Where are you going, my dear children?

Nursery rhyme and game Flipping the rainbow. Photo: Document

From a term referring to mental decline, Brain Rot has now transformed into a trend, an addictive content ecosystem on the Internet, where users are drawn to characters, sounds, and sayings that are so popular that they can be heard and seen everywhere.

A Brain Rot universe consisting of images of unrealistic characters created by AI and content producers on a background of electronically arranged sounds is creating a fever among young people, especially children. My two little ones are no exception. Listening to the two of them playing together, excitedly singing strange, soulless songs, I suddenly remembered the nursery rhymes of my childhood strangely.

Like "Chi chi chan chan" when I was still immature and learned to babble along with my mother: "Chi chi chan chan/ The nail blows fire/ The horse breaks the rein/ The three kings and five emperors/ Catch the cricket and go find it/ Buzz, buzz, buzz".

A little older, I followed the children in the neighborhood to gather and sing "Turning the rainbow": "Turning the rainbow/ River water flows/ There is a seventeen year old girl/ There is a thirteen year old girl/ The two of us/ Together we turn the rainbow".

Or "Globe" when playing claw explosion, if there are more people then you can play Dragon snake up to the clouds: "Dragon snake up to the clouds/ Is there a shaking tree/ Is the boss home?"...

Nursery rhymes follow us throughout our childhood. Time passes and the words may not be remembered exactly, but the memories of the rhymes and the games we played back then remain intact. That’s why I wonder why kids today are no longer interested in that lovely treasure.

Perhaps the change in living environment has faded the role of nursery rhymes when children have less space to participate in collective games. But thinking back, it is probably mostly due to us adults. Because we are too busy with our lives to earn a living to bring a full material life, we seem to forget to pass on to our children a colorful spiritual life.

Learning about nursery rhymes through newspapers and books is even rarer. Meanwhile, dedicated works to collect and preserve nursery rhymes are not absent. Books instructing how to sing and use nursery rhymes in games for children such as “119 nursery rhyme games for children”, “219 folk games for preschool children”... seem to only attract preschool and elementary school teachers and are of little interest to parents.

Will the nursery rhymes still be passed down in the long run or will they remain only in distant memories? Will there still be a painful search for the answer to the question “Where are you going, oh nursery rhymes?”...

Source: https://baodanang.vn/ve-dau-oi-hoi-dong-dao-3302799.html