Nursery rhyme

A nursery rhyme is a traditional poem or song for children in Britain and other European countries, but usage of the term dates only from the late 18th/early 19th century.

[14][15] These rhymes seem to have come from a variety of sources, including traditional riddles, proverbs, ballads, lines of Mummers' plays, drinking songs, historical events, and, it has been suggested, ancient pagan rituals.

[19] Early folk song collectors also often collected (what is now known as) nursery rhymes, including in Scotland Sir Walter Scott and in Germany Clemens Brentano and Achim von Arnim in Des Knaben Wunderhorn (1806–1808).

[21] By the time of Sabine Baring-Gould's A Book of Nursery Songs (1895), folklore was an academic study full of comments and footnotes.

John Bellenden Ker Gawler (1764–1842), for example, wrote four volumes arguing that English nursery rhymes were written in "Low Saxon", a hypothetical early form of Dutch.

She posited that children's songs were a peculiar form of coded historical narrative, propaganda or covert protest, and did not believe that they were written simply for entertainment.

As recently as the late 18th century, rhymes like "Little Robin Redbreast" were occasionally cleaned up for a young audience.

[35] In the late 19th century, the major concern seems to have been violence and crime, which led some children's publishers in the United States like Jacob Abbot and Samuel Goodrich to change Mother Goose rhymes.

Most attempts to reform nursery rhymes on this basis appear to be either very small scale, light-hearted updating, like Felix Dennis's When Jack Sued Jill – Nursery Rhymes for Modern Times (2006), or satires written as if from the point of view of political correctness to condemn reform.

[42] Research also supports the assertion that music and rhyme increase a child's ability in spatial reasoning, which aids mathematics skills.