Why are there references to death in children's songs?

Because most of our classic children’s songs and nursery rhymes were written during a time when death was viewed as a part of every day life.

Now we have become so overly concerned with shielding our children along with the rest of polite society from the realities of life there are those that seem to think that someone who doesn’t have a problem butchering a rabbit to make a stew borders on being a dangerous psychopath. However, back in the day those songs and rhymes were written it wasn’t uncommon for grandma to kill over dead in the living room (as opposed to a sterile hospital room out of sight of the kids), have mom pass away from the plague in her own bedroom, or watch as little billy fell in the well and drowned.

Death is part of life. We teach our dogs to “play dead”, kids pretend they are dead while playing (and not just in playing war either), it’s in our speech (“Oh, doesn’t that just kill you?”) and so on.

Maybe it’s a reference to impotence?

Why over analyze? Society today in the west is politically correct for fear of the truth. Simple really.

Death was abundant. Children needed to understand it could happen to them. Parents and grandparents wrote ditties to explain that fact in a way children could comprehend.

Because in older times, the preferred modus operandi to get children to behave as expected was to imply death if they didn’t.
You know, the good old times.

I don’t find it odd. What is odd is that adults avoid talking about death. Children confront it and adults shy away from it.

Ring around the rosie was actually a poem written at the time of the plague/ black death. It was never meant to be a childrens song. after it was a poem, it was in scary movies. But then someone made a sweet sounding “tune” to the poem making it sweet. Ring around the rosie: Black rings around the red rashes and bruses of the dying people. A pocket full of posies: people believe flowers and sweet smelling scents cured the plague. Ashes, ashes: they ran out of room to bury dead bodies so they burnt them. We all fall down: we all die.
Although it’s creepy it’s just the way it turned out.

@flutherother I’m not so sure that you can say that children confront it. I didn’t have a clue about the meaning of ring around the rosie until someone told me in the fifth grade, after which it made sense. I don’t think it is as much children confronting death as it is children referencing death without truely knowing they are. The songs have been so “sweetened up”, or whatever you would call it, as to cover up the meaning.

Is there any particular reason why we would be surprised to see references to death in childrens’ nursery rhymes?

It was a festive way to threaten their kids with death if they didn’t behave.;)

You can’t put kids in a bubble and expect them not to learn of things like death, at least the songs are giving them a up beat way of intoducing the topic to them. Death is a part of living and its something we all have to come to terms with at one point in our lives some have to come to terms with it at a much earlier age than others so I have no problem with it being in songs, since its nothing harsh or hard for them to hear. If it were something like a slasher movie then I would take issue with it.

Up until the advent of modern medicine and antibiotics, death was at the forefront of people’s daily existence. Have you ever stopped to ask why we celebrate birthdays? It’s basically the celebration that you managed to make it another year without croaking. (and, historically, age was referred to by season, such as ‘I am 11 summers’, which implies that you also made it through that number of winters).

This whole idea of childhood (and children being anything other than little adults) is relatively new, beginning at the start of the 20th century.

Nursery rhymes often reflected the current events of those times. Many times nursery rhymes were used as a way to quickly pass on subversive messages – the rhyming made it easier to remember (and disguised the real message). It allowed a sort of free speech. Free speech was usually punishable by death back then.

@PhiNotPi Most kids stories are quite up front about death. We used to tell each other stories as kids and our stories were all about ghosts and hauntings and gruesome deaths. That was what fascinated us and we were pretty normal kids. Look at traditional fairy stories.

Fee-fi-fo-fum,
I smell the blood of an Englishman,
Be he alive, or be he dead
I’ll grind his bones to make my bread

Wonderfully terrifying stuff that lets kids face (and conquer) their fears in safety.

What better way to approach the subject?

Why should kids be insulated against death?

Have you read older fairy tales and bedtimes stories? Like the original Brothers Grimm, or Der Struwwelpeter (which is so scary I won’t be in the same building as that book)? Before Disney, basically everything said “You gonna die!!!! Or get seriously maimed!”

A lot of nursery rhymes are mnemonics or allegories for historical events that seemed sufficiently important at the time. “Ring around the rosy” comes to mind, spelling out one or two (depending on the version) of the obvious symptoms of the Plague, what people did about it, and how much good it did them.

@Tay122 Many have associated the poem [Ring Around The Rosie] with the Great Plague which happened in England in 1665, or with earlier outbreaks of the Black Death in England. Interpreters of the rhyme before World War II make no mention of this;] by 1951, however, it seems to have become well established as an explanation for the form of the rhyme that had become standard in the United Kingdom. Peter and Iona Opie remark: “The invariable sneezing and falling down in modern English versions have given would-be origin finders the opportunity to say that the rhyme dates back to the Great Plague. A rosy rash, they allege, was a symptom of the plague, posies of herbs were carried as protection and to ward off the smell of the disease. Sneezing or coughing was a final fatal symptom, and ‘all fall down’ was exactly what happened.” The line Ashes, Ashes in alternative versions of the rhyme is claimed to refer variously to cremation of the bodies, the burning of victims’ houses, or blackening of their skin, and the theory has been adapted to be applied to other versions of the rhyme. In its various forms, the interpretation has entered into popular culture and has been used elsewhere to make oblique reference to the plague.

Many folklore scholars regard the theory as baseless for several reasons:
The late appearance of the explanation;
The symptoms described do not fit especially well with the Great Plague;
The great variety of forms makes it unlikely that the modern form is the most ancient one, and the words on which the interpretation are based are not found in many of the earliest records of the rhyme (see above);
European and 19th-century versions of the rhyme suggest that this “fall” was not a literal falling down, but a curtsy or other form of bending movement that was common in other dramatic singing games. (Source)

Even though children play dead and sing about it in rhymes and song, they still don’t grasp death. It’s not as if young Suzie is realizing she is singing about such a morbid topic. As well as when Billy is role playing with his friends and he is killed, he doesn’t actually form a state of mind from the experiences of death because many children can’t fathom the concept at a young age. Most don’t realize these things until they are far older.