A folk group defined, primarily, by age. From the first encounters with their peers until the time they begin to experience puberty, children create and pass on traditional lore— oral, customary or social, and material. While they are aware of sexual and racial differences and, to an extent, ethnic and national differences (all of which show up in their lore), children transmit their folklore quite freely within their group. Children’s folklore is the traditional material created and transmitted by children up to about age twelve; after that, they are adolescents, and their lore changes as they attempt to put childhood behind them. The family is the first folk group within which children learn traditional materials. The various rituals practiced at mealtime, bathtime, and/or bedtime, on holidays, for birthdays and other anniversaries, during the different seasons, and at any other times when the family regularly gathers form some of the initial ways in which a child’s world is structured. A child soon learns that different families have different traditional practices, and children discuss these differences with their parents and peers. Once children begin to associate with their peers without direct adult supervision, they begin to learn their own group’s folklore, which often has been passed down to the present through centuries of generations. That folklore comprises three broad categories: (1) oral, those items from individual words to complete stories that make up children’s discourse; (2) customary, those traditionally established practices, whether simple superstitions or complex games, by which two or more children interact; and (3) material, all of those concrete items, like paper airplanes and snow forts, that children learn to build during their preteen years. As children interact in the sandbox or the backyard, at day care or kindergarten, they use words that have specific meaning within their age group. Some of their earliest oral folklore consists of words like “doo doo,” to refer to feces, or “doo doo head,” an insult, which they have made up themselves. At one time, it was common for children to use the word “fish” as a derogatory adjective, as in “Those are really fish sneakers!” to indicate an unacceptable pair of sneakers (a discount-store brand rather than a fashionable name brand, for example). Certain pranks may have their own names; a “wedgie” or “melvin” describes the act of pulling someone else’s (usually a male’s) underpants up sharply by the rear waistband. As children become aware of conformity, they have special epithets and insults for the nonconformers who tatde (“Tattle tale, tattle tale…”), lie (“Liar, liar, pants on fire…”), cry (“Cry baby, cry…”), allow their underwear to show (“I see London, I see France…”), leave a zipper down (“XYZ,” that is, “Examine your zipper”), or engage in other behavior disapproved of by the group. With increasing age comes a concomitant development in language skills and oral folklore. Children ask traditional riddles (“What’s black and white and red/read all over?”) and tell jokes (“There was this kid, Johnny…”) that have been around for generations. The category of riddle joke combines the two. The riddle joke—whether about polacks, dead babies, morons, teachers, parents, elephants, famous people, or a host of other topics—indicates not only the child’s increasing capacity for humor, but also his or her participation in a tradition (continuing the moron or Helen Keller jokes) and additions to that tradition (space shutde disaster or Dolly Parton jokes). These forms of humor, along with parodies of everything from “The Star-Spangled Banner” to “Joy to the Wodd” and a good deal of gross or obscene humor, show both an increasing sophistication of wit as well as a willingness to either mock adult society or violate its rules—perhaps in preparation for the greater independence of puberty. Children also tell folktales that are often transmitted in situations in which there is little or no adult supervision, but they are about the dangers of such situations. Children at a slumber party or sleepover will, generally after the supervising adults have gone to bed, tell ghost stories and participate in various rituals with ouija boards, mirrors, and other mediums through which they attempt to contact the supernatural. Older (but still preteen) gids who are baby-sitting or are baby-sitters may relate stories such as the one about the threatening telephone call discovered to be coming from an upstairs phone. Boys or girls in summer camps tell, or are told by counselors and then pass on, ghost stories—usually set in the same locale as the camp. The absence of protecting adults (in the usual family ratio) makes the stories scarier. Customary folklore helps children structure their own activities without adult intervention. Counting-out rhymes (“One potato, two potato…” or “Eeny, meeny, miney, mo…”) allow children to pick the first “It” person for the game, the one who must suffer the punishment of being “It” without having been caught. The various tagging, hiding, cliasing, and capturing games all have rules established by tradition that can vary from neighborhood to neighborhood. Whether “It” counts by flves to fifty or tens to one hundred, whether the hiders must hide more than five feet or more than ten feet from the seeker’s goal (“Anybody around my goal is it!”), and whether or not the house counts in wood tag are matters for which group tradition provides a rule or