Eagledad

What are you talking about, God never professed slavery as a standard of moral behavior? He commanded slaves to “not rebel against their masterâ€Â, which is consistent with his commands for all people to not rebel against their leaders or governments. Stosh is exactly right, slavery is man’s creation, not God’s. Barry

The intent is easy, when man is prioritized before God, then man sets his standards of moral behavior before God's. Man is fickle and too often lead by emotion. God is principled, reasoned, consistent, and never changing. Once we take God out as the lead for moral and ethical decision making, man will dictate what “do my best†means by his emotion of the moment. By the way, you know God didn't prioritize family first in commanding loving they neighbor. Barry

Peregrinator is right. The oath is a guide of how to apply the law, the law is a list of actions to be applied at appropriate moments that confront the scout. If you are wondering if the creators of the oath and law did that on purpose, the answer is yes. I can’t find my source now, but there is some information that backs up Peregrinator. Barry

I agree, thanks dc. Scoutmasters have two basic responsibilities to the scouts; giver of knowledge and counselor of decisions. The scoutmaster gives the scout enough knowledge to have confidence to move forward. Knowledge is skills, information and visions of experience. Knowledge is not a lecture, disciplinary action or disappointing condemnation. Counselor of decisions is guiding scouts to make right decisions. Counselor holds scouts accountable for decisions and mentors guiding principles toward right decisions. The counselor doesn’t discipline, they guide accountability with the intention of giving the scout just (just) enough information for him to understand his decisions, whether it is right or wrong. I asked myself when I read Matts post if the scout made any wrong choices in giving the prayer. Given all the knowledge and life experiences that scout had at that point, did he in his heart do good? The difference between being a giver of knowledge and a counselor of decisions basically comes down to timing. The scout had been responsible for a lot of actions that night, did he really need to be confronted on his style of prayer? Could it have waited a day, week or even a month to allow the scout to grow from the confidence of his evening accomplishments? Matt, you are one of the best Scoutmasters I know on this list. Maybe it’s our culture or maybe the discussions on this forum, but I think you allowed the outside clutter pressure or embarrass you into focusing on what you wish the scout did instead of what the scout accomplished. We have all been there and will continue to be there, we allow our vanity to influence us into quick rash actions of the counselor when the proper action is timely patience of giving knowledge. I had this very same exact experience, so I understand the situation and the feeling involved. I humbly admit I had to grow from the experience myself. But I also learned that there is a difference between the pragmatic adult who is guiding patient growth and the reactionary adult who emotionally criticizes the process because they don’t understand the responsibility of developing men of character. Critics don’t understand your slow process of building scouts confidence toward making independent decisions based from the principles of the Oath and Law. They only see disappointing independent actions of boys who they feel require immediate correction. They want the scouts to feel their disappointment. Actually many of these adults want to punish the scouts for the emotion they are feeling at that moment. The SM has to protect the scouts from those critics and reactionaries or the scout will always wait for the critique to be told what to do before he initiates any action. The pragmatic SM MUST teach the critics how the scouts act on the knowledge at hand and that decisions based from ignorance are not wrong decisions, they are starting places of growth and learning. The Scoutmaster must stand of up for the scouts against the critics who don’t understand how the process works and want immediate change. You can’t allow the fickle outside world corrupt your good work. This is why Scoutmasters are heroes in my book. Most parents don’t see how the SM shields their sons from rash judgments of just about every adult around them. Even worse, sometimes Scoutmasters are wrong and have the responsibility to show humility to the scouts. The other adults don’t seem to feel that they have that responsibility. I pray for all you noble scoutmasters all the time Matt. Thanks again dc for helping us understand. Barry

OK, I had a really big laugh, but now I feel guilty because I hurt your feelings. Honestly though, I don’t understand why you are trying to bring some kind of relevancy to atheist that you have worked so hard trying to separate yourself from. Ask the average person to define atheist and chaplain and you will find I’m pretty dead on. Look up those two same words in most dictionaries and they will support that same public view. Up until now you have not run from what you claim to be; now you want some kind of moral or spiritual prevalence. You have worked very hard to define your status, now you’re having regrets? Barry

I don’t see what that has to do with atheist chaplains, but at least for Christians, Jesus was pretty specific of the destiny for those types of religious leaders.

