children's folklore

Children's folklore encompasses the traditional knowledge, games, rhymes, and customs passed among children themselves, largely outside adult supervision.

This includes jump-rope chants, counting-out rhymes like eeny, meeny, miny, moe, playground games, scary stories told at sleepovers, and beliefs about luck or danger.

Unlike folklore taught by adults to children, children's folklore transmits horizontally—from child to child across generations—often preserving surprisingly old material in slightly mutated forms.