A
nursery rhyme is a traditional poem or song that is told or sung to young children. The term dates back to in Britain, where most of the earliest nursery rhymes that are known today were recorded in English but eventually spread to other countries. The tradition of children's nursery rhymes is largely considered a form of verbal lore, both written and oral, with traditional utterances of repetitive patterns that vary in style and tone.
History The term "
Mother Goose rhymes", which is interchangeable with nursery rhymes, originates from the early 1600s in relation to a collection of stories in a monthly periodical from a French critic,
Jean Loret's . This contains the earliest reference to Mother Goose in the line (). However, these stories were not referring to any of the best-known Mother Goose rhymes that are most associated with the term, which instead have English origins. Thomas Carnan, stepson of publisher
John Newbery, became the owner of Newbery Publishing House following the death of John Newbery. He was the first to use the term Mother Goose for children's nursery rhymes when he published "Mother Goose's Melody" and "Sonnets for the Cradle". This was the first known publication, in 1780, of the collection of Mother Goose rhymes. It comprised a compilation of traditional English nonsense nursery rhymes and songs from a variety of sources, each with its own black and white illustration. In the early 1950s, the monography
The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren offered considerable insight as the first known publication of ethnographic research in which children themselves were consulted about their beliefs and oral traditions, including songs and rhymes.
Opie and Opie demonstrate that there are two classes of nursery rhymes that children inherit: those essential to the regulation of their games and their relationships with each other; and those which are "mere expressions of exuberance", repeated for no more reason than they heard it from someone else. The latter type exemplifies observations by Opie and Opie that children seem to find traditional rhymes funny and remarkable in themselves, and are often fascinated by the way they rhyme with repetitive patterns, styles and tones. For example, this popular English rhyme Opie and Opie heard from children at the end of a schoolday: Parents and children can speak and sing nursery rhymes together, and a child will start to imitate the sounds and pronounce the words. Eventually, the child begins to add words to their vocabulary, which they then can use when they want to talk or sing. An example is the saying "Sally go around the Sun". When speaking this nursery rhyme to the child, the parents have the option to change the word
around to
over,
under or
through, expanding the child's vocabulary and improving their language skills. Likewise, children eventually begin to learn to communicate using various styles of language, such as
alliteration and
onomatopoeia. Practicing nursery rhymes effectively primes children for cognitive benefits. Nursery rhymes expand children's mental abilities by exposing them to new ideas and encouraging them to use their imagination. The ability to break down words into sounds and syllables is necessary for children to fully understand and use the alphabet, and children develop these early literacy skills by learning nursery rhymes. This was observed, for example, in the nursery rhyme "A Sailor Went to the Sea": Exposure to this nursery rhyme allowed children to learn homophones and how there are different meanings for the words
sea and
see, even though they are pronounced the same.
Social and emotional development The nature of nursery rhymes serves as a tool for building and improving social and emotional skills for young children. Fundamentally, traditional children's nursery rhymes are a storytelling method with aspects like voice inflection and listener engagement, which help children to develop social and emotional understanding. For example, the nursery rhyme "
Ring Around the Rosie" involves children dancing around in a circle as they recite a short and catchy rhyme: Likewise, nursery rhymes benefit children's emotional development. Hearing nursery rhymes before falling asleep reminds children that they are in a familiar environment, so they feel safe and at peace. This might explain why non-parental child caregivers often rely on nursery rhymes to alleviate a child's discomfort and uncertainty when their parents are absent. Some children's nursery rhymes involve conflict, which the characters within the nursery rhyme must resolve. This can involve reconciling negative emotions like jealousy, anger, or sadness. Most nursery rhymes are meant to be told or sung to young children as a form of entertainment or as a means of learning certain lessons. To accomplish this goal, traditional children's nursery rhymes must take a simple form that can easily be learned and repeated by children. Specifically, they typically have a repetitive and predictable pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables, known as
isochronic meter. This does not necessarily have to involve repeating stressed and unstressed syllables one at a time, but can leave as many as four unstressed syllables between each stressed syllable. The simplicity of isochronic meter allows for this variability in the stressed syllable pattern, so each poem does not have to take the exact same form and can still be easily read in a very similar manner across various cultures. An example of this pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables can be seen clearly in the style of poems in several languages including English, Chinese,
Bengkulu, and
Yoruba in Nigeria. Another significant aspect of nursery rhymes that tends to be fairly standard across cultures is the number of lines that occur in a poem. Typically, these poems contain four lines with four beats in each line. These beats, as mentioned above, occur in an isochronic pattern. In English poetry, it is highly uncommon to find a nursery rhyme that deviates from this pattern. In other cultures, these conventions may be different; in Chinese nursery rhymes, for example, there seems to be less rigidity in the requirement that poems have four beats per line. There are multiple examples of nursery rhymes that contain a first line—with six beats, followed by three lines containing four beats each. Some Chinese nursery rhymes have up to six four-beat lines. Another convention that seems to be fairly universal in children's nursery rhymes is the pattern of rests before or after the lines. In English poetry, a rest is most commonly placed after the second and fourth lines of a poem, or after each line in a poem, while sometimes there will be rests after lines one, two, and four. Deviations from these three schemes can create awkwardness in the reading. Similar patterns are found within other cultures; rhymes in Bengkulu, for instance, often have rests at the beginning of each verse, which is slightly different from the pattern found in English, while rests in Chinese tend to be like those in English, with rests after each line. Yet another cross-cultural similarity is in nursery rhymes'
rhyme scheme, which tends to be an A-B-A-B pattern. There are variations, though they tend to be slight and few, as they make a nursery rhyme more difficult to read and understand—contrary to the intent that they be easy. == See also ==