They're great if you fit in with the group. If the group decides you're "different" in some way, you're going to get shunned, and shunned hard. Speaking from experience here.

It works great for "normal" kids but for any kid even the slightest bit non-neurotypical, it's going to be absolute hell.

I didn't really fit into the group when I was a kid, but in hindsight I still gained a lot from them (including experience learning to better fit into groups).

That's part of it! People think there's supposed to be some total acceptance and peace and love.

Society is not like this, family is not like this, even with your spouse, kids, or brothers/sisters you wont be like this.

Being criticized, ostracized by some, shunned by others, also helps make someone learn to socialize (which includes conforming to a few norms, that's part of being into a society instead of alone in the jungle).

And there are two other things too:

1) Everyone gets some of that treatment (even the popular jocks for example get talked about behind their backs as brainless or whatever). People that act like they are the only recipients, are too self-absorbed to see it.

2) Not everything someone brings or who their character is is good to begin with, just because its "theirs" or "original" etc. The group can have some pathologies itself, but it can help shape everyone to be better too.

The thing is this: When you are shunned, you don't get to learn to fit into groups better. You are simply left out. No one picks you until adults step in to make sure you are included, and if you are lucky the adults aren't part of the shunning.

Luckily for me, Girl Scouts was only somewhat bad one year. We moved, and then I hated the activities which focused around makeup and "girl stuff" instead of crafts and camping and things. My shunning was in school itself, and unfortunately the teachers didn't help at all.

Well I am glad your troop helped out a bit, I had mine ask me to leave and not come back because I didnt fit in with their religious boyscouts.

Honestly a large amount of troops are maintained by mormons or others as extended wings of their belief systems.

My father is an Eagle Scout that frequently volunteers for the organization at the national and council level. I don't always pay attention when he talks about scouts, but I have heard enough. I'm not very keen on supporting the organization myself, thanks to their abuse cover-ups and hostility towards non-orthodox people.

AFAIK, Mormons recently voted to stop using Boy Scouts as their de facto youth activities organization. The looming crash in membership numbers as a consequence is partly what prompted the organization to go co-ed.

But that's fine, as it also takes a huge and heavy thumb off the conservative pan of the political balance of the national organization. Without them, BSA can now be more open to LGBT scouts and leaders. Maybe even atheists someday. But...

Each troop is shaped in some part by their individual charter and the relationship with the sponsoring organization. If a troop meets in a church, it is likely to be more religious than one that meets in an elementary school gymnasium, or other municipal-owned building.

It's not a monolithic organization. Each council is different, and each troop has a lot of autonomy to organize its own activities.

This leads to situations where every troop within a 100 mile radius of your kid might be a complete mismatch for them, but if you do happen to find one that fits, it will likely remain that way until they age out.

If you can't find a scout troop near you that isn't filled with personality clashes, your kid will likely want to move away when they get the chance anyway, because the scout troops reflect the local culture. They will encounter the same kids at the high schools.

There is the Lone Scout program (part of BSA that almost no one knows about). The youth does not have to be in a troop, can still earn ranks/Eagle, merit badges, etc, can still participate in district/council/national events, and gets to wear a cool Lone Scout patch.

Same here. I was fast-tracked from Cubs to Boy Scouts because I was picked on and teased endlessly by many of the scouts. Later in my early teens even the scout master gave me hell because he was the father of the worst bully in the troop. I eventually had to leave what I saw as an organization of bully-enablers. This was in a small country town in SE Texas, more like redneck-scouts.

Can confirm I had a terrible experience and I'm weird. I was bullied and driven out.

I'm a fan of these sorts of programs as well, but adolescents also really really need unstructured time together.

A properly executed Boy Scout program[1] should give adolescents a lot of unstructured time and leave them with the sense that they spent a weekend hanging out with their friends having fun. It's only at the Cub Scout level where it's appropriate for adults to be planning and leading a highly structured weekend of activities. When I take my troop camping, even if there's a fixed plan for an activity during the day (eg. if we've hired a whitewater rafting outfitter for the day), by 4 or 5PM on Saturday we're back in camp and the scouts' time is their own from then until mid-morning Sunday when they need to be packed up and ready for the drive home. They're still loosely supervised by adults, but there's no adult telling them when to start cooking dinner or when to go to bed.

