Scoutmaster Podcast 75

And now the old Scoutmaster. So it's nighttime at summer camp and the scouts are sitting around a picnic table getting bitten by mosquitoes.

So they decide they're going to move and they go to another picnic table and soon there's some fireflies floating around and one of the boys says: well, I give up, I'm going to bed. Now the mosquitoes have flashlights and they're looking for them. Hey, this is podcast number 75..

Hey, this is Clarke Green. Welcome back to the Scoutmaster podcast.

So let's see here. Looking in the mail bag, We heard this week from Blaze Vitale, who is a new Scoutmaster out in Wisconsin. He says: overall I've really enjoyed the time with my troop. I feel like stepping up to become a Scoutmaster has given me more of a sense of purpose to my life and it's going to positively influence my family, particularly my son, The boys in the troop and the community. I've learned lots from your podcasts and several of the books you've recommended. The last podcast about summer camp was excellent.

I wrote out a synopsis of that section of the podcast and emailed it to all the parents who were coming. Your podcast consistently draws me back and continues to be my favorite.

I like the new website as well and the increased volume of post which have been coming out over the past several months. Great work.

Well, thanks, Blaze, And I've been keeping up with Blaze over the past few months. He's a new Scoutmaster, as his message implied there, And it's just great to follow that. Thomas Hulahan, assistant Scoutmaster with Troop 364 in Virginia Beach, Virginia, was a winner of one of our latest caption contests And he wrote to say this: first off, let me compliment you on your podcast- simply outstanding. The only shortcoming, in my opinion, is they're not long enough.

Well, thanks, Tom. Your knowledge, insight and humor is greatly appreciated by all that listen to you. I am sure I was a highly decorated Weebelos leader.

Did you get the Weebelos purple heart and all that? Yeah, me too.

And now I'm in my third year as an assistant Scoutmaster. The group of boys who bridged over with me are still at it And they're still with the program And we've done a good job recruiting and we have about 60 scouts now And we seem to continuously be growing. Once again, thank you for your dedication to scouting. Please keep up the good work.

Well, thank you, Tom. It's good to hear that three years later, things are still moving along strong, 60 scouts. That's a good size bunch And I appreciate you listening, I appreciate you being in touch. I'll remind you, guys out there and girls, how to keep in touch.

You can email me at scoutmastercg at Verizonnet, And you can check out the blog at scoutmastercgcom, And well, we'll let you know how to follow us on Facebook and Twitter and all that stuff before we leave today. Today, on the podcast in Scoutmaster ship, in seven minutes or less, we're going to continue with our summer camp preparations And this time around we're going to talk about how to prepare parents for summer camp, Not the ones who'll be going down and accompanying the scouts to summer camp, but the ones who'll be staying home. Oh yeah, they need a little help too.

And then we'll move on to talking about the older boys in scouting and exactly what we do and how we deal with that and the older boy question. I'll warn you ahead of time, it's a little bit of a rant. It's probably totally a rant.

So you know, if you want to skip that part of the podcast, feel free. Hey, I think that's enough to do for a mid-summer podcast, don't you?

Well, let's get started, shall we?

Scoutmaster ship in seven minutes or less. So once we've got the scouts prepared to go to camp, once we've prepared the troop, we've done our lists, we've sent our money, we've done forms and we've scheduled adults to be at camp and all that kind of stuff and figured out schedules of merit badges and all that business.

You know we're ready to go, but what we're doing is we're leaving a group of parents behind at home and a lot of times we haven't prepared them at all. Now this is usually going to concern mothers and it's usually going to concern families whose scouts are going away to camp for their first year. That's just my experience.

I know that dads have a lot of the same concerns, but I usually tend to hear these concerns more from mothers or just kind of sense that there's some tension or some reluctance or some questions about going away to camp that mothers have, especially that first year, and we have not always done a very good job of preparing them for this. Parents themselves are pretty concentrated on getting the boys ready for camp and they might be unaware of how much they're going to miss and worry about their scout while he's away. Or they may be aware of it and find it really kind of difficult to deal with. They may feel uncomfortable turning over full-time care to people they've just really gotten to know.

If we're talking about a boy going to summer camp for his first year, he's been with a scout troop since maybe February and has been on three, maybe four camp outs and this may be enough to get to know the family pretty well and know the boys pretty well and for the families to grow and to trust the adult leadership of the troop. But it's still a very big step Sending your son away for an entire week and it may be the first time he's been away for that long from home and it's not necessarily people you know really, really well and that you've known for years and years. And parents worry about the kind of food that they'll be eating and who'll be looking after, the daily concerns of clean clothes and maybe taking a shower every once in a while. They'll be worried if the other boys will tease their son or if their son will be able to find his way around camp.

They worry about a lot of things And what happens if he doesn't like being at camp? Can he call home?

