Learning from Children's Play and Folklore in South Louisiana

This interview with folklorist Jeanne Pitre Soileau explores how children's play and oral lore in South Louisiana are collected, transmitted, and changing over time. Soileau, an educator for forty-seven years who earned her Ph.D. from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, describes her method of collecting verbal play traditions such as hand-clapping games, jump rope rhymes, taunts, camp songs, and The Dozens. Her work draws on sessions with children ages three to eighteen at schools, churches, summer camps, and playgrounds, primarily in South Louisiana, gathered over roughly thirty-five years, with transcription of audio and video recordings forming the basis for her publications.

A central theme is that children's folklore constitutes ephemeral artistic expression, with its value residing in the act of playing rather than in the games as artifacts. Soileau argues that free, minimally supervised spaces such as recess, camps, and sleepovers are essential to the transmission of this lore, and she describes a remarkably rapid "children's network" that carries rhymes across distant English-speaking regions. She also notes that many adults block out childhood lore as they reach adolescence, though some of her informants retained extensive repertoires well into adulthood.

Soileau addresses the influence of media, noting that movies, radio, and television have long shaped play, and that children's screen time has grown substantially. She observes that the internet and social media have added rather than replaced play worlds, though she worries that reduced face-to-face contact may weaken the passing on of traditional lore. She offers no firm predictions about the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, calling for careful future study.

Ultimately, Soileau expresses cautious optimism that children's lore will endure, since children have always sought peers with whom to share a secret world, provided they have room to gather and play together.