NÉPI GYERMEKÉLET SZÉKELYKEVÉN
FOLK CHILDHOOD IN SKORENOVAC

Summary/Abstract: The objective of this paper is to illustrate the characteristics of traditional child-rearing and childhood through the prism of women’s life stories recorded in a Vojvodina diaspora community: Skorenovac. Research on folk child rearing and childhood has been only sporadically carried out in Vojvodina, and there is an even greater absence of such research in the diaspora communities. To avoid over-generalisation, I have attempted to generalise the statements on Skorenovac as little as possible, bearing in mind that the accounts of some respondents did not give a complete picture of the culture and way of life in the village. In my research, I have assumed that the narratives of life stories emphasise the issues of childhood and motherhood. The analysis of the data collected revealed that in Skorenovac, the upbringing of children commenced from a very early age, with parents taking their children with them wherever they went, thereby exposing them to the daily life and activities of the community. It can be hypothesised that this exposure led to children observing and becoming interested in the various occupations and subsequently acquiring knowledge through imitation in a playful manner. This process may also have facilitated the acquisition of rules and social norms of behaviour. The fieldwork data demonstrates the pivotal role of the family in children’s development, and the way children are raised within the family significantly influences their upbringing in the community. In one phase of my research, the target group comprised women of Bukovina origin, born in Skorenovac, over the age of 70. This was due to the necessity of interviewing individuals who had either had children or raised children from the mid-1930s to 1989, the period between the change of regime and the present. In selecting my interviewees, it was imperative that they belonged to a similar social class and that their childhood narratives highlighted the divergent norms that prevailed in the village at the time, depending on the family.

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