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    • It would be interesting to see this as a percentage of children.  I'm not sure what that looks like, but I think it was on the order of 25%. 
    • Technically declining. 2020 to 2023 had a little bump but basically is level, and comparing modern counts to the BSA peak membership in 1970 ... well looks like 2, almost 3 times the single parent households. 
    • You are well ahead of the curve. The Pack my son participated in was not linked to a troop. Therefore once Cub scouts advanced beyond AOL, if they continued in the program they found a troop under a different charter and left. Older scouts came to Blue & Gold receive them at crossover. Afterwards they were never to be seen again. When we attended Webelos camporee, they encouraged Cubs to visit Scout troops linked under the same charter org in their camps at night. Instead our Pack was left to spend the evening on our own. The troops invited their linked Cub Pack to join them on an overnight campout. We were invited to a day trip. (This was all during Covid years). So the older program was a total mystery. On the plus side, our Pack was free to run the Cubs program how we saw fit and didn't have to share space with a troop (meeting times, activities, storage, etc.) In my experience, if you want to be seen then you must send Den Chiefs and staff Cub events (camporees, day camps, etc.). Look beyond your charter.  Last year a troop in the opposite situation (no linked Cub Scout Pack sponsored by the charter) found the Pack, offered to lead a den meeting during our meeting time at our space, and invited them to go on trips. In turn, 4 of the 5 scouts who crossed-over joined that troop.
    • Single family households are actually declining now.  I'm not sure why they would make a change now for that... But perhaps it was overdue.  
    • BSA can follow a pretty wide lane and be “in line” as far as WOSM is concerned. The largest or fastest-growing WOSM programs have been sex-segregated. In many of these countries the Guides and Scouts collaborate nicely. So, to really fall in line, BSA and GS/USA would “play nice” together, and that ain’t happening. I think we in the U.S. are faced with an influx of citizens like no other country, and many parents from Europe and South America may envision scouting as co-ed because that’s all they’ve known since childhood. On the other hand parents from India, Indonesia, and Gulf states only know segregated models. For some, but not all, national scout organizations, that’s shifting. (It was nice to see young women singing and dancing while visiting with the Saudi tent in August.) I think single moms are a serious consideration, but many single moms that I’ve met are looking for unisex programs for their boys where they believe male role models to be instrumental in a young man’s development. So those moms will value sex-segregated programs over co-ed. So, any mom rhetoric is just corporate double-speak. The ground truth, I believe, is that the organization has collapsed to the point that it is unreasonable for it to produce an all-boy and all-girl unit in every small community; therefore, it is positioning itself to allow each unit to be more flexible in its configuration in hope that doing so may make up for six decades of losses three decades from now.
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