An author was being interviewed on the radio in the background as I was working away at my desk. He was discussing building resilience in young people. As I listened I thought “Hey! Who is this guy? This sounds a lot like Scouting!” This got me thinking about the big ideas that form the foundations of the Scouting method +and a specific instance of what I suppose you’d call “spontaneous inspiration”....
In recent years parents seem increasingly reluctant to allow their children to do things for themselves – to be ‘free range kids’. It makes me wonder if some parents have written activities like Scouting off as too dangerous, too unsupervised or less valuable than more controlled, conducted and packaged experiences for their children. We are barraged by irrational fears and constantly told to worry about what our kids do, what they see, who they talk to, where they g0....
‘ I am on my mountain in a tree home that people have passed without ever knowing that I am here. The house is a hemlock tree six feet in diameter, and must be as old as the mountain itself. I came upon it last summer and dug and burned it out until I made a snug cave in the tree that I now call home. ‘ Like most boys there where times when I wanted to escape; to be self sufficient, independent, heroic....
Father of three child and family psychologist Richard Weissbourd teaches at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and School of Education. His new book ‘The Parents We Mean To Be’ argues that parents have a much greater influence on their children’s moral lives than peers or popular culture. Serving as a Scoutmaster involves a fair amount of exposure to many different styles of parenting and I believe that Weissbourd’s ideas form a solid approach....
The Dangerous Book for Boys puts me in mind of following creeks through the woods, baseball cards held to the forks of my bike with clothespins, climbing trees, chemistry sets, purloined firecrackers, strike anywhere matches, building forts and a thousand other common joys of boyhood. Not virtual but visceral, hands-on and sometimes faintly dangerous. Risk and challenge remain vital to boys. We cannot legislate or litigate this vitality out of their lives....
I may have earned the equivalent of a few college credits related to the study of developmental, or cognitive, differences during my tenure as a Scoutmaster. What are cognitive differences? Autism, attention deficit, hyperactivity, Downs syndrome and learning disabilities of all stripes. Disabilities are, by definition, a condition that makes it difficult for someone to do the things that other people do. Difference is a way in which people or things are dissimilar....
Eric Sloane wrote and elegantly illustrated several pithy books on early American living and artifacts. As a teen I was, and as an adult I remain, fascinated with the Diary of an Early American Boy. Sloane bases this book on the actual 19th century diary of a fifteen year old farm boy named Noah. The book illuminates the spare original entries in Noah’s diary with Sloane’s illustrations and writing. The obscurities of early American life are explained in a compelling story that is at once plausible and inspiring....