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@mrjohns2, we validated you, now what do we propose for a solution? One of my strategies: offer to cook an adult-only meal. This assumes you know how to cook one very fine meal very well. But, usually when adults know that they’re getting a meal where they won’t have listen to kids complain, they’ll pitch in. Other ideas: Camp physically distant from the youth. Attend Camporees and require that the SM visit all of the other troops. Get your SM to training. Attend a summer camp that does patrol cooking. It takes quite a while to unlearn bad habits. So encourage her every time she takes a step back.

This is argument ad absurdum. In my years as an advisor I didn’t care how people felt about my venturers. (And some voiced fairly negative opinions.) I expected my youth to take it on the chin and press on. Those same people taught my scouts incredible skills. For that, they earned the right to voice any opinion they may have had. Needless to say, over time their opinions became more nuanced after working with my youth.

That’s a whole other metric. Registration fees have exceeded the cost of pizza. For older youth, many of whom pay their own fees, the pie that BSA is sharing is literally that.

@BetterWithCheddar when my sons were cubs, I only paid for the youth and didn’t need to register to overnight with them. BSA does risk pricing itself out of hey market. It’s not that they compete with sports, but they and sports share a pie with many things that parents want their kids to have.

@AwakeEnergyScouter, having grown wiup in a troop from a small-town (plenty of farm boys) and interacting with boys from troops of more urban areas, I kind of got the impression that our SM often picked the more remote campsites at summer camp and camporees. That might have been partly because some of the boys (yours truly excepted) were pretty rowdy. But it could have also been that some leaders absolutely needed more immediate access to showers, or needed weekends with a cabin (something our troop never spent a night in), or some other amenity. We took some pride in being that little bit more rugged. But, I think our SM just was pleased to be spared unnecessary drama, and letting the "city boys" have their first pick of location was one way to keep the peace. As I became an older scout, I got the impression that other boys did not always get the same experience. I later met many men my age who describe their scouting experience as being boring or inequitable because their troop "didn't do that much" in terms of living adventurously. It seemed that they were "over sheltered" or the SM made things so simple for them that the experience was trivial. That should be a cautionary tale for us all.

@Armymutt, I wouldn’t say that it’s the norm. I mean, wanting to “go full on papa bear” is one natural reaction in the context of all that we know about the prevalence of abuse among teens, and the disproportionate prevalence among females. It takes a while to balance out that protective streak with lived experience working with other leaders to deal with problems of substance. So, it’s likely that this kind of thing will arise fairly regularly. It isn’t all that new. And the behavior also happens in unisex environments. It probably has been happening in BSA and GS/USA since the 60s, contributing a little bit to scout resentment and the gradual membership decline that we’ve seen ever since.

I’m glad you can air your grievances. My conservation: there is a great temptation among leaders of female troops to clear a zone for the girls. In my experience this is especially true for male leaders. We had one upset that our boys were fishing behind their girls tents. Well, when they weren’t girls tents, nobody made a fuss about where our boys were fishing. Heck, the previous year, with a different female troop, not only did they not complain their leaders were grateful that our boys treated them like fellow scouts. Needless to say the boys are frustrated about the mixed signals. And, the girls often don’t like it as well.

They could be less prone, but the data is spotty (criminology is hard). It could be that CSA is more frequent among European youth, but here’s a report that shows how widely risk estimates vary in Nordic countries https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10538712.2015.1108944. Here is the most recent examination of CSA from a nation wide youth survey in the US https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/72/su/su7201a8.htm when this year’s data are available (probably by next year), I’ll try to plot out the responses to abuse-related questions for us all. At the moment Scouts UK is on the ascent finally having recovered the male membership to 1990 levels. But, it also has not faced litigation that BSA has, and its debt profile is much less than BSA’s. Nevertheless, it has been the model that many of us pay attention to because less gets lost in translation.

I figured it was duty to a country of rugged individualists.

One of the kindest, most mature, and friendliest of my scouts made his arguments about why BSA should not have included girls to me and, I later learned, to scouts of mixed sexes in a merit badge class being led by a female camp staff. Exactly which cudgel should I have had BSA reign down upon him? Meanwhile I have had to help multiple female scouts stand firm against proper sexual harassment from scouts (or sometimes verbal abuse from scouters). They don’t want anyone to get hurt, they don’t think they’ll be believed, they think they led on, or they think it’s part of the job. It’s been clear to me that my responsibility in each case so far was to affirm the young women, insist that they deserved more respect, and arrange a situation where they could advocate for themselves while not going all “papa bear on a rampage.” The whole process is extremely time consuming and very exhausting, and I’m getting better at it with the help of other scouters. Would I rather not find myself doing it? Yes. Do I trust National to do a better job than even you strangers in the internet? Not a bit.

@ramanous much of a troop’s culture is set by the SM. If he doesn’t buy in, the best you can do is assist his vision. With little nudges based on what you did for fun as a scout. Your personal goal should be to build your relationship with your son, his friends, and their parents. Some of this stuff regarding ideal methods will have to be put on the back burner.

It depends on how you define “tent”. At times my venturers slept under the stars. I didn’t bother to measure the distance between bedding to make sure they were the equivalent of two tent walls apart. (Although truth be told the sexes segregated on their own on most occasions.) It’s a big country, and National simply has no way to enforce a common culture on this.

