Troop Beverly Hills

Katie is now in kindergarten, and that means we get to enter the world of Girl Scouts. It's a different world than Boy Scouts! Not that the boys don't have their issues - for one, there's the bit about teaching scouts to be respectful to all people, religions and cultures, yet banning gays and lesbians. (What's more - since Unitarian Universalists refuse to discriminate on anyone based on sexual orientation, the Boy Scouts have removed the Religious Emblem for Unitarian Universalism from their lineup of Religious Emblems that can be earned. But I digress. Here's an interesting link if you want to read more: http://www.uuscouters.org/)

Anyways, I dutifully signed up to be a troop leader because, well, your child gets out of scouts what parents put into it. Drop-off parents lead to drop-out scouts. I am uneasy about leading groups of kids. Adults barely listen to me, muchless kids! But, parenthood is nothing if not a great adventure in stepping out of your comfort zone and doing things you didn't know you could do. Sometimes I think I learn as much as or more than my kids do from scouting.

So once I made the decision to volunteer, I signed up for the required volunteer courses. There are several different courses that new leaders must go through. They do a criminal background check, they call all 3 of your character references, they even wanted my resume of previous volunteer experience. Pretty serious stuff! At one of the training courses, I was advised that troops could use their cookie money to pay for stuff like the following examples:

Flying to Chicago to go to the American Girl Store
Going to Libby Lu's at the mall to get made over as rock stars

And that troop activities could include such educational opportunities as:

Putting on jewelry and makeup to learn about our appearance
Fashion design
Home economics (that's dandy....but I want to see the boys learning this too)

Then someone made the comment that planning a troop meeting was like planning a birthday party. I just about lost it.

I raised my hand to ask the trainer if she was serious. She was. She then sheepishly added that she herself had not done these things with her troop, but that others did. She added that "since not all girls like to camp or do ourdoorsy things, you have to do some activities to cater to their interests in order to keep them in the scouting program."

I have a couple of issues with that. One, I don't believe there's such a thing as girls or boys who don't like to camp or do outdoorsy things. Only parents who feel that way, probably raised by parents who raised them the same way, who put their irrational fears of dirt, bugs or whatever onto their offspring. Two, perhaps scouting isn't for everyone. When scouting has to become something other than scouting in order to keep kids in scouting, what have we really accomplished?

Also, what of teaching kids values? Scouting is supposed to teach kids to be honest and fair, friendly and helpful, considerate and caring, courageous and strong, responsible, respectful and environmentally conscious. What are you teaching when you set kids up with the "I live to be entertained" mentality? Scouting was never meant to be entertainment. Scouting is meant to be character building.

I am starting off with 5-year-olds. But mark my words, if I ever find out that Katie's troop is going to the American Girl store as a troop activity, we'll be looking for the nearest 4-H chapter.