Scoutmaster Podcast 314

I'm Ed Graetrichs and I'm an assistant scoutmaster with Troops 63 in Monroe, Connecticut. This edition of the Scoutmaster podcast is sponsored by backers like me. Thanks everything you do, man.

And now to you, Scoutmaster. I was enjoying my morning cup of coffee in the campsite And one of my assistants, Scoutmaster, said to me.

He said: you know, I got up very early this morning and I saw a deer in my pajamas. He said: how did a deer get in your pajamas? Oh, it's an oldie, petty goodie.

This is podcast number 314.. Hey, Welcome back to the Scoutmaster podcast. This is Clarke Green. Let's take a look in the mailbag and see what's on offer.

Oh, we have this from Walter Underwood, who joined us in last week's podcast to review the troop leader guide, volume 1.. And Walter read and reviewed my book, The Scouting Journey, on Amazon. He gave it a five-star review. He said: I've made several attempts to read Baden Powell's AIDS to Scoutmaster's ship, but I don't think I ever made it all the way through without losing the thread. It's not a long book, but the 1920s language and ideas required a continual translation in my head. Clark has set out to write the same kind of advice for today's Scouters with great success.

This is easy to read and a great introduction to what it means to be an adult leader in Scouting- Highly recommended. Thanks so much, Walter. I really do appreciate that. Once again, the book he's talking about is called The Scouting Journey and it was my goal in that book to take all of the ideas from Baden Powell's AIDS to Scoutmaster's ship, which is couched in language that a lot of people, including myself and apparently Walter, find. You know. You've got to kind of wade through it.

It's a little bit of a slog And what I wanted to do was to take those ideas and update them and make them more readable and accessible for people today, And I think I was reasonably successful in doing that. Check out The Scouting Journey. It's on Amazon. I'll have a link in the podcast notes. Also heard from John Dyer about last week's podcast number 313.. He said an excellent review of the new guide.

I enjoyed listening to the two of you discussing the content. Thank you, John, for that.

When I posted last week's podcast on Facebook there was a little discussion that started with somebody saying: you know they never should have changed the name of this from the Scoutmaster Handbook And it was a pretty weak excuse And my opinion is just watering down scouting, And you know I really take exception to that. I don't think this is watering anything down.

I think it was expanding the idea that the information in this book is for all scouters involved with a scout troop And it's very helpful for them to have it and to be able to reference it. So calling it something other than the Scoutmaster Handbook was probably a very good idea And a couple of people agreed with me on that.

And then, to be really argumentative, someone mentioned that it shouldn't really be called the troop leader handbook because the only real leaders in a troop are the scouts, And I agree in principle. But nobody asked me what this publication should be titled. If they had asked, I would have agreed and said let's call it the troop scout or guidebook or something like that.

And you know it does do a very good job of explaining Adults. Are there not so much as directive, leaders, guides and mentors to the scouts?

I'm so happy with the content of the book, I don't want a nitpick with the title, Okay. So Hey, we have a live chat session a couple times a week, usually Tuesday and Wednesday mornings. Go to scoutmastercgcom and check in And you can sign in during a live chat And we discuss all kinds of important stuff and things that aren't at all important. We usually have a number of frequent flyers join in And also this week, welcome to William J Smith, who is the scoutmaster of troop 204 and carry North Carolina.

So Tuesday and Wednesday mornings, watch the Facebook feed and the Twitter feed And come and join us at scoutmastercgcom for a live chat. Before I get too much further, I want to ask you to do something for me. Consider lending some financial support to helping me keep the podcast and the blog up and running. There are some significant costs to doing it, including my own time that I put into it. I've created two different ways that have been very successful to help lend financial support to my work. One is to become a scoutmastercgcom backer.

