Page:Margaret Mead - Coming of age in Samoa; a psychological study of primitive youth for western civilisation.pdf/29

 questions of how a developed personality, about which we know nothing, will respond to religion?” But the negative cautions of science are never popular. If the experimentalist would not commit himself, the social philosopher, the preacher and the pedagogue tried the harder to give a short-cut answer. They observed the behaviour of adolescents in our society, noted down the omnipresent and obvious symptoms of unrest, and announced these as characteristics of the period. Mothers were warned that “daughters in their teens” present special problems. This, said the theorists, is a difficult period. The physical changes which are going on in the bodies of your boys and girls have their definite psychological accompaniments. You can no more evade one than you can the other; as your daughter’s body changes from the body of a child to the body of a woman, so inevitably will her spirit change, and that stormily. The theorists looked about them again at the adolescents in our civilisation and repeated with great conviction, “Yes, stormily.”

Such a view, though unsanctioned by the cautious experimentalist, gained wide currency, influenced, our educational policy, paralysed our parental, efforts. Just ag the mother must brace herself against the baby’s crying when it cuts its first tooth, so she must fortify herself and bear with what equanimity she might the unlovely, turbulent manifestations of the “awkward age.” If there was nothing to blame the child for, neither was there any programme except endurance