Various 
Metamorphosis in adolescence (translated) 

– This edition is unique;

– The translation is completely original and was carried out for the Ale. Mar. SAS;

– All rights reserved.



Mothers often feel unable to understand their boys when the age of puberty approaches. Their child seemed so bright in the early years. Adolescents, on the other hand, have become a painful enigma: they can no longer guess what he is thinking; many facts about his physiological and psychological development remain unknown or at least very mysterious to them. On this problem the great educator, Pierre Dufoyer, puts at their disposal his vast knowledge and his ability to divulge with extreme clarity and rare precision the results of the latest findings of science and experience. He examines the character of the adolescent as a result of three factors: heredity, social and family environment and personal effort. It then accompanies mothers and educators through the game of physiological and above all psychological transformations that make a man out of a child. Adolescence is an age of crisis. The reader will find here, in a brief, scientifically secure and with clear moral intentions, much of the data necessary to understand the adolescent’s soul, and will be led effortlessly to appreciate the sublime advice that leads the treatment. It is theoretical study that leads to the practical.

Adolescence is the time when many mothers, imprisoned by this feeling of powerlessness to understand their children, feel overtaken by the situation and stop, at least partially, following their children’s education closely. They have the impression of feeling cruelly inferior to the new educational tasks imposed on them by their children’s growth.

They therefore grope about, without confidence, and minimise their interventions. They are careful not to discuss with them anything that has to do with psychological, emotional or moral problems, and in their dealings with them they maintain a cautious reserve, a wait-and-see attitude, at the threshold of the soul and perhaps even outside it. There is nothing strange in this attitude of most mothers.

This booklet has no claim to scientific teaching. It is not a work of science, but of practical utility. The notions given on character, its origins, its general and particular aspects are far from exhaustive. We have preferred to make an incomplete and simplified but usable work. The mother of a family who reads these pages will have gained – this is at least the hope and ambition of the authors – a better understanding of her children and thus the possibility of helping them more effectively.

The starting point is this: you have to accept that your child will grow up. He will never again be a child: he will become a man.

You must not be discouraged, you must adapt, you must be patient, you must find the right moment to talk; you must be gentle; you must suggest often; you must encourage constantly; you must make your child see reason in the way he feels and behaves.