Coming of age in Samoa

by Margaret Mead

The Samoan picture shows that it is not necessary to channel so deeply the affection of a child for its parents and suggests that while we would reject that part of the Samoan scheme which holds no rewards for us, the segregation of the sexes before puberty, we may learn from a picture in which the home does not dominate and distort the life of the child.

The presence of many strongly held and contradictory points of view and the enormous influence of individuals in the lives of their children in our country play into each other’s hands in producing situations fraught with emotion and pain. In Samoa the fact that one girl’s father is a domineering, dogmatic person, her cousin’s father a gentle, reasonable person, and another cousin’s father a vivid, brilliant, eccentric person, will influence the three girls in only one respect, choice of residence if any one of the three fathers is the head of a household. But the attitudes of the three girls towards sex, and towards religion, will not be affected by the different temperaments of their three fathers, for the fathers play too slight a rôle in their lives. They are schooled not by an individual but by an army of relatives into a general conformity upon which the personality of their parents has a very slight effect. And through an endless chain of cause and effect, individual differences of standard are not perpetuated through the children’s adherence to the parents’ position, nor are children thrown into bizarre, untypical attitudes which might form the basis for departure and change. It is possible that where our own culture is so charged with choice, it would be desirable to mitigate, at least in some slight measure, the strong rôle which parents play in children’s lives, and so eliminate one of the most powerful accidental factors in the choices of any individual life.

The Samoan parent would reject as unseemly and odious an ethical plea made to a child in terms of personal affection. “Be good to please mother.” “Go to church for father’s sake.” “Don’t be so disagreeable to your sister, it makes father so unhappy.” Where there is one standard of conduct and only one, such undignified confusion of ethics and affection is blessedly eliminated. But where there are many standards and all adults are striving desperately to bind their own children to the particular courses which they themselves have chosen, recourse is had to devious and non-reputable means. Beliefs, practices, courses of action, are pressed upon the child in the name of filial loyalty. In our ideal picture of the freedom of the individual and the dignity of human relations it is not pleasant to realise that we have developed a form of family organisation which often cripples the emotional life, and warps and confuses the growth of many individuals’ power to consciously live their own lives. The third element in the Samoan pattern of lack of personal relationships and lack of specialised affection, is the case of friendship. Here, most of all, individuals are placed in categories and the response is to the category, “relative,” or “wife of my husband’s talking chief,” or “son of my father’s talking chief,” or “daughter of my father’s talking chief.” Consideration of congeniality, of like-mindedness, are all ironed out in favour of regimented associations. Such attitudes we would of course reject completely.

Drawing the threads of this particular discussion together, we may say that one striking difference between Samoan society and our own is the lack of the specialisation of feeling, and particularly of sex feeling, among the Samoans. To this difference is undoubtedly due a part of the lack of difficulty of marital adjustments in a marriage of convenience, and the lack of frigidity or psychic impotence. This lack of specialisation of feeling must be attributed to the large heterogeneous household, the segregation of the sexes before adolescence, and the regimentation of friendship—chiefly along relationship lines. And yet, although we deplore the prices in maladjusted and frustrated lives, which we must pay for the greater specialisation of sex feeling in our own society, we nevertheless vote the development of specialised response as a gain which we would not relinquish. But an examination of these three causal factors suggests that we might accomplish our desired end, the development of a consciousness of personality, through coeducation and free and unregimented friendships, and possibly do away with the evils inherent in the too intimate family organisation, thus eliminating a part of our penalty of maladjustment without sacrificing any of our dearly bought gains.

The next great difference between Samoa and our own culture which may be credited with a lower production of maladjusted individuals is the difference in the attitude towards sex and the education of the children in matters pertaining to birth and death. None of the facts of sex or of birth are regarded as unfit for children, no child has to conceal its knowledge for fear of punishment or ponder painfully over little-understood occurrences. Secrecy, ignorance, guilty knowledge, faulty speculations resulting in grotesque conceptions which may have far-reaching results, a knowledge of the bare physical facts of sex without a knowledge of the accompanying excitement, of the fact of birth without the pains of labour, of the fact of death without the fact of corruption—all the chief flaws in our fatal philosophy of sparing children a knowledge of the dreadful truth—are absent In Samoa. Furthermore, the Samoan child who participates intimately in the lives of a host of relatives has many and varied experiences upon which to base its emotional attitudes. Our children, confined within one family circle (and such confinement is becoming more and more frequent with the growth of cities and the substitution of apartment houses with a transitory population for a neighbourhood of house-holders), often owe their only experience with birth or death to the birth of a younger brother or sister or the death of a parent or grandparent. Their knowledge of sex, aside from children’s gossip, comes from an accidental glimpse of parental activity. This has several very obvious disadvantages. In the first place, the child is dependent for its knowledge upon birth and death entering its own home; the youngest child in a family where there are no deaths may grow to adult life without ever having had any close knowledge of pregnancy, experience with young children, or contact with death.