I've been entertained by this thread, but now the discussion has crossed the line of stupid. Qwazse, athiest have NO doubt because they believe there is NO god. An athiest chaplain? LOL Who is fooling who here? For Pete sake. Barry

Your situation is challenging because as you said, you don’t have enough adults stepping up. From my perspective, that is your highest priority or the other problems will drag you down. I’ve experienced the ASM who didn’t really agree with my vision for the scouts and the troop. The tension between us never went away because he looked for opportunities to show me up as the SM and prove his style better. The problem solved itself when the adult left the program. Had he not left, we would have had to eventually get our minds aligned. I understand your dilemma, but there may be an opportunity here to fix that problem. One of my biggest disappointments of being the group leader is that most adults will do anything to dodge conflict. Council and district would rather stay out of unit internal conflicts, but if you know someone of wisdom and experience that you can trust outside the troop, I would certainly use their leverage. A strong COR is certainly an advantage. Barry

Wow, that is really good. I will have to memorize that analogy. Barry

I have often wondered what 300 ft really means to you. Of course, that is a good parents responsibility with the information given to them. A Scoutmaster who keeps the parents in the dark deserves the respect that follows. ​ I never had that problem as a coach because we communicated with the parents a lot. I have seen a few Scoutmasters removed and I agreed with each one. However, I have never seen a Scoutmaster removed by only one or two parents. There was always consensus. I guess my point of all this is is the SM will only receive the respect from parents that he/she give to them. Barry

You are missing the point Stosh, parents have to grow as well as their kids to be the best kind of parent, or best kind of scout leader for that matter. You scoffed at me before when I said that a good SM spends 50% of their Scoutmastering working with the adults. If the parents and adult leaders don’t understand how the program works, then likely the SM will struggle to maintain trust as well as respect with the parents. They can’t read our minds. After a few years of summer camps we started to understand that on the whole, the scouts who suffered the most from home sickness where the ones where the parents struggled to let go. I don’t mean not let their son go to camp, they struggled with the idea of detachment. They inadvertently made their son homesick even before he left by telling him how much they would miss him and how they wouldn’t know what to do. Even rover was mentioned as missing that member of the family. Don’t you see, it’s not just the teenagers who are struggling for change, the parents have to change as well. In most cases their son has never spent more than one night away from their home. Now they won’t see him for a week. Parents need to change and grow with the changes and growth of their kids. Most parents feel the emptiness of change, but some deal with it better than others. So, I started preparing parents a few weeks before camp. I told them they might be struggling feelings of being away from their son and that it is normal. But part of the therapy (I didn’t call it that) was instead of dwelling on the negative, help their son look forward to the positive of all the cool fun things at camp. All the friends they will make and all the skills they will learn. Show some envy for their sons experience. Don’t talk about the dog, but instead tell him how excited they are for him. Send some letters, but while they admit they miss him, also remind him of his chores that dad is doing and cleaning up the mess the dog made on the carpet. Life at home is the way it was before he left and the way it will be when he gets back. Right now summer camp is the cool place to be and they want to hear every story. That kind of instruction made a complete difference in our scouts attitudes at summer camp. And I think it really help the parents as well. Parents aren’t bad people, they are learning life’s lessons just like everyone else. But when a friendly voice tells them what they are feeling is normal and that everything will be alright, they become a lot easier to work with when their son experiences get a little tougher. We are part of the team. Ya well a lot of us here including me on the forum get pretty judgmental about parents, but truth be told parents aren’t always dealt a fair hand with scout leaders either. We can't change the world, but we can make a difference to the little piece of culture around us. Barry

I am glad to read that you are doing OK LeCaster, God bless you and all your family. But I feel your story is representative of the problem, not the solution. Not that I have a solution, but we as a culture seem to justify harmful behavior with examples of surviving victims. Coincidently I just ran into a long time scouter friend at a café who I haven’t seen in about three years. I was the SM when his older son earned eagle. His younger Eagle son is now an ASM for the troop. When he noticed that I didn’t recognize the women he was with, he said, “You didn’t know? The boys’ mother left me for another woman. The boys are taking it very hardâ€Â. It seems to me that our culture has reached a level where we glorify parents making personal choices even when in the back of our minds WE KNOW that friends and family will suffer from those choices for the rest of their lives. I am floored that our culture not only supports, but encourages mothers to abandon their children for their own personal happiness. And I mean abandonment to the extreme of even killing their unborn children. We seem to support being happy even at the destruction of those around us. Can anyone really say it is anything less? How can a culture survive when the parents are willing to accept their children as casualties of their personal happiness? How? What hope is there for my kids kids? I know this topic appears pointedly judgmental, I don’t mean to make it so. I feel that our culture has an overall problem of feeling entitled to be personally happy and that feeling is being used to the extreme for political advantage. Divorce and parent abandonment is just a result of the much bigger problem. But it is a problem that feeds the monster and makes it worse. I do not think good parenting should be looked at as a noble, but it seems today that any parents who are willing to make a marriage work to the end are indeed noble. I don’t have an answer, but I just wanted to remind ourselves that the problem is out there and our children are suffering as a result. Barry

