Page:Margaret Mead - Coming of age in Samoa; a psychological study of primitive youth for western civilisation.pdf/249

 hardly ever occur because of the large number of children in a household, all of whom receive the same treatment. Few children are weighted down with responsibility, or rendered domineering and overbearing as eldest children so often are, or isolated, condemned to the society of adults and robbed of the socialising effect of contact with other children, as only children so often are. No child is petted and spoiled until its view of its own deserts is hopelessly distorted, as is so often the fate of the youngest child. But in the few cases where Samoan family life does approximate ours, the special attitudes incident to order of birth and to close affectional ties with the parent tend to develop.

The close relationship between parent and child, which has such a decisive influence upon so many in our civilisation, that submission to the parent or defiance of the parent may become the dominating pattern of a lifetime, is not found in Samoa. Children reared in households where there are a half dozen adult women to care for them and dry their tears, and a half dozen adult males, all of whom represent constituted authority, do not distinguish their parents as sharply as our children do. The image of the fostering, loving mother, or the admirable father, which may serve to determine affectional choices later in life, is a composite affair, composed of several aunts, cousins, older sisters and grandmothers; of chief, father, uncles, brothers and cousins. Instead of learning as its first lesson that here is a kind mother whose special and principal care is for its