[1] The program is officially no longer known as Boy Scouts in the US, now that it's starting to go co-ed.

In the Boy Scouts troop I was in, no one was allowed to spend time at the parents/adult leaders tent. There's several obvious reasons for this, but one is to force kids, especially those who have a parent volunteering, to spend time away from them and learn some independence. I think it was a great policy.

Yep, this is totally right and an important part of the program. But still not a substitute for spending unstructured time with peers. If nothing else, teenagers should be spending time with possible love interests, flirting, saying the wrong things, saying the right things, figuring out why which is which, that sort of thing. For the large majority of kids that wasn't going to happen at BSA events. Maybe that will change with the broadening to include girls, but I suspect that sort of stuff will be frowned on rather than encouraged; it's just not the goal of the program.

I agree with all of this and spent my youth as part of a really great troop that did lots of great youth-led events. It was a wonderful enriching experience that has had lasting value in my adult life. But it was not a replacement for all the time I spent hanging out shooting the shit with my friends. Both things were really important to me.

For cub scout camp directors, the plan must include daily scheduled periods of 'down time' during which scouts can play on open fields or playgrounds. For a four hour/day camp, this might be 30 to 45 min in the middle of the schedule. There's also free time before and after opening and closing ceremonies. The same is generally advised for meetings. Before a meeting, it's best to give them some time to blow off steam before having them sit for any length of time for anything structured. Making things fun is the best first step toward not only engaging them as individuals, but getting them engaged with each other. So yea, essential and well recognized by experienced scout leaders

Dunno, when I did cub scouts / Boy Scouts even 20 years ago it was basically glorified arts and crafts

When I did it about 15 years ago we got dumped in a fenced in bit of eucalypt forest with our pockets stuffed with "normal" items like knives/shoelaces/mueslibars/1.25L bottles of water/first aid kits and told to survive for 24 hours. Granted it's almost impossible to actually get yourself killed in 24 hours, we had quick access to leaders if we needed them, and we were all relatively trustworthy kids who'd trained for it, but it felt like more responsibility than arts and crafts.

I think a lot of parents would refuse such exercise today since they precious children could get hurt. I also think no one will do it anyway since parent will hold you responsible for any scratchs or dommages.

> Granted it's almost impossible to actually get yourself killed in 24 hours

You should not under estimate the stupid thing children/adolescent can do today...

The wording of their comment suggests heavily to me that they are from Australia. I participated in scouts in Australia about the same amount of time ago as we did somewhat similar things, going on camps where there was a reasonable amount of independence and I would have described it as arts and craftsy.

You mention concern about liability these days, but it's important to remember not everywhere is America. I can't speak to the rest of the world, but Australia is definitely nowhere near as litigious as the US. I could definitely see something like what they described still happening in Australia today.

I was a Boy Scout in America; we did the same thing. It was a great experience.

The US is a very large and diverse country. There are lots of outdoor adventure sort of activities in much of the country.

Very much so. Camping, hiking, fishing are very popular in a lot of places. There are still many areas where it's not uncommon for a boy to get a rifle or shotgun at around age 10 and start learning to hunt. This modern super-protective cocoon life is largely a suburban thing.

Wow, sounds like an Order of the Arrow (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_the_Arrow) Ordeal. My large-city suburban US troop did this (I moved away before I was eligible to do it)!

I definitely remember doing this at OA.

By all accounts the experience varies enormously between troops. I’m sure someone who learned enough wilderness survival skills for it to be useful in their military career will pop up in the comments, and some more who suffered as you did.

Haha yeah. Camping was old hat to me when I went in the Marines. None of that stuff surprised me. One brutally cold night outside of Victorville we were supposed to dig in fighting holes but the ground was solid and nobody got more than a few inches deep despite hacking at it all day. We were going to be there all night.

Next to me was a big pile of wood chips for some reason. Knowing this would keep me warm and off of the ground, I lined my hole with a few inches of chips, training be damned. I was sleeping soundly (and warmly) when the company was roused at 0300 to go back to base. Nobody else slept a wink except those close enough to me to be warned. Basically, the CO got cold so we went home.

lol. I learned that survival training in the Scouts. Good times.