If you go to scoutmastercgcom, look up at the top of the page, all the way over on the right hand side, You'll see a support link that will guide you through the process of becoming a backer. It only takes a couple of minutes. Take a look at that this week and see if that'll work for you. Also, right there next to it is a link to Patreon P-A-T-R-E-O-N where you can become a patron Or basically a subscriber to scoutmastercgcom for a payment of $5 or more per month. A number of people have chosen to help out in that way This week.

I want to take a moment to personally thank Timothy Cherry and Hoyt Condra, who both became patrons since last week's podcast. In this week's podcast we're going to catch up on email questions that have come in over the past several weeks And I'm going to limit myself to answering four of them. Otherwise we would be here for a while. If you haven't heard your question answered on the podcast, try and answer them as soon as I possibly can by email. But if you haven't heard yours on the podcast, that's because there's a bit of a backlog And we're going to take care of four of those questions on this podcast.

So let's get started, shall we?

You were always on the beat Boy, beat Boy. Yeah, you were always on the beat Boy, beat Boy. I'm hanging in the street Boy, street Boy.

We were dancing to the beat Boy, beat Boy. Write me a letter, Send it by name.

Couple of the emails that we'll be talking about this week will remain anonymous for reasons that will readily become apparent as soon as we delve into them, and I'm perfectly happy to not mention anything about where emails have come from. But I think it's particularly important, especially when we're dealing with sensitive or difficult questions, to just be able to share the question without any personal information being shared, because I think it helps everybody out.

So I had this email that begins. While I certainly enjoy the informative and entertaining nature of the Scoutmaster Podcast, What keeps me coming back is your experience and ability to see through seemingly difficult situations with care and guidance.

One of our adult volunteers passed away suddenly, and there really isn't a playbook for this. What role do I have as a scouter?

What role does our troop have? How can we help the Scout?

How can we help the family? Well, as I read your email, I was reminded of an experience about a decade ago when the father of two of my Scouts, two brothers, took his own life. It was sudden, it was horrifying, and I had no idea what to do next. I mean, what do I say to these two boys.

What do I say to the other Scouts? I realized I was way out of my depth and thankfully I had a connection to a professional counselor who I contacted and she and a colleague offered to be at our next troop meeting to talk with the Scouts about what had happened. This counselor done a lot of work with youth and I felt very comfortable in taking her up on that offer.

Now I had no idea of the kind of a meeting this would be, how things would go, what would be said or how it would all end up, and I guess I could credit myself for knowing I was out of my depth and asking for help. But to be honest, I was horrified at the prospect that I would do further damage if I took it on by myself. The boys who lost their dad came to that meeting along with their uncle. The counselors divided us into two groups and spent the rest of the time facilitating a discussion with the Scouts. I was not sure I had done the right thing at all and I was hardly able to listen to the conversations, much less participate in them. But when we dismissed the boys and uncle told me it was tremendously helpful and it was a great relief to him personally and we went on from there and I don't really recall any issues coming up after that session, and I could write a lot about what I learned, but the single takeaway from the experience was recognizing that I was really out of my depth and asking for help, and that's my best advice to you or anyone who finds themselves in a similar circumstance: get some professional help with this, if at all possible, from people who are trained and experienced with helping children process these kind of losses, because, as you might imagine, the loss of a parent is not simply upsetting to the children in that family, but any children who those children may be associated with.

I know that it may be a little difficult for some of us to go. You know I'm really way out of my depth here. I really need to have help. I can't handle this, but these are very serious issues and I would liken it to this: if one of your scouts was seriously injured, you would know when you are out of your depth as far as what you're able to do for that injury. Right, you're going to call the EMTs, you're going to get them to an emergency room, and this is the same sort of a situation you're out of your depth, you don't really know what to do next. Don't ever be afraid to ask for help in a situation like this.

I was fortunate that within the circle of my friends, I knew somebody who was a professional counselor and could help out. If I hadn't, I would have widened that circle until I found somebody who was able to speak with me about it.

