How does Girl Scouts work?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Seems harmless enough but it is some Cold War nonsense. Teaches girls to love God and the USA. No thanks.

Tell me you know nothing about Girl Scouts without telling me you know nothing about Girl Scouts.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:One of the biggest surprises dual working parent families seem to have when their oldest hits school age is that all these activities they hear about kids doing require huge amounts of parent volunteer time. Its not like daycare, where you pay a fee and drop off. Almost every single activity your child does will involve a small amount or a large amount of volunteer time.

I send emails for our rec league every season begging for volunteer rec soccer/basketball/softball coaches and every season, without fail, a parent emails me to ask why we don't just hire some coaches. Every season.

Laughing but I totally understand those parents. I am an active volunteer in scouts and other groups .. but I would love to put money in the hat to hire an expert leader for some activities DD does. Some people (me) just do not have the personality or talent for certain activities (sports and theater). So I get it. If $500 would induce someone to coach, me and 4 other parents would have our wallets out already.

I have 3 kids. We pay a lot for tennis - clinic, private lessons and team.

The only activity that we know going in requiring time commitment is science Olympiad. We knew we had to coach.

I did not know or expect scouts was similar.

Similar. My 3 kids do swimming and tennis. They are completely organized and ran by paid professionals. I’ve never had to volunteer for anything. Maybe the end of year party..but that’s it

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I just wish GS would fade away. They make a big push at the beginnging of elementary and get all the girls hyped up. I didn't want to be the parent who said "no we aren't doing girl scouts its dumb" but it is. The activities are boring and lame and I can't wait for DD to agree on her own.

YOU don't like it, so you think that it shouldn't even exist? Even though millions of others get something positive out of it? That's a disgusting sense of entitlement.

There is a set of people out there who will just never be happy with Girl Scouts. They will always think it is lame or inferior, or they'll get snide about cookie sales, or if they can't think of anything else they'll say that girl groups have too much drama. Girl Scouts just attracts a level of vitriol that other activities don't -- I'm sure you won't find PP complaining about the existence of skating lessons or whatever Suzie is doing that her DD wanted to do also.

There is nothing you can do with these people but let it roll off. They are their own punishment.

I guess I just got really unlucky then. I have two DD’s and both their troops were not very active (infrequent meetings and activities) and when they did meet, activities were boring and/or poorly planned. Neither girl’s troop leader request help running the meetings, but I did volunteer in the ways that were requested. I am aware that there are other more activity troops in other grades, but at our school you join the troop for your grade and not some other grade. So it’s a crapshoot. It’s really inconsistent.

I'm not sure if you are the person I was responding to, who said that her DD really enjoys scouts but she herself finds it lame and wishes her DD would agree.
You're right that it's inconsistent. And it's fine not to like something: nothing is for everybody.
But although I really dislike baseball (which I do) there are not dozens of threads bashing youth baseball as a concept. There are a lot of people just pre-disposed to dislike Girl Scouts. And then there are even more people who expect Girl Scouts to deliver the moon, with minimal parent or girl effort, and they get really mad if it falls short of their imagined outcome.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I just wish GS would fade away. They make a big push at the beginnging of elementary and get all the girls hyped up. I didn't want to be the parent who said "no we aren't doing girl scouts its dumb" but it is. The activities are boring and lame and I can't wait for DD to agree on her own.

This statement is such a horrible way to look at life. The activities are troop selected. So if you step up and be a leader then you can choose activities that are not "boring and lame". My daughter is now in college and loved her time as a Girl Scout. She was active in her troop, as an older scout she helped lead younger troop meetings, in high school she sat on the Board of Directors for her Girl Scout Council and had the opportunity to travel to other states and Costa Rica. All of her trips were self funded through babysitting and COOKIE SALES. Because of all of the opportunities she had in Girl Scouts she was able to speak with women in a variety of careers and was able to narrow down what she wanted to study in college.

In our expeirience what worked really well was for leaders at the same school or neighborhood to talk to each other. The older girls need opportunities to be leaders and the perfect way to do this is to have them help at younger troops meetings. Our Daisy troop was lead by an 8th grade troop. They did all of the work but they required that a parent from every family stay at the meeting. It was made clear that they would lead the troop for the first year but then parents would have to take over. By the end of the year parents had a good understanding of what was needed and were able to sign up for different jobs so it didn't all fall on one person.

We have sons in Boy Scouts and have seen what is similar and what is different between the two organizations. But both require a HUGE amount of adult volunteers. The difference, in our experience, is that in Boy Scouts the adult volunteers treat their time as social and often stick around as leaders even after their children have left the program. On a recent camping trip our troop took there were 5 youth scouts and 8 adults! That doesn't happen in Girl Scouts.

