Herald - Lantern • Dispatch 23 October '85 —

From The Principal I By Stanley Kotzen Principal, Lower Cape May Regional High School

As if there weren't enough terms to describe the art of parenting a teenager, I have discovered a new one — County-Puberty. Add it to your lexicon of coping terminology. It is an expression describing the events that parents experience between the appearance of the first pubescent blemish and the day when adulthood reaches your children. For some it seems that the period will never end. Counter-Puberty is both a stage of adult development and a survival strategy. The term popped into my head during a weekend conversation with parents whose son had just been honored as an ROTC cadet-of-the-month at a small Pennsylvania college. THEY WERE beaming as they recalled many long sessions that the four of us spent in disciplinarian conferences while they were struggling with the disappointments of a youngster who was turning into a "bum". The satisfaction and pride that they now felt meant that not only had he grown up and through some tough times, but so had they. What they had lived through was not unique, but the passage was as real for them as a teenage boy's voice dropping two

octaves. I REALIZED that it is also not a phenomenon of the 80s. 70s. or even 60s. My own parents went through Counter-Puberty while I was turning into a noncommunicative 15-year-old. Through the years 1 have never forgotten the sage wisdom of an anonymous philosopher who stated. "The two biggest blessings in life are good health and good kids." For parents with both. Counter- Puberty is really a .breeze and nothing more than a series of awards dinners and a scrapbook filled with letters of commendation. It is discomfort when their youngster will not make up his or her mind about whether to attend M.I.T. or Stanford. Then there are the rest of us having to live with children who suddenly become rebellious and exhibit manners and mannerisms with which we are totally unfamiliar. WHAT HAD happened, we ask. to that neat and cooperative 11-year-old? What is this new language and how should I respond to the changes that adolescence has brought into our home? CountyPuberty is what is happening in the adult stage. There are parents who make it through CounterPuberty without any scars, and some do not. Some.- of the saddest moments in a high school day are those conferences of failure when parents openly display a dislike for their youngsters and what they have become. PARENTS HAVE to get ready for Counter-Puberty in the same way they prepare for the birth of their progeny. They need to attend classes on how to survive perhaps seven years of turmoil, and they need to hear from those parents who have come through * the experience without bitterness. The classes might be nothing more than a series of reassurances that the teen-age vigil will end and that it is not a solitary one > There are parent and support groups and programs and techniques, but each of us must find a personal style for surviving Counter Puberty. As the comic says. "Puberty is a hair-raising experience" — all of us have to be prepared.

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