So that is what my advice would be: when you're handling any kind of an issue where you feel, as a scouter, that you're out of your depth, don't be afraid to ask for help. Our second question for this podcast also remains anonymous, and it begins this way: I found out a couple days after a recent camp out one of my older scouts was teaching younger scouts some very profane, explicit limericks, and I am really pretty upset about the whole thing. I understand that we're not supposed to punish scouts, but I really question the judgment of this older first class scout who's ready to advance to STAR, and I am suggesting that we delay his rank advancement for four months.

What advice do you have for me concerning the advancement issues specifically- and I'm open to any other advice you might have about this- well, I wish I could say that this never happened to me. This sort of an issue is going to happen when you are working with boys this age. Boys this age do this kind of thing. This is not to have a. Boys will be boys, dismissing the behavior attitude towards it.

But we need to understand why they do this sort of thing. This isn't some kind of basic moral failure on their part. It made perfect sense for him to do this.

Okay, I know that if I were this that age and I knew some off-color jokes or dirty limericks or something like that, I would think that they were the best thing ever and I would make sure to share them with my friends, and especially with younger people, because I would make this equation. They would think I was pretty cool.

So it's a win-win situation as far as I can see, of course, unless somebody finds out that I was doing it. But I'm not really worried about that at that age. I mean, of course, this scout knows better. He probably feels pretty bad about the whole thing or at least embarrassed that somebody caught him, because teenagers are very poor estimators of risk. They tend to value the positive outcomes of taking a risky action like this way way above the negative outcomes.

That's why we have something like a juvenile justice system and emergency rooms. Okay, teenagers make very poor decisions when it comes to things like this, and by doing that, this is a process by which they learn to make better decisions. Just about every young person that we know, including the ones that you're a parent to, that live in your house, no matter how great and wonderful a kid they are, they sometimes just do a stupid, stupid thing.

That is just so jaw-droppingly stupid it stops you in their tracks. Theoretically, of course, they know better, but they don't experientially know better until they push the limits a little bit, and I think that's what's going on here. I know it's what I would have done at that age.

So what do you do next? Well, if you come at this from the punishment direction, this scout is going to do what we all did at that age.

He'll do a passable job of saying that he's sorry and act repentant in front of adults, and then he will likely kind of thumb his nose behind your back, because he knows that adults are somewhat hypocritical in this area and that adults know plenty of raunchy jokes and swear once in a while, and so there is an inherent unfairness that's going on here, coming at them with a punishment is going to backfire on you. Plus, we don't punish scouts. We just don't do that, and I've talked about this many, many times before. Punishment never happens in scouting, should never, ever happen. Proportionate consequences happen. If you make a mess, you clean up the mess.

If you break something, you fix something. If you share an off-collar joke with a bunch of younger scouts, you apologize for having done so, but you don't get punished for any of those circumstances. You just deal with the proportionate consequences. Anything above those proportionate consequences, that's punishment. Scouters don't punish. Parents can have the option to punish if they think it's going to be useful for them and that's the way they want to handle it.

So we make sure to let parents know what's happened and it's their choice to punish or not to punish. The other thing that is really important here is the kind of conversation that you can have with this scout. If you just like, look at the situation and you issue a judgment and that judgment is followed up with some kind of punishment, like making him wait an extra four months before he can be a star scout. You've missed a really big opportunity. That four months is going to go by. He's going to forget about that.

But if you have a really meaningful, open conversation about the scout oath and law, he'll probably remember that conversation longer than he will remember that punishment. So sit down with the scout and start asking some questions.

Why would anybody be upset about what he did? Why have him explain that to you?

Does he think that the scout oath and law mean anything, or are they just empty words that we repeat? What would he do in response to a situation like this if he were in your shoes?

Does he think what he did was wrong? Can he tell you why it was wrong?

