An Introduction to Social Psychology
Chapter 22: Personality Development Through the Direct Imitation of Persons
Luther Lee Bernard
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THE MOTHER MODEL— The first model which the young child copies in his personality integrating process is ordinarily his mother. But he is not able to imitate her behavior until he has proceeded far enough in personality integration to be able to recognize her behavior perceptually. Imitation is not the first form of response conditioning, but develops after all major types of perception have come into use. The child does not at first grasp the personality of his mother as a whole Her personality operates as environmental pressures upon him, but his perception or recognition of it is at first vague, undifferentiated, and ill defined. Those aspects of her behavior with which he first comes most directly in contact are the ones which he learns first to imitate, because these are the first which he can perceive and recognize effectively. This is why the young child imitates first of all the mother's expressions and attitudes towards himself. He copies her acts of affection, such as caressing with his hands, kissing, pressing his cheek against the mother's cheek, cooing in response to her cooing, smiling, and even a little later responding to signs of fear and anxiety, the expression of anger, defiance, general emotional disturbances, such as nervousness, and the like, when the mother exhibits these before him. He adopts her tone of voice, forms of expression, gestures, even carriage, and attitudes of sincerity or insincerity, her benevolence, devices of lying or evasion, social graces or the lack of them, as soon as he can recognize them. He becomes a stronger advocate of conventional practices or "good manners" in eating, dress, social intercourse, and the like, than his own mother ii she conditions strongly such responses in him. It is not uncommon to observe a child adding its own advice and admonition to that of the mother in
(343) holding the older children, who are beginning to differentiate their responses according to choice, down to their conventional obligations around the home.
WHAT THE YOUNG CHILD DOES AND DOES NOT IMITATE IN HIS MOTHER— All of these imitative responses develop in season. That is to say, they cannot take place until the child has learned to perceive any particular form of behavior with sufficient completeness to permit his copying it in detail and as a unit. The unvarying rule of the growth of the child's personality building by imitation is to expand always in the direction of greater and wider experience. This is of course not a set resolution on the part of the child. He is not even aware of the fact that he is following such a course. He is merely recognizing and copying. But if he is a normal and healthy child his expansion and deepening of experience and personality never cease and are pushed forward relentlessly, unless he meets with some involuntary check from his environment, until he has mined out and appropriated those qualities of character and personality in his mother which he is able to grasp. But of course the child in his earlier years is not able to grasp the more abstract aspects of behavior of the mother. He recognizes and copies her expressions of affection, her moods, every-day language, attitudes and elementary forms of social behavior or polite intercourse. These are copied in play or purposively. Even her occupational activities are imitated in play and, among the children of the poor, soon for utilitarian adjustment ends also.
The child is by his third or fourth year a simplified miniature of the mother. If the child is a daughter, she has the same tastes in clothes, the same company manners, and the same social prejudices, judgments, technique, virtues and absurdities. The expression "little woman" or "little man" which we so often apply in jest to the child of this age is by no means undeserved. But what the child does not perceive and imitate is the deeper and more abstract element of the mother's personality. Imitations of it may reach him from time to time, but he does not grasp it with sufficient detail to imitate it as a whole. It is too abstract for him to recognize as yet. Not until he is adult and has himself had the responsi-
( 344) -bilities of a family, has had to undertake the character training of children and the burdens of maintaining a home, will he realize fully the inner significance of strained facial expression, silent or ill-suppressed grief, the far-away look, the tired voice, and the abstracted answers which in his early childhood puzzled him. Most men and women understand best and value most their mothers and fathers when they themselves have undertaken the responsibilities of family life and have come to see what they involve. Only then can they complete their understanding of those traits of behavior which they imperfectly recognized in childhood.
THE IMPORTANCE OF THE MOTHER MODEL— It is perhaps better that this should be so, for the child cannot perceive everything and be all things at once. Each step in the development of his personality, when properly organized and economically controlled, lays the foundation in understanding for the next. Some types of understanding, if they should come prematurely, would only retard and discourage, perhaps even produce a cynical disposition, the most to be feared of all types of personality integration in childhood. But there are other types of recognition which should be kept from the child permanently, while yet a child, if possible. It is of the utmost importance that the mother should not display before the child any form of behavior which is not wholly normal and moral. Displays of temper, the use of bad language, any letting down in self-control, unkind attitudes or practices towards animals or human beings, untruthfulness, slovenliness, wastefulness, vices of all sorts, especially unkindness and insincerity toward the child himself, are certain to produce in him the psychic mechanisms for the same behavior and to lead to his imitation of such conduct, unless he is protected by much stronger stimuli from better models. But even then conflicts arise which are highly detrimental to his personality.
