ABSTRACT
The material that follows, excerpted from two chapters of the Opies’ book, provides a wide variety of examples of children’s lore. The existence of such material clearly suggests that children are more than receivers of adult culture and of ideas developed by adults; children are in fact active creators of the social worlds in which they live. For this reason the Opies speak of children’s culture, i.e. what anthropologists refer to as a ‘design for living’. All of the Opies’ material suggests the existence of a culture or cultures of childhood independent of adults, created, sustained, and destroyed by children for their own purposes, whatever those purposes might be.