Does his conscience tell him that he was acting in the best interest of those younger scouts, that he was demonstrating the kind of scout spirit we'd expect of a star scout? I mean, this is a very meaningful discussion here. When you have the chance to get this scout to exercise their own internal standard, to explore the ideas behind the words of the scout oath and law, you won't be able to have that conversation if you decide to pronounce judgment and issue a punishment as a part of the conversation.

You have to make it clear: if this kind of thing becomes a pattern of behavior, well, he won't be able to continue in scouts. It's pretty simple, and that you need to have a discussion with his parents about the whole issue, because it's your responsibility to his parents to share this sort of thing with them and they may choose to punish him kind of out of your hands, but that he needs to understand why you have to talk to his parents about it and you want them there while you talk to the parents. This will be as big an issue as you decide to make out of it, and I would make it as small an issue as possible. Scouts are smart. They understand when they've done things wrong. We don't have to bludgeon them over the head about it for days and days or for four months.

Let's talk about it honestly and openly, use it as an opportunity to leverage their growing, their understanding of the scout oath and law, make sure that any punishment responsibilities are right where they belong- with his parents, at home- and move on and put a positive spin on what is honestly, yes, very frustrating for a scouter to have to deal with things like this, but if we take it as an opportunity to help a scout form and shape their character through the application of the scout oath and law, it becomes a very positive thing. So our third email this week comes from Christopher Taylor. He says: I'm a long time fan and assistant Scoutmaster for a few years, and I was looking for guidelines on making a Facebook group for our scout troop. If I did create a Facebook group, it would be private, of course, with invite request admission only. Your thoughts would be appreciated.

Well, Christopher, I sent you to a link from the Boy Scouts of America and their official position on the use of social media and it will also be in the podcast notes and you'll note on that page. It says this: to help ensure that all communications on social media channels remain positive and safe, these channels must be public. Therefore, no private channels, eg private Facebook groups or invite only YouTube channels etc. Are acceptable in helping administer the scouting program.

So that's the BSA position on the matter. My personal advice to you, after having tried out a number of these things, is to just leave them alone and don't get involved with trying to set up a troop page for your Facebook or anything like that, because they're not a very good way to communicate with your Scouts or their families. I know it seems like a good idea, but it's likely not to be, because there's really no closed loop communication involved where a person at the other end of the communication acknowledges that they've received it.

And when you set up a group like this, whether it's private or public or whatever, it can take constant monitoring and there are potential problems with youth members and adults friending each other on Facebook and not being able to monitor the resulting interactions and the inevitable misunderstandings that can arise from these kind of interactions between youth members, between adult members. You get where I'm saying now. I wrote about this about three or four years ago. I'll have a link to those articles in the podcast notes. But to give you the quick analysis, while all of these social media tools and things like that do have their uses and they are useful for some things in Scouting, in my experience- and other people may be able to do this successfully- but in my experience they don't work for unit communications and they're really a pretty bad idea because of the other potentials that I just mentioned. I go back far enough to remember pre-email days and we tried lots of different things.

We tried paper newsletters mailed out going home. Those helped a little bit. We tried having a recorded phone message where you could call up and get a phone message about what was happening.

And then, of course, email came along and we all thought, hallelujah, all our communication problems are fixed. That turned out to be the case, did it? Then Facebook and the other social media things came along. We thought, finally, we'll have something to fix this. Then things like Scoutbook come along and everything.

We think now we don't have to worry about communications anymore. Well, none of these things are 100% solutions.

Some of them may help, but when you add up the amount of time that you have to maintain and monitor them, here's what I believe you're going to end up finding out. The world standard is one person talking to another person, that's it. Whether that's over a telephone or face to face, it really doesn't matter. But the only way you actually have a reliable communication with somebody that I like to call a closed loop communication, where they say: yes, I have heard what you said and I understand it, is through that face to face or voice to voice contact. My advice: if you really want to up your communication with everybody to make sure people are understanding things, I would put all that energy into making sure that everybody gets a phone call, and even that is not 100%. Human beings is our greatest asset and our biggest problem.