Here is an article that for many reasons is close to my heart. I know, I know, but I feel the truth of divorce shouldn’t be hidden by the pop culture veil that children don’t suffer. Not only is my observation that children suffer into their adult years, I also think divorce is the number one indicator of the present culture. “â€ÂIs divorce bad for childrenâ€Â†“The guilt is a burden I have lived with for years. I’m reminded of it every day as I look into my children’s eyes and see a hardness and pain that I never had as a child. I lived carefree in the comfort of my parents’ love. This is a gift I never gave my children. Instead, I showered them with the curses of a divorced life, the mixed loyalties of remarriage, and the travails of a blended family that never really blends.†http://thefederalist.com/2014/05/14/is-divorce-bad-for-children/ I have been asked several times why I don’t agree with the homosexual lifestyle. And while there are many ways of answering that, this article on the whole gets to the main point and could have just as well been written about gay families. Yes, I see one as bad as the other. That our culture encourages one and trivializes the other is why most of our kids have little hope in my opinion of growing up living carefree in the comfort of their parents’ love. Barry

And that is the point of the training, get it back on the discussion table and prove through the training that if anything, pocket or folding blade knives require more training because of their inherent of danger of non-fixed blade. I'm a pragmatic sort of person who tries to get folks thinking away from their emotions. It's just like the bow saw, most adults don't realize that it is the most dangerous woods tool the average scout or scouter uses. So they don't give it the respect it deserves and I think it is fair to say most users nick their hand with it. Barry

I would do a fixed knife safety training class for interested scouts and adults who might use these knives outside troop activities. It would be the exact same training that I use for the pocket knife making the point that there is no difference of safety between the two types. Barry

This is a favorite discussion with many of us, so I'm sure it will be very active. I think you have a good idea of a boy run program. But there are no two boy run programs a like because growth and maturity of both the scouts and adults require constant changes or tuning. So don't get fixated on a single method, get fixated on the objective so that you can identify when you are on and off track. Its more important know where you are going then how to get there. Start thinking pictures that you can help identify your goal. For example one of the pictures I taught our leaders was that we were trying to put the adults out of business. Another way I explained it was we want the scouts so confident in their skills that if the adults didn't show up, the activities still ran as planned. I would even test that when opportunities allowed the adults hang back or not show up. Do you really need adults at a PLC meeting? But you get the point. Your training has to be good enough to teach confidence of doing the skills in normal activities, and the activities need to give the scouts the expertise of the skill. And when I say skills, I am also talking about value skills like the law and oath, or leadership, management, character and so on. To something, we have to practice that something. So introduce them to the skills and give the freedom to practice. Barry

I am amazed what parents hold back from scout leaders about their sons health issues. It's as if they know their son is in a safe place, so they don't worry about it. I had been struggling with one difficult scout when in passing mom mentioned that let him come down on his medication during scouting activities. I kind of let them have it because dad was a very active ASM and knew what I was going through. After that, the scout was much better, but I several such stories. Enough that I started requesting full disclosure when scouts joined. I understand families want to give junior a break from meds on weekends, but that doesn't make any easier for the people around him. Barry

This was the part I wanted to point out as well, older scouts "Don't like change". It is rare for older scouts to go along with big changes in program, even if the change is just a merger. It can work, I'm just advising (warning) to consider the scouts 14 and older. The more involved they are at the begining, the better your chances of success after the merge. As for the merge, we found that only 25% of merges and splits are successful. Success meaning that the units continue to perform at least as well as before the change. Barry

More often than not the cause of a dying troop is burnout. They are a great opportunity for adults looking to start a new troop, but they need to contact their district to let them know. Our den of 12 Webelos was looking to start a new boy run troop when district introduced us to the burned out SM of a troop of five scouts. We took over and it grew from 17 to 90 scouts in seven years. Barry