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Knowing What Children Believe: 
Believing What Children Know  
C.W. Sullivan III 

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. 

In "Children's Folklore," chapter 5 of Elliott Oring's Folk 
Groups and Folklore Genres: An Introduction, children's folklorist 
Jay Mechling comments: 

The white, male folklorist recognizes that he will never 
really know what it means to be a black woman, but we 
all think that we know what it means to be a child. (91) 

The implication, here, is quite significant. Mechling suggests that 
folklorists who collect from children—or, perhaps worse, those who 
collect from other adults their memories of what they did when they 
were children-fail to recognize that they are collecting materials 
from members of a significantly different culture and must proceed 
accordingly. And while many children's folklorists have, like 
Mechling, commented on this situation, no one has, thus far, at-
tempted to delineate the ways in which or the reasons why the adult 
culture has become and is now separate from that of the child. I 
want to examine this situation and the assumptions upon which this 
and other comments Mechling makes in his article are based. 

Cultural worldview is something into which members of a 

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culture are educated, not something that comes with birth; and it takes only 
a few examples to illustrate the assertion that children see the world differ-
ently from adults. Children's literature critic and reading theorist Peter Hunt 
recounted to me [although he wrote it up differently] an evening's reading to 
his daughter, Felicity, of Shirley Hughes' Up and Up. One page was divided 
into three separate vertical panels: the first showed a little girl holding a 
bunch of helium balloons, the second showed her being lifted off the 
ground, and the third showed the balloons being burst by an over-hanging 
tree branch. Felicity studied the page for a moment, pointed to the second 
panel, and said:  "That girl still has her balloons!" Where the adult reader 
saw a continuum of events happening to the same character as the text 
moved from left to right across the page, the child seems to have seen three 
discrete pictures about three different individuals. As I have commented 
elsewhere, "most adults in Hunt's position would have misinterpreted 
Felicity's reading as a mistake rather than what it actually was—an alternate 
interpretation of an available text" (18). In western culture, we are taught to 
read from left to right, and that is true for a series of pictures as well as a 
series of words; Felicity had not yet learned that reading skill. 

Not only do children have to be enculturated into the process of reading 
literature, they also have to learn how to interpret the literature they read. 
Once, when our older son was small, my wife read him a story about a little 
duck with a misshapen leg. The duck was, of course, an outcast for much of 
the book but won his acceptance in the end—a traditional story pattern. My 
wife, thinking this a good opportunity to discuss tolerance and physical 
handicaps, asked Jason what he thought of the little lame duck in the story. 
Jason, after thinking a moment, commented that having a leg like that must 
have caused the duck to swim around in circles. The point that the author had 
intended and that my wife had seen was lost on this child who is now 
working on a masters degree in engineering. 

The third example comes from children's traditional play. A number of 
years ago, when our younger son was a second or third grader, a neighbor 
called with what she thought was "a funny story." It seems that Aaron and 
her daughter had been playing house, and after "breakfast," her daughter 
"went off to work" while Aaron "stayed home and took care of the house." 
As a folklorist, I found the story interesting—and understandable. My 
neighbor had seen the children's playas a violation, perhaps, of the norm as 
she understood it; I, however, knew the source—at least from my son's point 
of view. At that time, my wife was teaching in a county school and 
carpooling with three other women. As a result, she left the house as the boys 
were getting ready for school. I made sure they were ready for school and got 
them onto the bus. Then I went to teach my classes at the university. I had 
also 

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arranged my schedule to allow me to return home before the public schools 
let out for the day, and so I was there when the boys came home. My wife 
came home later. My son was, thus, playing what he saw at home: his mother 
going off to work and his father staying home (even though he knew I 
worked at the university). What sense it made to Angela, his playmate, I do 
not know. 

The enculturation process not only educates children into the ways in 
which their culture views the world as they grow older, it also seems to 
encourage them to forget however they saw the world when they were 
children. There is a great deal of evidence that a lot of adults do not 
remember what it was like to be a child (or, perhaps, had much more 
protected childhoods than most). When the Opies were collecting material 
for their landmark The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren (1959), they 
were in a school lunchroom and heard one child respond to the question, 
"What's for lunch?", with the answer, "S.O.S!". Recognizing folk speech, 
they asked what "S.O.S." stood for and were told, "Same Old Slush" (162). 
Even though that is the proper interpretation for a child to give to an adult 
(authority figure), most contemporary children's folklorists would not have 
been satisfied with that answer, as the Opies appear to have been, knowing 
that alternative meanings include "Same Old Slop," "Same Old Stuff," "Same 
Old Shit" and "Shit On A Shingle" and that those meanings are available to 
and circulate among grade school students. 