an answer. Hundreds of jump-rope rhymes, ball-bouncing rhymes, handclapping rhymes, and other game rhymes (for example, “The farmer in the dell…”) provide the structures for games dating back many generations. Customary behavior also guides children through the wodd in other ways. Some items are learned from both the family and the peer folk group. A child might learn the traditional birthday song from parents, but only his or her peers will teach the equally traditional parody (“Happy Birthday to you, you live in the zoo…”). Other holiday customs may be a similar combination of family and peer traditions. Children also have a variety of folk beliefs or superstitions, from the popular “Step on a crack, break your mother’s back” to various omens of, or practices for, luck before the baseball or soccer game or before a test at school, as well as beliefs (many of which diey share with adults) having to do with good and bad luck. Gids, mosdy, have a variety of ways (twisting apple stems or peeling apples while reciting the alphabet) to discover the initials or name of the boy they will marry or to discover the number of children they will have. There are also clubs, some secret, with their requisite initiation ceremonies, wherein children gadier in groups, united against whatever may come their way. The category of material culture encompasses the least-studied aspect of children’s folklore. Perhaps this is because some of the most obvious items in that group are made of the least-durable substance—paper. The most ubiquitous of these is the paper airplane, constructed in a variety of sizes and shapes from clean notebook paper as well as returned test papers or homework. Paper is also used fbr boats, fortune-telling devices, bracelets and chains, drinking cups, “poppers” (which make a loud noise when the teacher is not looking), various animals (some derived from origami patterns), footballs (to play with in study hall), game boards (for “hangman” or “battleships”), puppets and “cootie” catchers, cone-shaped missiles (launched in the updraft from the hot-air heaters), and rubberbandfired spitwads—to name a few. Most of these constructions, along with snappers made from hairpins and various other devices, are found more often in schoolrooms than anywhere else. Outside of the school, children are equally creative, and they have more materials with which to work. Some of their creations may come from seasonally acailable materials: sand castles, hideouts, and tree houses in the summer; snow forts, snow angels, sled runs, and snowballs in the winter. Boys, mostly, make guns, knives, slingshots, bows and arrows, spears, lances, and quarterstaffs out of available pieces of wood. Boys and girls alike make “motors” for their tricycles and bicycles out of old playing cards or other pieces of cardboard. Girls, mostly, make friendship bracelets out of thread with bits of metal or beads woven in. In our modern, hightech society, some children still make traditional string figures and “conkers” (a British term for horse chestnuts with string through them), a testament to the endurance of some folklore. A century of scholarship, during which a number of folklorists have found children’s folklore a rewarding field of study, has shaped the current awareness and study of the subject. One of the first to study children’s lore, and also the first editor of the Journal of American Folklore, was William Wells Newell, whose Games and songs of American Children (1883) was the first major study of American children’s folklore. In some ways, especially in his focus on games and songs, Newell set the tone for much subsequent study of children’s folklore. Shordy after Newell’s book, Henry C.Bolton published The Counting-out Rhymes of Children: Their Antiquity, Origin, and Wide Distribution: A Study in Folk-Lore (1888). Newell and Bolton started a trend in children’s folklore that, in many ways, culminated in such encyclopedic studies as Roger Abrahams’ Jump-Rope Rhymes: A Dictionary (1969), his Countingout Rhymes: A Dictionary (1980), lona and Peter Opie’s Children’s Games in Street and Playground (1969), and their The Singing Game (1985). Between Newell’s and the Opies’ books, there were several variations on the main theme. Stewart Culin’s “Street Games of Boys in Brooklyn, N.Y.” (1891) was a study of a specific region and a specific kind of Street Games (1976). Other variations included articles and game, and it certainly pointed toward Alan Milberg’s book books that were not exercises in scholarship but collections of games and songs for children, such as Charles Weir’s Songs the Children Love to Sing (1916) and Songs to Sing to Children (1935). Children’s games and songs (and other folklore) were also included in such expansive studies as The Frank C.Brown Collection of North Carolina Folklore (1952–1964) (especially Volume 1 edited in part by Paul G.Brewster), and Carl Withers’ Plainville USA (1941) and subsequent works. As the study of songs and games continued, the study of children’s folklore in general began to broaden. Among the few examples that must stand for a great many books and articles, Brewster’s American Nonsinging Games (1953) was the first large study of nonsinging games. The 1950s also saw the publication of lona and Peter Opie’s The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren (1959), which gives nearly as much space to customary behavior as to oral traditions. Martha Wolfenstein’s Children’s Humor: A Psychological