During the first four or five years of the child's life he perceives and learns to imitate the basic patterns of social and moral behavior, and unless his models are kept intact and normal the adverse effects upon personality building will be lifelong. What is here said of the importance of the mother in constituting a proper model for imitation by the child applies
( 345) likewise to all others who come in contact with him during his most formative years. But normally no other person has opportunities of influencing the moral and social growth of the child equal to those of the mother. As the years pass and as his personality becomes more and more integrated and fixed, the relative importance of any one model declines, but there never comes a time when those interested in the control of character can afford to disregard models entirely. These facts should serve to call attention to the supreme importance of training for motherhood, not only in the elements of the organic care of the child, but also in regard to his moral, social, and mental education or training.
THE FATHER AND MOTHER MODELS CONTRASTED— The father also serves as a model for the imitation of the child. This second model begins to condition responses in kind or otherwise soon after the mother comes to serve in this manner, but the volume of imitation of the father is slight until long after the child has imitated the mother's behavior extensively. The reason for this is that ordinarily the father is away from home during most of the child's waking hours. This is of course truer of the city father than of the rural, but even in the country the father is away at his farm duties and is not so closely copied as is the mother, who is constantly with the child. The later development of extensive imitation of the father has some rather marked effects upon the differences in the behavior which the child copies from father and mother in building up his personality content. In keeping with the principle that the child imitates first those attitudes and that behavior which are manifested toward himself, it follows that among the first things the child learns from the mother is the enjoyment and expression of affection. This is one of the first attitudes which she takes toward the child. Also, it is she who feeds and cares for the child, makes him comfortable, and stimulates his sensitive zones, thus calling forth in him those expressions of pleasure which we see indicated by the smile, laughter, and cooing. In this ,N,av the sight of the mother, the sound of her voice, or any other indication of her presence, comes to condition all of the pleasurable or comfortable experiences of the child. This conditioning, made at a time when there is little
( 346) interference content or conflict in the child's mind, is very strong, if the mother is devoted and expressive and careful of her child. This conditioning lasts throughout life and the mother always remains the symbol of tenderness, refuge, care, and comfort. The term mother itself symbolizes in our culture this quality of care and tenderness.
ADVANTAGES AND DISADVANTAGES OF THE FATHER IN PERSONALITY FORMING CONTACTS WITH THE CHILD— The father, who does not perform these services and functions for the child, must always be at a disadvantage as compared with the mother in the affections of the child. Even though the child comes to look upon him with the greatest respect and to consider him as a person of almost superhuman powers, and learns to go to him for help in difficult situations, there is rarely ever the same sort of intimate understanding and affection between father and child that there is between mother and child. The contacts are essentially different in the two cases. The contacts of the father with the young child are usually more abstract. He holds it less, if at all. Some mothers for hygienic and disciplinary reasons very foolishly do not wish the father to handle the child. But in view of the moral and emotional associations which are established by such close contacts with the father, it might be wise to sacrifice something of discipline to the valuable conditioning of responses in the child to stimuli in the father, and vice versa. The father is understood and valued by the child more for his strength, activity, and generalship of an obvious sort than for his emotional expressions and the immediate organic comforts which he brings to the child. He picks the child up, handles it in an exciting and exhilarating manner, with the result that to the child he seems to possess almost unlimited strength. The very roughness of the father, attached as it is to safety and affection, gives the child a thrill which is more or less of a relief from the cloying tenderness of the mother.
And when the child is able to visit the father at his office or to go with him among the busy acid complex places of industry and business, he comes to associate his father with the marvelous and entrancing outside world. Thus the distinction between the father and the mother is further emphasized. The
( 347) latter is associated with the home and with the gentler virtues and the quieter and more restful aspects of life. By the time the child is able to go with his father into the outer world he has largely recognized and imitated the more concrete content of the mother's world. This environment has become more or less commonplace to him and it no longer affords him new stimuli for recognition and imitation on a sufficiently large and complex scale. He has already learned to react to it by automatic suggestion, rather than by eager response and with a challenge to new adventures. But the very nature of the father's habits, his departure daily into a distant and mysterious world, the fact that he has contacts with other men and does things but poorly understood by the child, lends the flavor of romance to his father which far outdistances any variety or newness of appeal which his mother can offer him. It is not that he does not any longer love his mother. He is more attached emotionally to his mother than to his father and in all probability always will be. But in the irresistible search for new experiences which stimulate the expansion and development of his personality his father is now able to play the larger rôle.
