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U.S. teens are spending less time with their friends in person

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Re: U.S. teens are spending less time with their friends in person

#251
post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

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.

Re: U.S. teens are spending less time with their friends in person

#252
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So true, in essence driving them into online friend interactions. Makes you wonder what life will be like for children 50 years from now, and how that would compare with today. After there was a time when making explosives was a childhood right of passage along with chemistry sets, making fires, even having a pocket knife. Today, such common activities would not end well at all, however innocent the intention. These…

I want my kids to either grow up in a huge city like NYC where I live or a rural area. I spent a year in a small town in rural NC and your kids can grow up wild. I think the suburbs are the stifling force here. They're too safe.

I agree, it kills me to see a bus stop filled with idling cars of parents too scared to let their kids walk. Suburbs are incredibly stifling. Most of the recently built ones I've seen don't have sidewalks at all, it's very car-centric and closed off.

Re: U.S. teens are spending less time with their friends in person

#253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 (e…

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.

Re: U.S. teens are spending less time with their friends in person

#254
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So true, in essence driving them into online friend interactions. Makes you wonder what life will be like for children 50 years from now, and how that would compare with today. After there was a time when making explosives was a childhood right of passage along with chemistry sets, making fires, even having a pocket knife. Today, such common activities would not end well at all, however innocent the intention. These…

Estes model rockets still offer a little bit of that wild freedom. You build something yourself and shoot it into the sky on a pillar of flame. And if you're really lucky you get it back in the end.

Good luck finding anywhere legal to launch them. None of the places I used as a kid can be used anymore.

Re: U.S. teens are spending less time with their friends in person

#255
post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

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.

Re: U.S. teens are spending less time with their friends in person

#256
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So true, in essence driving them into online friend interactions. Makes you wonder what life will be like for children 50 years from now, and how that would compare with today. After there was a time when making explosives was a childhood right of passage along with chemistry sets, making fires, even having a pocket knife. Today, such common activities would not end well at all, however innocent the intention. These…

"even having a pocket knife" .. I must have given away at least 5 swiss army knives to TSA. The teenager in me still clings on to a pocket knife.

I almost never have a pocket knife with me these days because wherever I put it, it's just a matter of time before I leave it in some bag that I throw into carry-on for a plane trip.

Re: U.S. teens are spending less time with their friends in person

#257
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My friends and I grew up field testing pretty much everything in the anarchist cook book. Our summers were filled making exotic explosives and blowing things up. It’s a wonder we all lived, with no major injuries or jail time. Our antics would land a kid these days in Guantanamo Bay.

Having a copy of the anarchist / jolly roger cookbook would have you serving jail time in 2019. I remember a time where you would see printed copies at car boot sales or numerous geocity copies.

You could buy it at a local comic book store in the 90s in Erie, PA.

(Ps, my local pizza shop, just down the road from the comic shop, was the feature of the Netflix doc Evil Genius. The Pizza Bomber was the dude who brought us our pizza and my best friends managed the shop when it all went down.)

Re: U.S. teens are spending less time with their friends in person

#258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I grew up in the suburbs, and starting at age 9 or so, my friends and I would frequently ride our bikes to each other's houses when we wanted to hang out, weather permitting. Often a group of 4-8 of us would wind up just generally riding around town, largely unsupervised. Keep in mind this was the mid 90s, so it's very possible things have changed since then.

yeah bikes and longboards were really popular until we could drive

Depends on the neighborhood/city. In the south it's not uncommon to get people throwing trash at you and/or forcing you off the road.

Re: U.S. teens are spending less time with their friends in person

#259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW, Cub Scouts / Boy Scouts are a pretty great place to get those same skills and experiences. Great opportunity to get a well rounded childhood.

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.

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.

Re: U.S. teens are spending less time with their friends in person

#260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and less interested in school. Though my profession is probably owed to the unsanctioned time I spent online in my youth (especially time away from school), and I luckily never had access to enough unearned money to buy a fast enough computer to play video games, never really played video games much, and still don't now that I have threadrippers, hundreds of gigs of ram, and top tier GPUs sitting around everywhere.…

> I'd probably have them on a feature phone ... Everyone thinks that, and then caves under the pressure.

Grow a spine. If you are too weak to withhold a luxury electronic device from a child in your care, you are probably too weak to raise a child in general... I think.

I mean, I don't have kids, but I can't imagine being plied into spending hundreds of dollars on something which I don't want even for myself, and which I think is bad for the recipient.

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