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A study of the jump-rope game and particularly of jump-rope rhymes illustrates the manner in which a specific type of childhood play articulates basic issues of psychological development in girls during the latency period. In the form of the game, highly sensual motor activity is coupled with ritual, the setting of a group of peers of one sex, and an exercise of recently developed coordinated linguistic and conceptual skills. The content of the rhymes demonstrates the frequent reaching back into prelatency issues by means of chants dealing with sibling rivalry, aggression, jealousy and rage toward boys, and a fear and mastery of death. While some rhymes give "practice" to the girl's fantasy of her future fortune and heterosexuality (as older folklorists would have predicted), there is a striking prominence of themes of anality and anogenital confusion and indications that superego forces are marshaled to defend in particular against the pull of regressive gratifications.
The data of these rhymes tend to confirm some classical impressions regarding the latency period (Bornstein, 1951) and call our attention especially to more recent formulations which recognize that the latency period may be a highly unstable developmental phase for girls in particular (Jacobson, 1964); (Kestenberg, 1957). Notwithstanding the lower incidence of clinical psychopathology in girls (as compared to boys in this age range), girls in latency are often in a state of unstable transition, prone to easy regression to pregenital themes and pregenital issues. Other authors have suggested that it is precisely in such transitional periods that rhythmic psychomotor activities have a special stabilizing importance. The jump-rope rhymes are an even more specific articulation of some of the important areas of instability for girls, areas which