THE NECESSITY OF TURNING TO THE FATHER AS MODEL— Many mothers cannot understand this turning of the child at a certain stage of development to the father. They feel hurt and jealous, believing that they have lost the child's affection. It is a perfectly natural and necessary step. If the child is not always to be a child his personality must expand and it must develop new and wider adjustments to the technique of living a collectively conditioned life. The father is the natural avenue through which the child reaches this fascinating outside complex world of things, of machines, of business and governmental relationships. It is a wise father who understands his function at this period and responds to the desires of his child to expand his contacts through him. And it is a wise mother who does not stand in the way of this expansion of personality in the child. The tendency of the child to follow the father when he goes away to work or the child's requests for a story about what he does during the day, or to be told a story about when he (the father) was a little boy, should be accepted ea-
( 348) -gerly by the father as an invitation to induct him into the wider experiences of life and to establish connections of a permanent and intimate character with his child. All of this behavior material which the child can comprehend from the father's stories of his own childhood or of his everyday experiences is assimilated or imitated into the personality of the child and becomes material for future adjustment behavior and judgments of his own.
The child also imitates the visible behavior of the father in so far as he has opportunity to observe and understand it. He walks and stands like the strong father whom he admires. He copies his language and his more energetic expressions with much satisfaction, including even his swear words, if any are used before him. He is even likely to assume an air toward his mother such as his father has, tender, nonchalant, superior, aggressive, even unkind and contemptuous, according as the father's may be. This is true of course only in so far as the child approves of his father. So great is his tenderness for an affectionate mother that a father unkind to his mother, especially if he is also unkind to the child, may greatly antagonize the child and drive him into a closer and more sympathetic, almost pathological, relationship with the mother. Such a situation is very unfortunate for the child, because it creates in his emotions a fundamental conflict which may always cloud his psychic development and it also deprives the child of his father's guidance in making normal contacts with the outside world. Where the father's habits are such as to unfit him to be the child's guide in understanding the outside world, the situation is equally or more unfortunate. For the same results are produced if the child is antagonized by the father and the imitations of the child are corrupted and distorted if he does not separate himself from his father.
SHOULD THE MOTHER SEEK TO RETAIN HER DOMINANCE ASA MODEL?— It has sometimes been suggested that the mother could retain her dominance over the personality development. of the child if she were less of a home person and went out into the world and brought back stimuli such as the father brings to condition the developing behavior responses of the child. This is perhaps in some degree true. But there
( 349) are serious difficulties to be overcome before such a program of mother dominance can be made fully effective. If the mother's contacts with the outside world are as full and as deep as those of the father she will have to enter into outside occupations as seriously and as devotedly as does the father. If she does this it will isolate her largely from the child in home connections and will thus prevent his tenderer and more intimate social and moral character responses from being conditioned to the mother's behavior. The question is, whether she does not lose more than she gains by following such a policy. If the mother is qualified to rear a child— and she probably should not have one if she is not— it can scarcely be regarded as desirable for her to turn over to another, who is in all probability less qualified for the function of serving as a model to the imitations of the child in those years when he is conditioning his responses to the most intimate moral and social values of life— affection, loyalty, sympathy, kindness, truthfulness, in fact all of the primary virtues and attitudes which are at the basis of strong character. It may, however, be desirable after these character traits have been conditioned in the child, for the mother to seek wider outside contacts, especially if her own spiritual welfare depends on so doing. Such contacts may serve both to enrich her own personality and to stimulate the personality growth of the child. However, any mother who takes upon herself the serious responsibility of bringing a child into the world should not shirk the greater responsibility of seeing that it has the best possible model for intimate personality development and imitation. Such functions cannot be lightly turned over to another, unless that person is especially well qualified. In any case the mother is likely in after years to pay for her freedom from the care of the child in its infancy with a diminished affection in its adulthood, because she did not condition in it permanent and deeply set affective responses to her personality. It is, however, wise for the mother to retain some interest in her husband, and also in friends, after the birth of a child, not only for the sake of recourse in the case of the death of the child, but as a means of keeping her attitude toward the child more or less objective and thus to avoid spoiling the child.
