Page:Margaret Mead - Coming of age in Samoa; a psychological study of primitive youth for western civilisation.pdf/257

 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 dics 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 inter-