ABSTRACT
But children's folklore is primarily about children, and is therefore heir to all the difficulties the concept of "childhood" has encountered in this century. What seems remarkable about the chapters that follow is that the children who appear in these pages are so different from the children who appear almost everywhere else in twentieth-century social-science literature. We can seek therefore to discover how the rhetoric of childhood in folklore differs from that, for example, in psychology, where child development has been a major subject. We must hurriedly add that there are many rhetorics of childhood-a subject in the context of psychology we have dealt with elsewhere (Sutton-Smith 1994). In the psychological literature, there is a rhetoric of children as relatively passive experimental subjects who become attached to their parents, who begin to gain understanding of the world around them, who progress through various steps in language development, in social development, and in moral development. They learn to relate to their peers and to their teachers, and in due course they go through their physical, emotional, and intellectual growth and become adolescents. We hear either of the extent to which their behavior is determined by patterns of child rearing or sex-role stereotyping, or we hear about the inevitability of the growth crises and growth sequences through which they pass.