(350) Too great show of affection is often as harmful as too little, fostering as it does in the child abnormal attitudes toward the parent.
The fact that the child grows beyond any model for imitation should not be a source of regret. It is the inevitable result of the development of the personality of the child. He is himself as yet unspecialized and must master all types of behavior. Parents and others with whom he comes in contact and whom he uses as models for imitation are likely to be highly specialized in their behavior. Hence the child takes from each of them what he can perceive and copy, mines them out with reference to their personality contributions, as it were, and then passes on to some other model there to perform the same or similar functions. All this the child does relentlessly, with the unconcern of youth and ignorance. Youth is tenderhearted where it understands, but the heartaches of parents, friends, and often of lovers, it does not as yet fully comprehend, because it has not had the experience. The impulses to new integrations or experiences, to live to the full, are irresistible, as irresistible as is the metabolism which underlies them.
THE UNAVAILABILITY AND INCOMPLETENESS OF THE FATHER MODEL— Yet the child does not mine out through imitation the whole of the personality content of any one model before he seeks to come under the influence of another. He takes only what he can perceive or understand. Just as we saw that the child did not grasp or copy into himself or herself all of the personality content of the mother, so likewise does he fail to grasp the full significance of the life of the father. He can as yet understand and imitate only the more superficial qualities of the father. The more abstract qualities, which are really the fundamental bases of his character, the child for the time being misses. Hence he turns elsewhere for his inspiration in personality development, perhaps later to return to an adequate appreciation of what his father is and does.
The serious and abstract life of the father, his intricate business or professional interests, the child is never able to grasp fully while yet a child. In that period of the first five years,
( 351) when most of the child's basic attitudes are fixed, he is unable to see his father except through the eyes of romance. He is something of an adventurer with news from a strange land and strange scenes, a dispenser of bounty, a hero. But even the father pales as a producer of romance, just as the mother failed earlier as an avenue to new experiences. Unable to grasp the truly wonderful but abstract elements in the personality of his father— his intellectual grasp of his work-a-day world, his functional relationships to business and professions arid people, the hundred strands of destiny which he holds constantly in his hands and with which he guides men and events — more remarkable than the fanciful and concrete ones which the child conjures up about him, he turns to less abstract and more obvious personalities to provide him with romance and to lead him into new adventures where he can follow.
OUTSIDE ADULT MODELS — The postman, with his messages in envelopes from mysterious persons at perception-defying distances; the delivery man who semis to own and dispense according to some unknown and unusual system all the world's goods; the fireman who races about the streets in wonderful machines and rings a gong as the child himself would delight to do, climbs ladders, wears a slicker and a funny hat and has command of the water hose; the policeman, the stern minion and maker of the law, "who'll get you if you aren't good," and who can put you in jail; the street car conductor and motorman who make the street car go and take your nickels and carry you into previously unknown regions; the engineer and conductor and porter who own the "chu-chu" trains and let good people ride in them; the vegetable huckster, with his heaps of things he gives to mother; the taxicab driver who joy rides continuously and to whom people give fabulous sums, and "who'll run over you if you don't watch out"; and the wonderful, wonderful clothes with red bands and brass buttons which some of these romantic people wear— these people with so much more wonderful experiences than his desk-driven father has — next claim his admiration and approval and provide him with models to imitate. He acts the part of all of them in turn in so far as he understands them. Through this perception and mimicry he learns much of the objective world in
( 352) its simpler and more obvious forms. Thus he gathers an understanding of the more concrete aspects of the transportation system, the police, and local trade and commerce. It is as much as he is able at first to understand. The girl child has slightly different models. The feminine models corresponding to the uniformed males are relatively few in number. Nurses, dancers, and the like, are perhaps the most common. All of her models hold her closer to the type of her mother.
From adults in general— neighbors, friends of his parents, chance acquaintances, men and women he sees on the street, in stores, everywhere— the child learns that the world is made pretty much after a pattern. Not that he generalizes this fact into a sentence or a formula. That would be too abstract for his early years. But one may learn things without ever putting them into words, or at least into abstract ideas. He hears other men and women tell about their families, friends, interests, purchases, trips, recreations, visits, work, as they talk with his parents. He finds that other men are fathers and other women mothers. He is likely to call all men daddies and all women mothers, whether they have children or not. He inevitably, through the process of conditioning by analogy and similarity, classifies people in whatever relationships he knows through experience. To him the world is a world of families and homes and fathers who go to work, of mothers who take care of their children, look after the house or apartment, attend teas and card parties, or go to shows, and who entertain. To these are added children of three classes: those of an age and experience similar to his own, babies who are helpless and know nothing and for whose powers he has a great contempt, although possibly an equal affection, and big brothers and sisters who know everything and eat and do everything and own everything about the house. In this world he lives and grows in depth and breadth, imitating as much of it as he understands and approves and can, building it into his own personality, until he goes to school.