Can I call him? How am I going to know what's going on? It's an uncertain time. I see this anxiety in the parents of scouts headed for camp for the first year all the time. Some of them find the experience a lot more difficult than their sons ever will. They don't find a whole lot of solace in the first letter that they get from their scouts.

Either Hey, I am having good time at camp, See you later. Or hey, I hate camp, I'll see you later. Or yeah, John broke his arm, See you later.

You know there's not a whole lot communicated there and they're not going to necessarily get a letter back to him in reply to that one within a week's time, depending on where the camp is. You understand what I'm saying. You probably will remember this from the first year that your son went away to camp.

But you know, if you're listening to this podcast, it's pretty likely that you went with him. But these are real things.

How can we, as scout leaders, help parents prepare for how they're going to feel once they've dropped their sons off and they return home? For you know what could be a very quiet and a very long week. Being separated from a child for this length of time is a challenge for every parent, even though many other parents have gone through it before.

So here's some thoughts that I think will help parents be prepared for their sons going off to camp for the first time, And you know, the first one's pretty easy. It's acknowledged that this causes, most parents at least, some distress, And it's really a normal part of a child growing up. It's temporary, even though it might feel like a week is a long time and you're going to feel better. Yeah, you will. It's stressful. It's stressful for a parent.

It can be very difficult. It can be a great relief, you know, for the scouts to go away for a week, but they're still going to be worried and they're still going to be a little stressed Now. Most scouts are going to encounter some homesickness and some ups and downs. We're going to talk about how to deal with homesickness in our next podcast.

But you know we understand, as experienced leaders, that most scouts are going to encounter some homesickness the first year that they go away and sometimes the second and third year too, And they're going to have some ups and downs. They're going to enjoy some parts of camp and not enjoy some others. They're going to be some challenges.

What we can help parents understand is that his fellow scouts and the adult leaders that will be at camp with him and the camp staff are all working hard to make sure that it's overall a positive experience, that it's a measured challenge that scouts can overcome- and they do that year after year after year. We can let parents know that we expect some homesickness, We expect it And we expect other difficulties to arise and we're prepared to deal with them, And that they also may be a little difficult, they may be a little distasteful for a scout, but they're a part of a healthy growing process that all scouts are going to encounter in one way or another.

I don't like to make a big issue of it because sometimes it can be a little distracting, but you know, every one of our children one of these days is going to pack their things and going to head out and make their own way in the world. And if they have the experience of going away to summer camp before they're going to pack their bags and move out of the house and end up at college or end up going off on their own, you know it's going to be a positive experience for them and they're going to learn some things. I know that when my son went away to college and he came home for that first break in the fall he was absolutely stunned at how naive and unprepared most of his fellow freshman students were that he shared a dorm with for the college experience. And they were unprepared. I mean, he was amazed that very few of them knew how to do laundry or knew how to look after themselves. We're able to survive.

You know about very basic day-to-day things. He had been, let's see, to summer camp for three or four years, for a week at a time as a boy and then joined the camp staff- for I guess he was there for about four years full-time during the summers- And so, going away to college he was ready. He knew how to look after himself. He knew how to deal with any feelings of homesickness or anything like that. He knew how to make friends. He knew how to work with groups of people.

So I try and let parents know that this is a very positive experience. Even though there might be some stress and some negatives involved with it, it's overall a very positive experience for a scout.

So we want to encourage parents to think positively about the time that the boys are going to be spending at camp. Scouts typically thrive at summer camp and return home very happy.

They may have had a rough time here and there, but when it's all over they're happy scouts. I would say that in the run up to summer camp, instead of discussing and sharing your worries as a parent with your scout or how much you're going to miss him, talk about all the great new experiences that he's going to have when he goes away to camp. Ask all the questions of all the adult leaders that you need to ask. There are really no silly questions, No, And hopefully you don't get an attitude from any adult, because it's better to ask than to worry.

You know, if you need to ask about the food, if you need to ask about the shower facilities, if you need to ask about the campsite, if you need to ask about what they'll be doing, definitely ask. And then understand as a parent and respect the rules and times for helping off and picking up and visiting camp. Some places in the country camps pretty good distance and parents aren't going to be visiting. Some places have a regular schedule where there's a day, usually late in the week, where parents come and visit and see what the boys have been up to. But understand and respect those rules.

I think that's really, really important for parents to know, Also understand and respect how you'll be communicating with your scout and how he'll be communicating with home. For the most part, I like to see the communication be very limited and I like to see it be under the oversight of the adult leaders that are there at camp, And that can be really rough for a parent, and so understanding how that's going to work up ahead of time is going to be important for them, And I would lay that out. I would make sure, as a scout leader, that I've laid that out very clearly. I encourage parents to plan something interesting or special to do while their boys away at camp.

