Scoutmaster Podcast 308

I'm Tim Jakes and I am Scoutmaster with Troop 93 in Westchester, Pennsylvania. This edition of Scoutmaster Podcast is sponsored by backers like me And now for you, Scoutmaster.

So one morning, it's in the teens, The temperatures drop pretty seriously overnight And who do we see walking around the campsite? One of the Scouts.

And what is he wearing? He's wearing a pair of shorts. Of course, You've seen this.

You're laughing right now because you have seen this before. Right, Temperatures in the teens, but the boy is walking around wearing a pair of shorts. This happened to Don Fowler as the Scoutmaster Troop 95 in Spartan, New Jersey. Recently. Don decided to go over to the Scout and say that in this weather, wearing shorts, you could actually get frostbite on your legs. And the Scout looked at him with a straight face and said: don't worry, Mr Fowler, I have three layers of shorts on.

Don, I'm sure, smiled or laughed right out loud, but he did require that the Scout put his long pants on. So good for you, Don.

Hey, this is podcast number 308.. Welcome back to the Scoutmaster podcast. This is Clarke Green. Oh, let's take a look at the mailbag. I got this message from Alex Fayah. He said: I'm from Brazil.

I've been listening to your podcast for a while now. I think it's great to hear someone with more experience and realize how similar are the Scouts of my country and your Scouts. I really appreciate.

So far, so good, a new Scoutmaster story and the PDF package. Well, Alex, thanks for getting in touch. Always good to hear from people And down in Brazil.

How about that? Hey, every week we try to have a couple of live chat sessions at ScoutmasterCGcom, And this past week, in addition to all the frequent flyers that stopped in, we also heard from Kyle Burkholder, who is the Scoutmaster of Troop 333 in Peoria, Illinois, and Mr D Andrews, who's the Assistant Scoutmaster of Troop 160 in Ames, Iowa. Keep an eye on the Facebook feed and the Twitter feed. Come and join us at ScoutmasterCGcom, usually Tuesday and Wednesday mornings, for a live chat.

We have a lot of fun doing it. So if you're a regular reader and listener and if the resources that we've created have helped you, you can return the favor by becoming a ScoutmasterCGcom backer. It's easy to do: Go to ScoutmasterCGcom, click the support link at the top of the page and you can become a backer, just like Jim Yencer did last week. Thank you, Jim. Becoming a backer this week, I'll make sure to personally thank you on next week's podcast. You can also help us out at Patreoncom.

It's P-A-T-R-E-O-Ncom where you can sign up on a monthly subscription basis to help us out and also help us launch seminar CG. Go to wwwpatreoncom- backslash- ScoutmasterCG for more details: P-A-T-R-E-O-Ncom backslash- ScoutmasterCG.

Well, in this week's podcast I am going to begin a three-part series talking about scout parents. So let's get started, shall we?

Over these next three podcasts, we're going to be talking about the three most challenging things that happen in scouting so far as parents are concerned, And this week I want to begin by talking to parents about whether or not they should compel a reluctant child to keep going on in scouting, because this is a question that I get a lot, and there's a number of circumstances that conspire that make this a kind of a really difficult issue for a lot of parents. Let's set the stage for a moment here.

First of all, the age of the children that I'm thinking about as we talk about this are children between the ages of, let's say, 11 and 15, so the adolescent years, which can be particularly tumultuous. It's a great time of life in a lot of ways, and it's a really hard time of life in a lot of other ways, especially if you're the parent of an adolescent child, Even if you've already been through this with an older child. Every child is individual enough that these years are going to be at least slightly different- and many times dramatically different- between children even in the same family. If you are going through this for the first time as a parent, it can be really, really confusing.

So the advice I'm going to offer you is based on more than 30 years of volunteering with children this age and being able to observe children go through their adolescence hundreds of times and see them on the other side, which is really hard to picture. Sometimes, when you're having difficulty with your own child, It's kind of hard to picture that you're going to get through all of this- because 99.99% of us do- and you're going to be on the other side watching hundreds of parents and children go through this. I hope that you'll value some of what I have to say.

So, before we even talk about Scouts, let's just get an idea of what children need at this age, and this shouldn't be news to anybody. They need some very basic, simple things. They need consistency and security, They need some discipline and expectations and they need a lot of affirmation and confidence. When you're an adolescent, your world is shifting on you. Things are changing, You are changing, Your mind is changing, Everything around and the world- and it looks like the world around you- is changing at the same time. You're very sensitive to things like peer pressure.

You're very sensitive to negative experiences. You're very sensitive to positive experiences and you have very little life experience, So your decision-making skills are not going to be all that sharp and your ability to look into your own future and to make decisions based in your best interest is not going to be a very strong set of skills when you're an adolescent. Thankfully, you have parents and you have caring adults around you who are going to help advise you through these two multiple years, and hopefully you will listen to them and things will go well. While all of that is true, it is also true that when you're an adolescent, you have to start to learn to make your own decisions and make your own way.

I mean, do you remember how confusing and unsettling that time of life could be? So, basically, you have to take a deep breath, step back a moment and observe what's going on, and that'll help you find your feet as a parent.

So you are the parent of a child who has been a scout for a while- It could be a number of months or a number of years- and they come to you and they say: I don't want to do scouts anymore. So my first little bit of advice is: do not overreact.

Okay And best of luck. I understand I can be a very reactive person myself, but don't overreact.

Just listen And then triage one or two quick things. Has your scout had a bad experience of some kind and does it raise to the level of seriousness where it needs the attention of the adults who are working with them and scouts?