There are other and more sinister situations of adult forgetfulness, 
ignorance, and, perhaps, idealism. The Australian Children's Folklore News-
letter recently recounted two.  ACFN, in reporting the situation to be 
discussed next, reminded its readers that Ian Turner's Cinderella Dressed in 
Yella (1969) was initially declared obscene by an Australian postal official, 
and for a time, the publishers were not allowed to use the normal book 
preferential postage rate (2). More frightening still is ACFN's account of Phil 
Burrows, whose photographs of girls playing "F1intstones, Flintstones," in 
which three of the five girls flip their dresses up to show their underpants 
when the rhyme says, "Pebbles shows her knickers," caused him to be 
charged with "three counts of indecent dealing, suspended from teaching, and 
smeared [in the press] as an actual or potential child molester." After six 
months, the case was brought to court and immediately thrown out. Borrows 
was paid back salary, but at last report was still on "sick leave" (1-2). Closer 
to home, when the Children's Folklore Newsletter published Gary Alan 
Fine's collection of Little League Baseballers' folk speech in the 1980s, a 
public school superintendent wrote administrators at the editor's university 
criticizing the university for supporting a publication which distributed such 
obscene materials to children (CFN, 11.1 through IV.3). In each of these 
cases, the adults doing the accusing failed to realize two things: first, that this 
material was being 

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distributed to other adult scholars for whom it would have intellectual interest 
and value; and second, that this material was the property of the children 
themselves, collected from them and not being distributed to them. 

This separation of childhood from adulthood is a relatively recent 
phenomenon. To some extent, the Romantic movement was an initiator of 
this attitude, and the locus for it may well be Wordsworth's "Ode on the 
Intimations of Immortality" in which he depicts the child entering life nom 
heaven and "trailing clouds of glory" (line 64) and in which the child loses 
that connection with heaven but gains knowledge of the world, Wordsworth's 
"philosophic mind" (line 186). The overriding perception of human develop-
ment as a movement from innocence to experience, as Blake first articulated 
it for the Romantics, was one of the central tenets of the Romantic movement 
and could certainly be interpreted as a part of the move from childhood to 
adulthood. Later in the same century, folklorists and anthropologists studying 
children followed the Romantics' lead and added to it the influence of the 
Darwinian evolutionary model; they saw children as a separate culture, a 
culture representative of the early stages of human and societal evolution. As 
Mechling argues, "Consequently, the study of children had the same rationale 
as the study of American Indian cultures-namely the collection and preser-
vation of the representatives of the savage stage in human evolution" (92). 
This combination of Romantic and the Darwinian elements, however, has led 
to a view of childhood as a time of innocence and to a view of children as the 
innocent; as Romantic innocents, children have no knowledge of good and 
evil, while as Darwinian innocents, they have no knowledge of what are 
considered the more advanced stages of civilized development. From there it 
is but a brief step to seeing children, as most people do today, as innocents 
who must be protected nom the "real world." How often do we tell children 
that this or that activity or topic is "for adults" or that they will "learn about 
that when they are older"? 

The division of material into what is acceptable for children and what is 
not, a division perpetrated by adults, of course, explains why there was such 
official shock at the materials in Cinderella Dressed in Yella, Phil Burrows' 
photographs, and the Children's Folklore Review. There is, however, a great 
deal of traditional material passed on by and among children which adults 
might fiind offensive and which has only recently been available in such 
collections as Herbert and Mary Knapp's One Potato, Two Potato (1976), 
Sandra McCosh's Children's Humour (1976), and Simon Bronner's American 
Children's Folklore (1988), among others. These three collections alone 
illustrate the wealth of what adults would call offensive, if not outright 
obscene, material circulating among the children. And the children know how 
adults feel about this material, and so they do not often allow adults—who 

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seem to have forgotten it-to know of its existence. This ignorance, then, 
reinforces the adult belief that children are innocent or, at least, that their 
own children are innocent of such material. 