You know, make some plans for that week, Don't just sit around and worry about the boy. Those are just a few of the issues that we are working with in preparing parents for summer camp. It's one of the things that often gets overlooked in the hundred of other details that you're taking on.

And keep your eyes open, because anxious parents are very easy to spot- and make sure that you've answered all the questions that they need to have answered and that they're going to feel as secure as possible about sending their scout away to camp for the first year And you know it's almost always- I would say 99.99% of the time in my experience- it's a positive experience for the parents and for the scout. Hi, I'm Kevin Cowan and I'm listening to scoutmaster ipod. No, I can't. I am Kevin Cowan, the happy camper, and you're listening to the scoutmaster podcast. Oh, beautiful, That's right, it's time

For a scoutmaster's minute. One of the fun things about having a blog is you post something out there and then a discussion begins in the comments section of the post and you get a lot of interesting ideas, reflections and perspectives on things, and one of the recent posts on the blog was about whether or not parents should push their sons to stay in scouting, and one of the ideas that came out of that was talking about the retention of older boys.

You know, boys who were 15,, 16, 17, and it was suggested that if scouting wants to keep boys that are that age, they have to give them age-appropriate programs, apart from the troop program, and that was the only way that we're going to keep them as a part of scouts. Here comes the rant that I warned you about earlier. But I just think that is just total malarkey. I don't believe it at all. I've heard about it for the past 25 years and I got to tell you it's just not been my experience. We talk about it at the troop level.

You know, in training programs and things like that, there's this constant at a 5 at a district to council level, especially at our summer camp, about the older boy programs and we have to have these, otherwise they're just going to walk away from scouting. There's the talk about that and the venture program and everything.

Oh my gosh, we have to have the whole scout program is geared for the younger boys in the troop, and the older boys they just lose interest and they leave. But this is actually what happens in our troop boys. On average, of that 35, I would say about a half of them are 15, 16, 17 years old.

So somewhere between 10 and 15 of them, let's say. And of that 10 or 15 we lose about 4 of them, 3 to 4 of them every year. And the reason that we lose them is because they turn 18 and they graduate from high school, and that's why we lose them. We don't lose them because they quit scouts. We don't lose them because they stop showing up and they don't retrader. We lose them because they turn 18 and they're too old to be scouts now.

In the interest of full disclosure and complete honesty, I think probably of that group of boys who are 15,, 16,, 17 years old, 1 to 2 we might just lose over the attrition of them finding something else to do and not being interested in scouts anymore. Now, that's not an older boy problem, that's just not an older boy problem. I guess, and I hear from people who have a scout troop who somehow either perceive or actually lose a lot of older boys over time. And I have the antidote for it.

If you do have an older boy problem, I hear an awful lot about them, so there's got to be some out there. I have a quick two step program for you to eliminate your older boy problem. Step number one: use the patrol method and make sure that scouts are leading their own troop. I know everybody's tired of hearing about it, I know, but if you want to retain older scouts, have them lead their own troop. Step number two: let them set their own level of participation. Don't tell them how much they have to participate.

Okay, for every highly engaged older scout in a key leader position in our troop, I have one who is less active and less engaged because he's doing other stuff too. He's playing football or he's on some academic team or he's following a very strong academic course in school, and you know he is less active than his fellow scouts. But I don't get angry with him and I don't put policies in place designed to make him feel bad with certain percentages of things that he must do or something like that. Not every boy is going to step into a senior leadership position. Some of them are going to be involved to a certain point and that's what they want to do and that's it. And if you're not prepared for that to happen, you're going to have an older boy problem, I can guarantee you now.

As a result, we retain a lot of those older boys. They remain active all the way until they graduate from high school. That's the way that it works.

Now, one thing that we do have- that is kind of a natural outgrowth of the things that scouts do- is we do have one annual trip that is a venture patrol trip for boys from 13 up, and usually that's a canoe trip. This year it happens to be a trip to Kandersteg International Scout Center in Switzerland, but we do have that and that I guess you could call an older boy program. But the real older boy program is that they lead their troop. They lead it every time you meet.

They lead it when we go to summer camp. They lead it when we go camping. They lead it at the venture patrol trips. I mean, come on, folks, that's what keeps them interested and challenged and engaged. There is no older boy problem when you run the patrol method and scouts lead their own troop.

So if you're having an attrition problem with boys who are 15, 16 and 17 years old, then you need to go back and you need to look at the way your troop is being run, because my guess the boys aren't running it, and you need to look at the way that you're making a guy feel if he's truly interested in sports or academics or something else outside of scouts and he feels as though he's penalized for being interested in things outside of scouts and doing other things in his community. Those are the two things that may be causing an older boy problem and that's a pretty easy fix. It's a pretty easy fix. I'd love to hear your ideas and your experience about this question, and you're going to learn how to get in touch with me in just a moment.