IN THE SCHOOL he comes in contact with another class of adults, one he has not known before. These are people whose special function it is to guide him in his understanding and imitations. They bring to him his first systematic analysis and
( 353) synthesis of objects. They also induct him into the mysterious art of understanding abstractions and symbols. The Sunday School usually precedes the public or parochial school. Here he studies personalities in the main, following their adventures in various concrete relationships of life, and now and then he steps aside to consider the abstract merits of their conduct and aims. He learns his moral lessons from studying typical cases of behavior in action. Often in early childhood, the Sunday School lessons are beyond his powers of recognition, but he goes largely because the other children are there, or because of the prizes or from loyalty to his teacher, who is a sort of foster mother to him, or because of her praises. The kindergarten and the graded school use somewhat more concrete methods of instruction with him and provide him with models for imitation and assimilation which he can understand. He handles objects, analyzes movements, learns accuracy of measurement, and attains control over things, in the kindergarten. In his readers he encounters stories dealing with concrete social relationships much like those he has had at home or on the playground, and these stories help to deepen his personality impressions. Later he comes to deal with abstract questions and relations as such, in questions of conduct, numbers, and the like.
The school systematizes the personality building process. The teacher is a guide and a mentor, a critic, and a taskmaster, or a leader, as the case may be. His allegiance to her may be great, but it is not likely to offer as much of the romantic as did the postman, fireman, policeman, and the uniformed brotherhood as a whole. These integrated for him a limited world of concrete realities. School leads him into a world where, in spite of all efforts to the contrary, system and analysis turn romance into something not far removed from toil. The problem of making the school interesting is that of making the connection between it and the actual world of people as he has learned to know it as close as possible. But abstractions and generalizations cannot be wholly avoided, if the school is to perform its functions of preparing for and inducting him into a broader world of experiences.
BROTHERS AND SISTERS AS MODELS— In order to follow up
( 354) the development of the child's personality building on the basis of adults as models, we have passed by another phase of analysis and perception and imitation to which we will now return. If the child has older brothers and sisters they have begun to serve him as models for imitation almost as soon as his mother and father have performed that function. As soon as he is able to play with them they become dominant models of one class. They are so much nearer him in age and in recency and vividness of experience that he can understand them much better than he can older people, like his parents and their friends. They talk the same language, have the same desires, hopes, fears, disappointments, powers, limitations, only in slightly greater or less degree. They also have the same or very similar moral and intellectual development and standards. Hence, after he has made a preliminary adjustment to them, there is no one so capable of teaching the young child as an older brother or sister who is not too much older. The degree of sympathy and understanding which develops between well-brought-up children is simply remarkable. The attachment of the younger for the older amounts at times almost to idolatry. There is nothing more striking than the attachment, even literal adoration, manifested by a child of two for another more active child of four or five. It equals, although it is of a different kind, that which the child has for a good mother. And it is interesting to note that almost invariably the attachment of the younger child for the older is greater than that of the older for the younger. This is perhaps in part because the responses of the younger become more exclusively conditioned to the older than those of the older to the younger, but it is especially due to the fact that the world of new experiences opened up to the younger child by this relationship is vastly greater than that made available to the older. In cases where the older child has had the major responsibility of training the younger, this situation may be reversed.
PLAYMATES AS MODELS — The child without older brothers and sisters is ordinarily at a considerable disadvantage in the matter of possessing models easy to understand and imitate. He is also at a disadvantage in the matter of making collective or social adjustments to his world. In both of these respects
( 355) he must substitute in so far as possible other children on the playground for the missing brothers and sisters. The play group performs one of the most valuable socializing functions in the life of the child. It is not enough for the child to make his adjustments to his father and mother and to other older people. The relationship here is not wholly a mutual one. The differences in strength, intelligence, skill, experience, in fact, in all of the arts of life, are so great that the child is compelled to take a dependent attitude, just as the older people assume protective attitudes. But even the attitude of dependence carries with it a secondary attitude of exploitation which is made possible by the secondary attitude of tolerance which accompanies the attitude of protection in the older people. Thus the child brought up among his elders too frequently lacks initiative in constructive matters, is lazy, and is unduly artful for his age. He has not always learned the lesson of fair play or of coöperating and seeking reward on a basis of merit only.