This view of children as innocents, especially, has also led to what 
Mechling calls the "trivialization of childhood. . . 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" (92). 
Mechling might have gone on to say that this triviality barrier pertains to 
virtually every aspect of the intersection of professional adult activities and 
the lives and culture of children. Certainly children's literature is as 
trivialized as children's folklore and childhood itself. As Ursula K. Le Guin 
comments, "There is seldom big quick money in kiddylit. . . . But the 
economic discrimination is only an element, as usual, of the real problem; a 
reflection of a prejudice. The real problem isn't the money, it's the adult 
chauvinist piggery" (44). The same is true of elementary school teachers; 
how else can you explain the fact that elementary school teachers are among 
the most overworked and under-paid professionals who deal with children? 
The situation for day care and preschool workers is even worse. And it is 
almost pointless to discuss the way that the social and economic evaluation 
of someone who "merely" stays home and takes care of children has changed 
in the last four decades. It is only in medicine, a sacred cow of another kind, 
where those who deal with children have a status in the general society equal 
to the status of their peers who deal only with adults. They are "doctors," 
after all. 

Not only does our culture see childhood as a trivial time and time of 
innocence, it also sees it a stage which must be out grown and left behind. 
The attitude is evident in our folk speech and in the way we speak to 
children. We tell our children: "Don't talk baby talk," "Act your age," "Grow 
up," "Stop acting like a baby," "You're not a baby anymore," "You're older 
now, and you've got to start taking more responsibility," "That's kids' stuff," 
and "You're too old for that." Sometimes, we give them mixed signals, telling 
them that they're old enough to be responsible for cleaning their rooms but 
too young to go to the beach for the weekend with their friends. Moreover, 
our society has made a number of privileges age-related rather than awarded 
by ability or responsibility; and many of those privileges-especially those 
having to do with cars, alcohol, and relationships with members of the 
opposite sex-are much anticipated. Children, themselves, recognize this 
necessity to age and castigate an unfortunate peer who acts, in their estima-
tion, younger than his or her years, using "baby" or "cry baby, cry" as 
derisive terms. It is unfortunate, as C.S. Lewis says, that we imagine growing 
up as a train which leaves one station for the next (26). 

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How well does the adult remember the child that he or she was? The 
recent t-shirt which proclaims "The older I get, the better I was!" suggests 
that we do not remember all that well, and Jay Mechling argues that 
folklorists must "approach children's folk cultures as [they] would any 
unfamiliar culture" (93). My comments in this paper suggest that the 
problems adult collectors have with both the collecting and publishing of 
children's folklore stem not only from misperceptions of a folkloric nature, 
but from misperceptions within the culture as a whole. In fact, I believe that 
it is safe to say that the adult cultural worldview, into which children are 
educated, also educates them out of their own cultural worldview-and out of 
their own culture. Thus, it is not just the study of children's folklore which is 
made difficult by this naive adult view of children as innocents, it is virtually 
every aspect of adult-child relations and some aspects of adult-adult relations 
as well. It can be quite difficult, then, to really know what children believe 
and believe what children know. 

East Carolina University 

NOTES 

This article was read as a paper at the 1995 American Folklore Society meetings and is a 
distillation of three hours of lectures I gave at the Fife Conference, Utah State University, June 
1995. 

WORKS CITED 

"Folklore Censorship." Australian Children 's Folklore Newsletter. 26 (June 1994): 
 1-2. 
Le Guin, Ursula K. "Dreams Must Explain Themselves." The Language of the Night. 
 Ed. Susan Wood. New York: Berkley, 1979. 37-46. 
Lewis, C.S. "On Three Ways of Writing for Children." Of Other Worlds. Ed. Walter 
 Hooper. 1966. New York: Harcourt, 1975. 22-34 
Mechling, Jay. "Children's Folklore." Folk Groups and Folklore Genres: An 
 Introduction. Ed. Elliott Oring. Logan: Utah State UP, 1986. 91-120. 
Opie, Peter, and Iona Opie. The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren. London: 
 Oxford UP, 1959. 
Sullivan, C.W., III. "Learning the Structure of Traditional Narrative." Children's 
 Folklore Review. Guest Ed. Judith Haul. 15.1 (1992): 17-23. 

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