Dete i san u narodnim uspavankama

Abstract

The purpose of sleep is to help children grow and develop, which is why many parents try to lull their children to sleep. The present paper investigates what types of feelings, desires, blessings and expectations from a childare contained in lullabies sung by different nations, as well as what perspectives on sleep and lulling a child to sleep there are. The corpus consists of 120 lullabies published in Milutin Đuričković‟s book “Zvezdice sna: uspavanke naroda sveta” (2021). The content analysis technique and descriptive method are used in analyzing the corpus. The obtained results show that the blessings and desires in the lullabies are concerned with the child‟s health, happiness and long life. They are related to dreams that come to life, which provides evidence for lullabies having a magic function. The expectations from a child show that the child was raised to fulfill the expectations of his/her family and the community. The analysis of the perspectives on sleep and lulling a child to sleep shows that emphasis is placed on the quality of sleep, the things that help the child go to sleep and the role of family, primarily that of mother, in creating optimum conditions for going to sleep and removing sleep distractions. The analyzed lullabies also contain a model of raising a child – encouraging the desired behavior (sleeping) by rewarding a child or punishing a child for misbehavior by frightening him/her as a means of reactive discipline. The analysis shows that the lullabies belonging to different nations have many elements in common. The fact that the lullabies used to have other functions besides the basic one suggests the need for further research.