A host of ill-digested fragmentary conceptions of life and death will fester in the ignorant, inexperienced mind and provide a fertile field for the later growth of unfortunate attitudes. Second, such children draw their experiences from too emotionally toned a field; one birth may be the only one with which they come in close contact for the first twenty years of their lives. And upon the accidental aspects of this particular birth their whole attitude is dependent. If the birth is that of a younger child who usurps the elder’s place, if the mother dies in child bed, or if the child which is born is deformed, birth may seem a horrible thing, fraught with only unwelcome consequences. If the only death bed at which one has ever watched is the death bed of one’s mother, the bare fact of death may carry all the emotion which that bereavement aroused, carry forever an effect out of all proportion to the particular deaths encountered later in life. And intercourse seen only once or twice, between relatives towards whom the child has complicated emotional attitudes, may produce any number of false assumptions. Our records of maladjusted children are full of cases where children have misunderstood the nature of the sexual act, have interpreted it as struggle accompanied by anger, or as chastisement, have recoiled in terror from one highly charged experience. So our children are dependent upon accident for their experience of life and death; and those experiences which they are vouchsafed, lie within the intimate family circle and so are the worst possible way of learning general facts about which it is important to acquire no special, distorted attitudes. One death, two births, one sex experience, is a generous total for the child brought up under living conditions which we consider consonant with an American standard of living. And considering the number of illustrations which we consider it necessary to give of how to calculate the number of square feet of paper necessary to paper a room eight feet by twelve feet by fourteen feet, or how to parse an English sentence, this is a low standard of illustration. It might be argued that these are experiences of such high emotional tone that repetition is unnecessary. It might also be argued if a child were severely beaten before being given its first lesson in calculating how to paper a room, and as a sequel to the lesson, saw its father hit its mother with the poker, it would always remember that arithmetic lesson. But what it would know about the real nature of the calculations involved in room-papering is doubtful. In one or two experiences, the child is given no perspective, no chance to relegate the grotesque and unfamiliar physical details of the life process to their proper place. False impressions, part impressions, repulsion, nausea, horror, grow up about some fact experienced only once under intense emotional stress and in an atmosphere unfavourable to the child’s attaining any real understanding.

A standard of reticence which forbids the child any sort of comment upon its experiences makes for the continuance of such false impressions, such hampering emotional attitudes, questions such as, “Why were grandma’s lips so blue?” are promptly hushed. In Samoa, where decomposition sets in almost at once, a frank, naïve repugnance to the odours of corruption on the part of all the participants at a funeral robs the physical aspect of death of any special significance. So, in our arrangements, the child is not allowed to repeat his experiences, and he is not permitted to discuss those which he has had and correct his mistakes.

With the Samoan child it is profoundly different. Intercourse, pregnancy, child birth, death, are all familiar occurrences. And the Samoan child experiences them in no such ordered fashion as we, were we to decide for widening the child’s experimental field, would regard as essential. In a civilisation which suspects privacy, children of neighbours will be accidental and unemotional spectators in a house where the head of the household is dying or the wife is delivered of a miscarriage. The pathology of the life processes is known to them, as well as the normal. One impression corrects an earlier one until they are able, as adolescents, to think about life and death and emotion without undue preoccupation with the purely physical details.

It must not be supposed, however, that the mere exposure of children to scenes of birth and death would be a sufficient guarantee against the growth of undesirable attitudes. Probably even more influential than the facts which are so copiously presented to them, is the attitude of mind with which their elders regard the matter. To them, birth and sex and death are the natural, inevitable structure of existence, of an existence in which they expect their youngest children to share. Our so often repeated comment that “it’s not natural” for children to be permitted to encounter death would seem as incongruous to them as if we were to say it was not natural for children to see other people eat or sleep. And this calm, matter-of-fact acceptance of their children’s presence envelops the children in a protective atmosphere, saves them from shock and binds them closer to the common emotion which is so dignifiedly permitted them.

As in every case, it is here impossible to separate attitude from practice and say which is primary. The distinction is made only for our use in another civilisation. The individual American parents, who believe in a practice like the Samoan, and permit their children to see adult human bodies and gain a wider experience of the functioning of the human body than is commonly permitted in our civilisation, are building upon sand. For the child, as soon as it leaves the protecting circle of its home, is blasted by an attitude which regards such experience in children as ugly and unnatural. As likely as not, the attempt of the individual parents will have done the child more harm than good, for the necessary supporting social attitude is lacking. This is just a further example of the possibilities of maladjustment inherent in a society where each home differs from each other home; for it is in the fact of difference that the strain lies rather than in the nature of the difference.