Here Mead tapped into a deeper criticism of her own culture. She saw life for Americans of her time as one in which people are brought up ‘denied all first-hand knowledge of birth and love and death, harried by a society which will not let adolescents grow up at their own pace, imprisoned in the small, fragile, nuclear family from which there is no escape and in which there is little security.’ Although much has changed in America and in the Western world since this time, her insights still apply in many ways. Our adolescents are still pressured to conform to particular models of human sexual
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