Fairy Tales: O is for Opie and Outdoor Play or The Truth About Kids

Iona and Peter Opie were a husband-wife folklorist team in the 1950s - 1980s. Like so many of the collectors on this list, they were primarily academics whose books are now almost entirely found in the juvenile section. 

I was fascinated to discover that the Opies were primarily interested in children at play. They were some of the first folklorists to delve into what would be called now "urban legends"--that is, playground games and lore passed down within an urban sub-culture.

The first adult non-fiction Opie book I picked up was Children's Games in Street and Playground. I also picked up several books with forwards by them and about them. 

I nearly set down the first book within moments of opening it since the initial pages go on and on about creative children and their democratic play carried out by fresh, non-jaded souls.

Eh... 

Based on my experiences with my peer group as well as my experiences growing up with four older brothers who played Capture the Flag with the neighborhood kids during the summer, sweetness & light is not the main characteristic I would assign to children's play. In fact, some of my brothers' stories about camp sound remarkably similar to Lord of the Flies. I really can't get excited about childhood innocence. 

I think it exists! But I think childhood innocence reminds us that we are fundamentally animals. It is innocent legally. It can be quite brutal and indifferent in reality. 

In any case, I kept going with the book, and when the Opies stopped delivering panegyrics and started talking about their primary research, the book got downright fascinating. I also formed the opinion, after picking up their first book The Language and Lore of Schoolchildren (1959) that the introduction to the second book (1969) may have been motivated by the "I am so appalled" shock leveled at the first book by the intelligentsia: my, my, my, kids don't submit their games and stories and poems up for adult approval! 

The Opies may have felt it necessary to defend the children they watched from "improvements." 

In fact, the Opies argue that the "aggravating," even bullying quality of children's play is often the result of being herded and watched by adults. As many parents can attest, if parents stay out of the fray, children will often resolve problems themselves in accordance with a "juvenile code." The Opies also make a point that I learned in a Childhood course years ago (likely based on Opie research): street/playground games are handed down from child to child, not imposed by adults. 

When I wrote His in Herland, I used this knowledge for the following passage:

Troas citizens are supposed to prefer new games, the ones carefully crafted to help students discover their potential. No doubt the old games involve dirty limericks, scuffles in the dirt, and “unhealthy” competition alongside Calvin & Hobbes incomprehensible rules, the kind of rules that don’t improve anything or go anywhere.

Alim played a game he learned in the mountains [Red Rover]. No doubt, like most playground games, he learned it from older peers who learned it when they were younger. At some point, the parents played it too. Wasn’t honoring parental role models a virtue?

The narrator goes on to wryly admit that honoring the past is entirely subjective here: supported when it results in the type of forward thinking approved of by the intelligentsia; dismissed when it gets in the way. Gilman's text is equally all-over-the-place, and the idea of "new games" is presented in Herland with, I'm sorry to say, great seriousness: her narrator argues that children are actually bored when they play the usual games, and they need better, more engaging, more improvement-oriented games. They will be happier! 

The Opies point out that when adults try to "help" children in their games, the adults, not the children, get rapidly bored:

"In fact, children's games often seem laborious to adults who, if invited to join in, may find themselves getting impatient, and wanting to speed them up. Adults do not always see, when subjected to lengthy preliminaries, that many of the games, particularly those of young children, are more akin to ceremonies than competitions" (2).

Malcolm Gladwell makes the same point in his article/chapter on stickiness. Very young children are often attracted to endless repetition. They will additionally slide in and out of paying attention and the other young children don't mind (until someone throws a truck).

The Opies did interviews as well as fieldwork. They point out that teenagers are the epitome of self-consciousness. They scorn games they played a year earlier for being babyish. I can attest to that observation. I got derided by my peers when I first entered the teen programs in my church (at the age of 12) because I wanted to keep playing the games we had played less than six months earlier.

I believe I caved. (Actually, I believe I learned to make jokes, which is what many highly overactive kids will do.) 

Looking back, I still think my peers were boring and unimaginative and rather full of themselves. I entirely relate to the protagonist from Only Yesterday, who pulls her imagination with her into everyday life, despite her staid mother. 

I did keep reading books from the kids' section through my teens, which startled and impressed my mom, but reading is the one area of my life that I was and am entirely honest about--I am not going to stop getting out books that I want to read because of other people's entirely superficial ideas about what I am supposed to want to read. I can't think of anything more stupid and self-deceiving.

In any case, the Opies continued to watch children without judgment for several decades. After Peter Opie's death in 1982, Iona continued to publish into the 1990s. She died in 2017. 

Overall, the Opies argue that children continue to play their own games and tell their own stories despite mass media and other supposedly corrupting influences. I suggest children even now play their own games and tell their own stories except those games and stories have gone even further underground. Being monitored doesn't stop inventiveness; it simply sends it elsewhere. In His in Herland, the younger children continue to throw "inappropriate" (competition-laden) games at each other and to tell dark, Grimm-like, bloody, violent, and inappropriate tales--late at night, when adults are not present.

More on the Opies' fascinating research will follow!