It has been a learning process for us to enjoy life, to get past that seriousness, and the older we get, the easier we find it to laugh. And we did laugh quite a bit during these interviews, like when Gislean protested our rigid upbringing. "Little German girls are raised to be little good girls. It took a long time to stop being a good girl, and I resent that. One misses a lot in life by being a little good girl. Cinderella was a wimp." With others it was a different kind of laughter, a soft laughter as, together, we tried to fill in the first lines of a song or poem that we half-remembered from childhood.... What serious children we used to be ... Raised within the silence, we lived in communities where the adults were always right, where obedience and loyalty were valued above all. (Hegi 1997)

The theme of childhood soundmaking has always been an important one for Hildegard Westerkamp, an issue that was evident from her Master's thesis, which uses her own childhood experience of Christmas music as a case study; to her autobiographical Breathing Room III, which includes a song that she used to sing as a child; to an article in Musicworks magazine ("A Child's Ritual," Summer 1987 issue); to many references to the importance and freedom of childhood soundmaking in her oral presentations. She explores this theme most fully in her work for tape and female voice, Moments of Laughter (1988). I think this piece, of all of Westerkamp's work, transgresses the most borders in relation to compositional choices and the thinking behind them, cultural expectations regarding the distinctions between public and private domains, the roles of children and women, and the importance of children's nonverbal communication. 

https://www.jstor.org/stable/833590