When such "spoiled" children come to associate with other children they frequently discover themselves to be nuisances and incur ill will instead of friendly approval. They wish to have their own way and will often "queer" things rather than coöperate or follow other leadership. The play group is excellent for purposes of discipline. It teaches every child to consider the equal rights of others, to work in harness and to cooperate, and to value the opinions and good will of his equals.
It makes of the average child a democrat instead of a tyrant. Nowhere else can he easily find models of a democratic relationship to imitate. The play group, even more than the home, or at least the modern home with its small number of children, is the true prototype of the larger society.
DIFFERENCES IN IMITATIVE RESPONSES OF BOYS AND GIRLS — What has been said so far about the personality development of the child applies almost equally to the boy and the girl. But soon after the stage of development at which the child enters school and takes part in a play group drawn not from his immediate neighbors' families, hilt from the community as a whole, a divergence begins to appear in the personality development of the boy and the girl. In fact there are signs of this difference earlier. The girl is more likely to cling to the mother
(356) model more firmly and for a longer period than the boy. This is probably the result of both a conscious and an unconscious direction by the mother herself. All conventional pressures influence her to the emphasis of feminine models in her mother, playmates, and teachers. As a consequence the girl never takes the same degree of romantic interest in the father's exploits and she does not attempt to imitate him in so many details as does her brother. Nor does she seek after the adventures of the uniformed gentry with the same romantic intensity as the boy of her own age. They appeal to her also, but they do not equally tempt her away from the domicile into an unknown and venturesome world. She is already being domesticated and is acquiring the "feminine virtues." She is interested in her clothes and the forms of social intercourse. She "plays doll."[1] She dislikes the roughness of boys and their untidiness. She is consciously or unconsciously modeling herself after the ideal of "the little lady," which her mother and other adult women have expressed to her verbally or otherwise. She is even now being groomed for some man's choice, after she has passed many years of apprenticeship in making herself an object of desire by the male sex. Of course there are exceptions to these typical distinctions between boys and girls, and in this day of the leveling of sex distinctions the exceptions are more numerous than ever before. But they are not likely ever to disappear wholly. Where the general rule is violated it is more likely to produce the "tomboy" than the "sissy." This fact probably indicates that the distinction between the two sexes as it now exists is largely the result of the repression of the activity tendencies of the girls.
THE GANG— The boy, having largely mined out the conventional personality values of the ordinary play group, is now ready for a further adventure in specialization. His world is
( 357) again becoming too narrow. His contacts with mother, father, brothers and sisters, teachers and playfellows, and public functionaries generally, have become largely stereotyped. He responds to them more by suggestion than by conscious and purposive imitation. His world lacks enterprise and adventure; it has grown stale. Accordingly, in his never ending youthful struggle for new experiences, he joins with a few more choice spirits in a gang. He may or he may not know that he is joining a gang. The result is much the same, except that where the leadership of the gang is strong and its separation from the old play group is well marked, his consciousness of gang specialization is more vivid. The boys may use the term gang or club, and they may even have some form of initiation, together with other gang ceremonies of admission. The purposes of the gang may even be specified and a constitution be prepared and leaders elected. In such cases it is a club. But most gangs are much more spontaneous in their origin and more random in their purposes and procedure. Whatever the formalities and the statement of ends, the one big unconscious aim of the gang is to enable the members to secure new experiences, to have adventures. They are attempting to widen the boundaries of their world, geographically, intellectually, morally, and socially. Leaders appear more or less spontaneously and each one finds the place for which nature and previous experience have fitted him.
