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Children’s Folkore in the twenty-First Century:  
Folklorists oF Childhood respond to the newtown tragedy

elizAbeth tuCker

This introduction to the panel “Children’s Folklore in the Twenty-First Century: 
Folklorists of Childhood respond to the Newtown Tragedy” was presented at the 
annual meeting of the American Folklore Society in Providence, Rhode Island on 
October 17, 2013.

At the American Folklore Society’s annual meeting in 2000, the Children’s Folklore 
Section sponsored a panel in response to the Columbine tragedy of 1999. Titled 
“The Monstrous Child: Folklore Responds to Columbine and Adolescence,” this 
panel resulted in a special issue of Children’s Folklore Review (2002) in which 
folklorists of childhood responded to both Columbine and adolescence. Jo Ann 
Conrad’s paper, “The War on Youth: A Modern Oedipal Tragedy,” identified the 
concept of a “monstrous child” from which tragedies come. Since the time of 
our panel on Columbine, questions have arisen about the line between play and 
violence in frames of children’s activities and the issue of adult control of such 
activities. In the aftermath of the horrifying tragedy at Newtown in 2012, in which 
twenty children and six teachers died at the hands of a late-adolescent shooter, 
this panel again gathers folklorists of childhood to re-examine the use and urgency 
of children’s and adolescents’ folklore for youth and adults.

During the thirteen years since our panel on “The Monstrous Child,” many 
changes have taken place. With horrifying rapidity, so many school shootings 
have occurred that it is hard to remember when all of them happened. Newtown, 
however, has left an indelible imprint of horror and sadness on people’s minds. 
The children who died were so young; there were so many of them, and their 
killer was a troubled late adolescent or young adult who also killed his mother. 
Newspaper reporters wrote about Newtown as “slaughter of the innocents,” 
invoking a well-known Biblical theme. Something terrible had happened, and 
people of diverse backgrounds struggled to find meaning.

In this panel we will try, as folklorists of childhood, to interpret contemporary 
children’s and adolescents’ behavior. Our presentations address diverse aspects of 
contemporary children’s folklore, but all of them reflect the need for folklorists to 
analyze how children’s culture develops and changes, particularly in relation to 
intertwined roles of play and violence in youth folk practices. This year’s theme 
of cultural sustainability, defined on the AFS website as “meeting the needs of the 
present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own 
needs,” fits our panel’s purpose well. We plan to examine the culture of childhood 
from multiple vantage points, exploring how children and adolescents maintain their 
own culture and what methods and strategies we choose to use in our research.

During the discussion period, we will ask you to consider how childlore is 
growing and changing in the early twenty-first century and how it contributes to 
the discourse of play and violence in twenty-first century public life. 

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Children’s Folkore in the twenty-First Century tuCker

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WORKS CITED

Bronner, Simon J. 2002. Introduction: Folklore Responds to Columbine and 
Adolescence. Children’s Folklore Review 24 (1-2): 7-20.

Conrad, Jo Ann. 2002. The War on Youth: A Modern Oedipal Tragedy. Children’s 
Folklore Review 24 (1-2): 33-42.

Tucker, Elizabeth. 2012. Changing Concepts of Childhood: Children’s Folklore 
Scholarship since the Late Nineteenth Century. Journal of American Folklore 
125:498 (Fall 2012): 389-410.

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