Id imagine it can be good if you’re never exposed to camping/survival otherwise.

I had to go through SERE for aircrew (which is in Spokane, WA) and that was the first time in my life I was ever out in the woods. It was such an insane shock and learning experience. I think there’s a lot of value being exposed to that stuff even if you have no desire to do it recreationally.

In my troop, most of the kids had never been Cub Scouts. Everyone in my patrol earned Eagle, and we never did any of the prepackaged artsy-craftsy stuff.

We crafted meals and campfires and patrol flags and lashed together poles to make camp gateways with banners and flags hanging off of it.

We slept inside caves, rapelled down cliffsides, and did weekend-sized training trips for week-long outdoor travel destinations like Quetico/Boundary Waters for canoeing, and Philmont for hiking, and then still did the council-organized camporees.

My troop joined with several others in the council to organize our own summer camp, because they thought the one run by the council was too weak, with respect to earning merit badges. You might get two or three badges at Ransburg. In the LBL group-camp area, you might earn a dozen, while also learning stuff like bow-drill firecrafting that isn't even a requirement for any badge. If you weren't in the right troops, you didn't even know about it.

The quality of the adult leadership absolutely has an impact on the experience for the kids, and that varies greatly. The economic class of the parents is also a factor. Some of the more interesting activities cost more money. That's when fundraising and sponsorship comes in. Richer parents get to have more independent troops.

If I ever had any inkling of going into the military, it all might have been an adequate replacement for about four weeks worth of training. Which would have gone instead into unlearning independent initiative and doing things the military way, instead of the situationally adaptive way. Scouts has a lot of ceremony in it, which seems somewhat lame, cult-like, and pseudo-patriotic in retrospect. That might have helped in a military career more than knowing how to build campfires and small game snares.

When I did scouts many years ago, there was definitely a lot of variation by troop. Some, like the one I was in, had a lot of weekend camping/hiking, extended trips, summer camp, etc. and the weekly/biweekly meetings were mostly just organizing for those activities. Other troops, scouts was mostly just those meetings with games/arts/crafts/etc.

Yea, for the first year of cub scouts with 5 year olds, that's the appropriate kind of activity that combines play, limited strength and skills, and allows you to mix in information about nature, society, arts, science, etc. That said, you also start camping the same year, with your parents, and transition to sharing tents with other kids over then next year or two. By the time kids are 10, they are running the boy scout troop, and the adults should be there just for support and advice. I put it this way: In cub scouts, the adults are at the front of the room. In boy scouts the adults are in the back of the room. In Venture/Explorer scouts, the adults are in the next room.

Agreed. I'm 34, I quit scouts at 13 as my father died just before I Turned 13 and everyone was treating me like a leper because they didn't know what to say or do BUT scout camps were:

- stamping pre-cut leather and using vinyl cord to 'stitch' it together to make wallets

- shooting splintered fiberglass bows at targets 5 feet away

- shooting bb guns older than my father 5 feet away

- singing cadences about "Uncle Dougie" the head of camp Belzer

Scout meetings were:

- carving soap into eskimos

- painting pinewood derby cars

- making a toolbox from pre-cut wood

- making model airplane from pre-cut wood

- doing idiotic skits that in hindsight were wildly innaporpriate like when I had to stand in front of everyone and go "When I grow up, I want to be a baker. Don't, eclaire turns and grabs butt buy my buns!" while others said things like "Be a surgeon. Needle, thread, stab him in the head" and "Be a girlscout, Heya mister, hiya mister *pretends to raise a skirt and show leg" wanna buy a cookIEEEE"?

God. I need therapy don't I?!

Camping trips were:

- Dads that have never camped, trying to drag full kitchens into the woods and burning every meal (my father refused to go on scout trips because he was a proper woodsman and they'd all be like "Mark can you help us with our tent/where's the bathroom/is this poison ivy/oh my god is this a tick/can I eat this/how do I start this fire, where's the gasoline"

- Visiting the visitor's centers in state parks

- Walking on, often paved or drastically improved, par trails

- Group trips to the general store to buy ice cream and candy