgia for our own childhood shapes what kids get exposed to.

This brings me to an issue that apparently really cheeses people who study childlore: Adults, it seems, are in a perpetual state of worry that Kids These Days just don’t play like they used to, probably because of whatever technology was most recently introduced. Roud and Willett both independently brought this up to me and insisted that it’s not t

folklore is by its nature not handed down by an authority. It is of the people, by the people—even if those people are children. So although kids may crib from pop culture and adopt things they learn from adults, making something their own and using it for their own purposes is what transmutes it into childlore.

Willett thinks grown-ups can be overly focused on “children as becoming,” worrying about their development and preparing them for the adult life they will one day lead. And in the process, she thinks, we can miss “children as being”—the complex society and culture they inhabit right now.

Children themselves probably couldn’t tell you where their lore began...These things were almost like analog memes, micro-bits of culture that seemed to come from nowhere and everywhere.