They feel like harmless traditions, but songs sung to children can seed negative age stereotypes. A new study reveals how nursery rhymes may contribute to these stereotypes and why more positive representations of the aged is a societal necessity – not just a sentimental gesture.
Summary:
- Ageist attitudes take root in children as young as three years old. Because nursery rhymes are learned through repetition and melody during critical brain development, their implicit messages are easily absorbed without conscious scrutiny.
- Older adults appear in only 4% of the analysed rhymes. When they do, more than half of these depictions carry negative stereotypes: portraying older characters as physically debilitated, cognitively impaired, unhygienic, or helpless.
- The researchers recommend creating new, diverse rhymes that portray older adults in positive ways. They also suggest reviewing early childhood curricula and encouraging intergenerational activities through collaborations between public institutions, writers, gerontologists, and older adults.
"It's raining, it's pouring…" the next line comes as natural as the ABCs, “The old man is snoring, He went to bed and bumped his head, And couldn't get up in the morning.” A nursery rhyme learned in earliest childhood and saved as a deep memory, most don’t stop to question if the depiction of the “old man” is positive or negative, and how that may contribute to ageist beliefs.
That is precisely the point of a new study by Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy’s Associate Professor Reuben Ng and Research Associate Nicole Indran: nursery rhymes work on children below the level of conscious attention, and what they are quietly teaching about old age is not especially helpful.
Published in JMIR Aging, the study is the first to systematically examine how old age is portrayed in nursery rhymes.
“Nursery rhymes are a huge part of our lives,” says Assoc Prof Ng. “We grew up with them and now we recite them to the children in our lives – our kids, nieces and nephews.” He explains that as these rhymes are delivered through repetition and playful melody, the implicit messages about ageing get absorbed easily. “If a medium has that kind of frequency and reach during the years of critical brain development, it deserves just as much scrutiny as movies and books.”
More than child’s play
To that end, the researchers pulled together 735 unique nursery rhymes from major online collections and searched for terms tied to old age such as old, grandfather, granny, elder, and others. After filtering out false positives and duplicates, 29 rhymes remained in which old age was a genuine, central theme.
That is just 4 per cent of the total, indicating a lack of representation of elders in nursery rhymes overall. But when it does appear, the picture skews unflattering: 59 per cent of the rhymes carried negative stereotypes of older people, against 34 per cent positive and a mere 7 per cent neutral.
The negative rhymes cluster around a familiar set of tropes. Older characters are physically debilitated, falling down wells, bumping their heads, scraping their skin. They are cognitively impaired, forgetful, prone to nonsensical repetition. They are unhygienic, helpless, unlikable, irresponsible, incompetent. The positive rhymes, by contrast, lean on a narrower and gentler set of qualities: wisdom, affection, joviality, such as the wise old owl, the merry old soul, or the grandmother baking pies for visiting grandchildren.
The authors openly flag one limitation in their study: nearly all the rhymes in their dataset appear to originate in the West, so the findings reflect Western cultural assumptions about ageing. That raises the question, what would the same analysis find in Asian nursery rhymes?
Assoc Prof Ng notes, “In Asian contexts, cultural norms like filial piety often afford older adults respect, but respect doesn’t necessarily translate into nuance.” It remains to be seen if local rhymes portray older adults as active, multidimensional human beings, or are limited to an Asian set of stereotypes such as ‘doting caregiver’ or ‘stern disciplinarian’. “Given Singapore’s multilingual landscape,” he says, “we’d also examine linguistic cues to see how terms for ageing in different languages and dialects carry subtle assumptions about vitality or decline.”
Rewriting the golden years
The paper's central claim is that this matters more than it might seem. The study points out that ageist attitudes tend to take root in one's formative years and persist into adulthood, and there is a substantial body of prior research showing that children display negative attitudes towards older people as young as age three.
This finding has real-world implications in addressing ageism in society. “Most anti-ageism interventions target adults through public awareness campaigns or workplace sensitivity training,” says Indran. “These interventions matter but essentially aim to undo decades of ingrained bias. If ageist stereotypes are forming before a child can even read, that’s a strong argument for shifting some of that investment upstream,” she says, while making it clear it’s not an either/or decision. “Campaigns targeted at adults are crucial but right now, early childhood is an untapped site for ageism prevention.”
Rather than directly attacking nursery rhymes – many of which reflect “past attitudes” and whose meanings the authors admit are "inherently subjective" – the study lays out several realistic interventions.
First is the creation of new nursery rhymes that flip the script and depict older characters in a positive light, as well as creating opportunities to introduce alternative versions of existing rhymes. Achieving this should be a “collaboration between public institutions and creative ecosystems,” says Indran. “Libraries and early childhood agencies have the reach and platform to host workshops and commission work. However, the creative direction should be led by writers, gerontologists and older adults themselves so the final products are genuinely enjoyable and not preachy.”
The study also recommends that curriculum developers ensure negative attitudes towards older adults are not reinforced, especially given the evidence that stereotypes often take root in childhood and carry on into adulthood.
Other suggestions include intergenerational storytelling and performance sessions for the reciprocal exchange of knowledge and skills, and opportunities for collaborative projects across age groups to bridge generational gaps. Crucially, the study highlights that empowering parents and caregivers with the resources to confront ageism will help create lasting impressions on children’s perspectives towards ageing.
Regarding future areas of study, Assoc Prof Ng and Indran propose exploring children’s perceptions of depictions of older adults in nursery rhymes by speaking with them directly. Assoc Prof Ng suggests: “We’d keep it direct and relatable for children: ‘Would you want to play with this old man/woman? What game would you like to play with them?’ The answer would tell us a great deal about whether children see older adults as engaging, active partners or default to stereotypes related to passiveness and frailty.”
Designing our future selves
The melodies of our childhood have a long echo. They teach us how to speak before we fully understand what we are saying, quietly shaping our worldview long before we enter a classroom or a workplace.
As Singapore navigates its transition into a super-aged society, we must do more than protect the dignity of today’s seniors; we safeguard the future of the children reciting these rhymes.
After all, the old person snoring in the rhyme is not just a character from the past – they are the future self of every child singing along today. Building a society that values them is not just to change how our children see the old, but to change how they will eventually see themselves.