Girls also form gangs, but ordinarily with different types of behavior in view. Their gangs are more in the nature of social cliques and are competitive with other gangs. There are boys' gangs of this sort also, especially fraternities, but they are less frequent than those organized by girls. The girls' gangs do not ordinarily run toward daring and spectacular action, although they may embrace athletic activities. The boys' gangs, in their search for adventure, not infrequently cross the borderline of morality and lawfulness. This is the worst aspect of gang life among boys and serves to emphasize the need of some sort of direction or collective control. This need of guidance in the gang life of boys is now recognized and leaders of boys' and girls' clubs, gang leaders, playground directors and play leaders of a trained and responsible sort are being pro-
( 358) -vided. If such leadership is not too officious and is yet efficient, the developing child can secure almost as wide an experience as when the boys and girls are left to their own uncontrolled interests, and certainly their experiences are likely to be more valuable socially when under proper leadership or direction. The boy scouts and girl scouts, campfire girls, athletic clubs, anal other similar clubs, when led by people with a broad social and civic outlook, can give most valuable training in collective adjustment behavior, and not without sufficiently exciting adventures.
QUALITIES OF THE GANG LEADER— The leader of the gang is a person of prestige, whether he be a particularly able and experienced boy of a similar age and kind or an older club leader trained and practiced in the function of leadership. At first this leader is likely to command the boy's enthusiastic allegiance. For one or two seasons this leader is king and his followers may find no essential error or weakness in him. The almost absolute dominance of a quick witted, athletic, daring leader over the other members is sometimes most astonishing. The trained club leader provided by a social agency can rarely, if ever, secure such complete acquiescence and homage from a group of boys. Among girls, the situation is likely to be somewhat different. They have been brought up more to use older persons as models and to imitate the domestic, or at least the feminine, virtues. But boys early escape from the home to find their adjustments on the playgrounds or elsewhere in a life of action. They choose as leaders boys who can fight better, plan better, think faster, and execute more effectively than other boys. Their experiences are not sufficiently broad or deep to lead them to raise many questions as to the ethical or social values of their leader's proposals and conduct. They have not yet gone far in the lessons of public and ethical analysis, which are in the main general and abstract in character. What they require of a leader is first of all that he be efficient in planning and in execution. Social and ethical niceties can he adjusted later. They want action and they demand self-confidence in their leader. If this is forthcoming they will usually follow him to the limit and stand by him through thick and thin. But he must never be "yellow." This
( 359) is unforgivable. Next after this, he should not be slow witted; although this is under certain circumstances pardonable.
WHAT COMES AFTER THE GANG— The gang or club life of the boy and girl mark the last stage in their experimental contact adaptation or direct imitation of personal models. After this they begin the serious business of life, allying themselves with some occupational interest or becoming responsible for homes, unless indeed they enter college or travel or pursue a life of leisure. In their occupational connections they continue the process of imitating models and of building up personality content with which to meet collective adjustment situations. But their models are predetermined for them by the limits of their business or professional life and they are no longer free to vary these models to suit their personal interests or whims and the desire for an ever widening general experience. Life inevitably becomes largely stereotyped and the personality elements which they must acquire are in the main predetermined. If instead of turning to an occupational alliance they go to college or adopt a life of social leisure they continue in much the same type of experimental imitation which they pursued in the play group and in the club or gang. But at college at least some of the boys' models are intellectual and abstract, while in the life of social leisure the selection of models is hedged about largely by convention. In the former case there is little chance to develop individuality in personality by direct imitation, and in the latter there is almost no chance to escape relatively complete conventionalization. This does not mean that all individuality of personality development necessarily ceases in the middle or late 'teens, but that if it continues it must come largely— if not wholly— through indirect imitation of models. This type of imitation will be the subject of the next chapter.
MATERIALS FOR SUPPLEMENTARY READING
- Addams, J., The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets, Ch. III
- Bonser, F. G., "Chums: A Study in Youthful Friendships," Ped. Sem. IX: 221-237
- Dewey, J., "The School as a Means of Developing Social Consciousness and Social Ideals in Children," Jour. Soc. Forces, I: 513-517
- Ferris, H. J., Girls' Clubs
- Forbush, W. B., The Boy Problem
- Frear, C., "Imitation," Ped. Sem., IV: 382-386
- Hall, G. S., "The Story of a Sandpile," Scribners, June, 1888
- Healy, W., Honesty, Chs. III, IV, VI
- MacCunn, J., The Making of Character, Part II, Ch. XXXV
- Puffer, J. A., The Boy and His Gang
- Rasmussen, W., Child Psychology, Vol. I, Ch. XV
- Sharp, F. C., Education for Character, Chs. I-XI
- Stoner, W. S., Natural Education, Ch. II
- Swift, E. J., Youth and the Race, Ch. VII
- Taylor, M., "The Child in the Home," Mental Hygiene, VI:746-772
