Grown-ups tend not to take nursery rhymes very seriously. We sing them, read them and repeat them mostly because children enjoy them — a pleasant way to fill a few minutes or head off a tantrum. But look at what actually lasts, and it is the rhymes and the stories. They settle into the stock of things people quote back to themselves years later, when they need an answer to something.
Old rhymes, practical wisdom
Stories read aloud at home can quietly fill gaps that formal schooling leaves. Think about how much room a school timetable really gives to folk culture: a few hours on tales, a little on riddles, slightly more on proverbs — perhaps ten hours spread across ten years of schooling. Whatever the curriculum leaves out, home can supply, and the time to start is well before school begins. A child who already knows this material finds those few school hours easy, because the ground is familiar.
The first lullaby
Folk songs and rhymes teach through words and music together. What a child hears in the earliest months stays, so it matters a great deal what that is. There is little point experimenting: this material has already been tested by generations, remembered and passed down. Children take to simple, transparent rhyme, to unhurried melodies, to short repeated syllables that imitate animals and other familiar sounds.
A baby's first music is usually a lullaby sung over the cot — slow, drawn out, half spoken. Coaxing a child towards sleep, a parent is doing something closer to a charm than a performance, and it works: an ordinary lullaby settles a child in a way little else does. What a small child needs is not a wash of unrelated noise but a world of words with a shape to them. Lullabies are the entry into that world, and it is remembered for life.
Waking should have its songs too. Every stretch and roll can come with a rhyme or a few chanted words, and a baby will smile at them. Hearing this first at the very youngest age matters. Later the same chants become the soundtrack to a child's own movements — the first exercises, the first attempts at dancing, done gladly because they are set to something familiar. As the child grows, simple songs give way to tongue-twisters and to singing games with parts to play and actions to remember. By two or three, without anyone setting out to teach it, a child starts making up words and rhymes of their own. By then they have already absorbed what rhyme is and had a first course in music and poetry — taught by the people closest to them. Watching the results, fathers who left the singing to someone else often find themselves joining in.