Have they been bullied? Had another negative experience that needs to be corrected?

So triage that first, Just check on that and then listen very carefully to their reasoning. They may not have the best understanding of exactly why they're feeling the way that they're feeling. At this point I would not issue a verdict.

I would not make a decision other than to say to the child: okay, well, I've heard what you had to say and we're going to either fix the situation- and I'm glad that you told me- or let's see how you feel about this again next week And this might go away on its own and it might come back up. But we've given ourselves and our child some latitude to get away from the heat of the moment and begin to examine this decision with a level head.

So what if they come back to you again and they say: you know, I really don't want to be in scouts anymore. Thought about it. We talked the last time. Still the same reasons, Not very happy doing it.

Well, it's not unreasonable that a child in their adolescence might be ready to move on to something else. Maybe they have another interest or something that has taken the place of scouts and they want to devote a lot of time to it and pursue it. That's very valid.

You know, is it something they took up just a little while ago or is it something that's been growing? And so at that point, faced with that decision and helping to advise a child about that, I would say, okay, well, you don't have to make the jump right now.

Let's see how this plays out for a given period of time- And you know, maybe that's three weeks or three months- and see if this new interest has some staying power And if it does no harm, no foul, Let's move on to it and let's invest in it and pay attention to it. As a scouter, I don't have a problem with that. And if you're a parent and you're in the throes of this kind of situation with your scout, come and talk to us. Talk to the scouters who are working with your child. Let them know what's going on. They may have a perspective on it that you might find helpful.

Now, if your child persists in the idea I really don't want to do scouts anymore, They don't have another interest that they want to pursue. And I want to reiterate again: if it's a sudden change, if it's like a night and day change, if it's like somebody threw a switch, it's more than likely something negative has happened and you really need to follow up on that. But if they cannot articulate what is making them feel this way, why they want to discontinue being involved with scouts, my advice to you as a parent is just to keep on going and to keep them involved, and even to require them to be involved, Because, as we said a moment ago, they need consistency and security in what they're doing. They need affirmation and confidence and they need discipline and expectations. They don't particularly like any of those things, But it's your job as a parent to be consistent and just to stick with it. The adults working with your child and scouts know that this is going on because they're going to observe things that you won't.

So let me go back 10 or 15 years and think about our own boy being in scouts and his reluctance at times to keep going, to keep moving on. You know, some of his relationships with his friends shifted a little bit. Some of them grew stronger, some of them got a little weaker. His love for camping kind of came and went, depending on who was going on the camping trip, But his mother's response remained very consistent: This is something that you do and you're going to continue doing it.

Now, none of his objections were things that raised any serious concerns on our part. They were very serious to him and we understood that. But in the grand scheme of things we also understood he needed consistency, discipline and expectations from us, because the rest of his world was kind of shifting around.

Now I've advised a lot of other parents the same way. They'll come to me and they'll say I don't know whether or not they're going to stick with this and I say: well, you know, it kind of comes down to you making a decision based on what you observe and what you know about your child.

Is their reasoning behind this just largely emotional? Will they follow their reasoning consistently over a period of time?

And, like I said you know, three weeks, three months, six months, depending on who it is and what the situation is? If you take that approach, you give everybody a little time to kind of cool off and look at it with a level head.

So I began talking about this by asking the question: should you compel your child to continue on in scouts, even when they say they don't want to? And my answer is yes, but with reservations, and I think I hopefully have explained them to you.

So let me go back over this ground one more time and come up with probably a little bit of an oversimplified answer to a very complex question. First of all, understand where you are in your child's development. If you're in the adolescent years, things are inherently unstable and that's fine, That's healthy, It's not a bad thing. It's a little tiring sometimes for a parent, but that's not a bad thing.

So what is going to help them see their way through adolescence while having some stability, feeling safe, having some consistency, some discipline and expectations, affirmation and a lot of confidence is going to help them too, And there's a lot of all of those things available to you as a parent and to your child when they are involved in scouts. So they come to you, They say: I'm really not interested in being a scout anymore. You listen carefully. You don't make a judgment right there. You listen carefully.

You suggest: okay, I'm hearing what you're saying. I would like to see if this stands the test of time.

Let's talk about this again in two or three weeks and see how you feel. Then Talk to the adults who are working with your child in scouts. Talk to them about any possible problems your scout might be encountering and remember, as always, if this is like a really sudden change, I would be concerned that there's been some kind of a negative experience- not to say that sudden changes always indicate that there's a negative experience. But it would be responsible on your part as a parent to just to ask enough questions of the right people to make sure that that is not the case.

And so, once we've done that and once we've talked with our child about it, if they have consistently expressed a desire to not do scouts anymore and it stayed with them and they have another interest or alternative plan for what they're going to do rather than scouts, at least as enriching as their experience in scouts. Like I said, no harm, no foul there.

The other thing is if this decision not to be in scouts anymore seems to be either at the top or the trough of the emotional roller coaster that is adolescence. I usually advise parents if they ask to keep their children involved in scouts, and even require them to do so, because I've watched it any number of times and I've watched children go through this and see them on the other side. In my experience, the ones that stay in scouts appreciate their parents consistency later in life. That's a few thoughts about what can be a very complex subject, and I'm always available to talk to you if you're a parent or a scouter, or indeed a scout, and you're in the middle of a dilemma like this, and it's easy to get in touch with me and you're going to find out how to do that in just a moment.