Communication is always a challenge, no matter where you are or what you're doing. If you're getting more than three people together around a given goal or something like that.

Communication is always going to be a challenge, and I am not suggesting people haven't figured out a way to use social media more effectively than maybe I did, but I still think everybody would have to agree that there's only one gold standard: face to face, voice to voice- and that's where I think your effort is better spent. And our fourth and final email will be anonymous.

Here's what it says. I have a situation developing over the past few months. I'm hoping you can offer me some sound advice. I'm a Scoutmaster and one of our newer parents has become a problem. They are very critical of what my older scouts are doing. They are stepping in constantly with comments that are basically undoing what I'm trying to accomplish as a Scoutmaster.

I'm looking for a second opinion and any offer of advice how to resolve this. I want us to find a happy place where we can all win.

Well, I'm sorry to hear this is going on. Don't feel alone. It happens all the time in scouting and outside of scouting too. Every once in a while, our scouts, our youth members, may cause conflicts, and these are usually pretty easily resolved, in comparison to the kind of conflicts and difficulties that adults create distressingly, this is not unusual or infrequent.

Now, if you're a scouter, and especially if you're a Scoutmaster, that means you are a good-hearted person, and this good-heartedness serves you and your scouts very well, until you have a conflict like this, because, being a good person, you're probably averse to resolving conflicts and you tend to avoid them. And if you want to resolve this particular conflict, I will tell you in my experience, the only way you're going to resolve it is to take it head on and make sure that there is no further misunderstanding about exactly what you need to have happen. Now. You've described an adult who's clearly overstepping their bounds.

If they're a registered trained scouter or just an active parent, here's what I would do: first discuss with your committee chair what you're about to do and then get this person sit down with them face to face and you tell the adult something like this: you are interfering with my work as a Scoutmaster, and your complaining and your difficult attitude is going to have to stop as of now. So here are my directions to you. If you have a direction or an observation that you think needs to be shared with the scouts, you will come and talk to me. First, to be clear, I don't want you talking to the scouts at all. I only want you talking to me when you bring these observations or complaints or whatever to me. I will be happy to discuss any issue or explain the actions that I'm taking or how I'm going to handle it with you.

But we will be doing that out of your shot with the scouts when I have the time. So let me go back over this real quick. I don't want you speaking to the scouts, I don't want you complaining to them, I don't want you directing them and I don't want you even sharing your observations with them.

Now, that might seem a little extreme, but your attitude is causing difficulty. So you and I will talk whenever you have a problem.

Otherwise, I don't want you speaking with the scouts unless I've specifically directed you to do so now. If you don't want to follow this very simple direction, then you'll no longer be able to participate in meetings or on camping trips. The way forward is up to you.

I think I've explained myself clearly what's your choice now. You have to be direct, very, very clear about what you want to have happen and you have to direct what's going on.

Here's the very simple logic. The Scoutmaster, mentors and guides youth members and leads adults. I have no problem ordering adults around, in a way that I would never order scouts around. If you have an adult who has a problem, you don't deal directly with it. Things will never be resolved. Part of your job is directing the adults and you can't do this by being indirect- okay- or assuming that they understand what's going on.

You have to spell things out. Another way of putting it is: you're the head coach and you can't have any assistant coaches acting like they're free agents who could say or do anything they like. Directions, comments, anything that is communicating with the team needs to come through you. Now. If this adult reacts poorly or threatens to leave with his son, then show them the door and don't fret too much about it. Once in a while, things like this happen in scout troops.

You're going to feel bad about it because you're a nice person, but you cannot save a scout from their own parents. Bad attitude or foolishness. Don't let it drag on. Don't think that suddenly this person with an attitude problem is going to get the idea and change without you saying anything.

This is something that you're going to need to address, so I hope that helps listen. If you have a comment, a question or a reaction to anything we've shared on the podcast today, get in touch with me. It's pretty easy to do and you're going to find out how to do that in just a moment.