Facts not in evidence. People do wear non-uniform patches because they have a story to tell. Because @Armymutt didn’t ask, we don’t know what that story is. In terms of taking a side, the American flag is about as much of a side as anyone can take. But the implication of it on a BSA uniform has more to do with identifying the organization’s country of origin, not alignment with international policy. So, I understand why the dissonance. A piece of real estate devoted to affiliation seems to be being appropriated for something more personal. Emphasis on “seems.” Like the Puerto Ricans, that scouter might have some Scouts UA affiliation, and we’ll not know without asking.

The solution, to me, seems quite simple: get the scouters shirt size, look up the UA scout association, and see if you can order a shirt his size. Along with payment, send a little extra coin for purchase of tourniquets and other supplies. Give the scouter the shirt, encourage him to go big.

… doable, as long as BSA is willing to take another membership hit over the next few decades … We’re not scouts UK, and litigation waits in the wings for any reports of sexual assault in any American organization that promotes both sexes camping together as a matter of course. I personally believe that a coed troop could be a healthy option for many communities. But the specter of abuse lawsuits will linger for quite some time.

Mamma rolled steel. Women on the shop floors was bigger than we realize. The Socialist Workers Party agitated at the time, and she rebuffed them soundly. I’m pretty sure she wasn’t the only American woman who did.

GS/USA might have and issue. You see, BSA likes to tally up all the service hours of every scout, multiply that by some dollar wage amount, and claim that they provide that many millions of dollars of service to the country. Now you're saying that maybe some of those $ might also be claimed by another organization!🙃 As far as the scout's advancement, however, I'm in favor of double-dipping. There's something to be said for doing the kind of work that multiple groups want to recognize. Besides, I'm sure in ways that nobody's observed this scout's done more good that went unrecognized. And, that's my general gripe against bean-counting service hours. By-and-large I see scouts putting in more hours than they will ever need for rank advancement. They serve cheerfully without asking for anything in return. Fretting over one particular set of hours being recognized by more than one organization is just oh-so-much straining at gnats.

SM just noticed that I was missing from my new shirt. I have them in my older shirt. I had a spare on my old venturing uniform, but I gave that to a Swedish scoutmaster.

The card is a tool for SPL’s to maintain discipline, if needed. In many troops, it’s not needed, so it might not be required. If a scout is found to violate knife/axe safety, rather than temporarily robbing the scout of a tool, a PL or SPL may request to see the scout’s card, clip a corner from it, explain the safety violation that necessitates the clip, and assure the scout that you think he or she will do better next time. Once the scout presents a card with four corners cut (never happened in my lifetime), slice the card in half and invite him/her to retake a safety course with a JASM or instructor and earn a new card. Obviously, if the scout doesn’t have his card with him, he needs to put his tool away and acquire he card. The nice thing about this is that the scout is accountable to all the leaders in the camp. His PL doesn’t have to worry about watching every scout all the time. If he PLC agrees on the procedure, a scout who might “visit” a friend’s patrol just so he could violate safety without his PL catching him/her again can be mentored by the other PL without the two PL’s having to report on which scouts are playing loose with safety. So, ask your PL what your troops policy is.

This makes the statistician in me cringe. There is no formulation of YPT that can cover all the bases. At the very best, it can reduce the odds of CSA. I'm not faulting @AwakeEnergyScouter for the word choice. This is precisely the language that BSA policy wonks put forth. Also, the following is problematic: The jury is out on the "time under care" hypothesis. Mainly because criminology is a very difficult science. In pregnant substance use scenario, we don't know the odds of the biological father being a co-conspirators vs. trying to interdict their partner's substance use. Moving on to lethal force against young children, it's very hard to credit their relative safety in the presence of their biological father to mere lack of time with potential victim. That's like saying "He'd also crack under pressure." Simply put, the facts are not in evidence. Moreover, assuming that's the cause could lead to a very wrong conclusion. If moms are abusive as a consequence of spending extra time with kids, then the logical solution would be to assign kids to biological males more often. Alternatively, rely on institutions that extend family ... like school and scouting. But as we know, this will only mitigate - not eliminate - risk. There's no doubt in my mind that young women benefit from the presence of male role models, but there's also no doubt that that will put some young women at risk for sexual abuse. The same could be said for young men and female role models, but at a lower rate of sexual abuse. This bit of odds-betting played by lawyers has little to do with DEI, I think.

Agreed. Contact your council advancement chair who will hopefully be as helpful as ours.

I thought you were talking about guys missing out on a root beer float social or something! I can only base my speculation on the enthusiasm with which youth in my charge have approached these surveys ... This is a service to the boys who aren’t invited to be part of the statistical sample. Feel sorry for the girls who expend the effort to complete the survey and naively think they’ll be heard instead of being used to drive to a foregone conclusion.

Let’s not have “max tan” and “max color” scouters casting aspersions on one another. The one thing we can be sure of: whatever insignia suggestions we have, 99% of them will be ignored by BSA. @Gossmaaf, welcome to the forums!

Not sure about your references to BSA activities. It’s a big country. Some district somewhere is bound to be doing something that some scouter somewhere else will complain about. All I know … My Eagle scouts who took Citizenship in Society MB told me that it was an enjoyable experience. The minority scouters whom I’ve met are awesome. The ones who volunteer in underserved communities need our help. Making that happen is very very hard. I grew up among klansman wannabes. Comparing notes with older cousins later in life, I realized that mine was a novel phenomenon. Having, in the past decade, acquaintances whose lives were lost to such brazen malice, I’m disinclined to condemn anyone who makes an effort to specifically welcome people from underserved groups.

To Scouts Canada’s credit, they produced a really nice necker for WSJ.