[Anonymous]

Five pages keeps circling back to the same fundamentals of Girl Scouts:

1. It is run by parent volunteers. Without parents, there are no troops. The more committed the parents, likely the better the experience will be for the girls.

2. The activities are selected by the parents and girls, which circles back to #1. Parents really invested in Girl Scouts will identify lots of fun badges and experiences for the girls whether those are outdoorsy, cultural or museum-type things, or community service. As they get older, the girls will be the ones to make those choices.

3. Troops that are more laid back end up being more of a social setting with some easy badges or activities to provide the baseline structure for a meeting. This works great for some girls and their parents, but others find it really boring.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Five pages keeps circling back to the same fundamentals of Girl Scouts:

1. It is run by parent volunteers. Without parents, there are no troops. The more committed the parents, likely the better the experience will be for the girls.

2. The activities are selected by the parents and girls, which circles back to #1. Parents really invested in Girl Scouts will identify lots of fun badges and experiences for the girls whether those are outdoorsy, cultural or museum-type things, or community service. As they get older, the girls will be the ones to make those choices.

3. Troops that are more laid back end up being more of a social setting with some easy badges or activities to provide the baseline structure for a meeting. This works great for some girls and their parents, but others find it really boring.

This is probably the best summary of Girl Scouts I've seen on DCUM. Thanks!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

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Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:One of the biggest surprises dual working parent families seem to have when their oldest hits school age is that all these activities they hear about kids doing require huge amounts of parent volunteer time. Its not like daycare, where you pay a fee and drop off. Almost every single activity your child does will involve a small amount or a large amount of volunteer time.

I send emails for our rec league every season begging for volunteer rec soccer/basketball/softball coaches and every season, without fail, a parent emails me to ask why we don't just hire some coaches. Every season.

Laughing but I totally understand those parents. I am an active volunteer in scouts and other groups .. but I would love to put money in the hat to hire an expert leader for some activities DD does. Some people (me) just do not have the personality or talent for certain activities (sports and theater). So I get it. If $500 would induce someone to coach, me and 4 other parents would have our wallets out already.

I have 3 kids. We pay a lot for tennis - clinic, private lessons and team.

The only activity that we know going in requiring time commitment is science Olympiad. We knew we had to coach.

I did not know or expect scouts was similar.

It sounds like you do private $$$ tennis. Rec sports need volunteers to run everything.

I guess it is private. They have played at the local pool and tennis, local rec center, racquet club and now country club. None of them required parent volunteers minus the pool and tennis club would ask for help organizing parties. It was more a potluck type sign up. Same with soccer. My kids have played both rec and travel soccer. They only asked for snacks.

It is hard enough just getting my kids to practice and games.

That's because you were lucky and those teams had coaches step up and they didn't need to beg the parents. I coached my son's U8 team one season because no one volunteered. That was experience.

Right? Talk about oblivious! That rec soccer team almost certainly had a volunteer parent or four coaching it. It sounds like you were lucky and happened to have a kid the same age/grade as parents that were enthusiastic and volunteered to coach before the organization needed to send out the annual "if we don't get a volunteer you don't get a team" email.

I am a Girl Scout leader. My girls pay $35 per year registration and that's it. Other than that, cookie sales and the volunteer time of an awesome group of parents cover everything. If you want your kid to go hiking and camping and do robotics and participate in democracy and you *don't* want to volunteer, you can do that. You can sign them up for paid courses at REI and the local art center and Pongos and Girls Inc. That will amount to several thousand dollars a year.
Or you can help out and volunteer to be part of a Girl Scout troop.

No, it’s not “$35 per year and that’s it,” that’s like saying breastfeeding is free. There’s the value of your time, the other volunteers’ time, the ways that volunteers end up subsidizing troop activities (buying up surplus cases of cookies, donating supplies to meetings, time spent selling cookies to your colleagues to supplement the cookie sales, hours and hours on largely pointless trainings, etc). And let’s be clear—most of the Girl Scout volunteer duties fall to the moms. The GS organization makes it more difficult for dads to volunteer, dads aren’t allowed to sleep in the same tent as their own daughter on the GS camping trips. I was a GS leader when my daughter was in grade school, so I know from experience how much effort it takes to make it work. I think it’s disingenuous to say it’s simply a $35 investment. It’s not. And sometimes the GS experiences are a bit contrived despite everyone’s best intentions. The most fun and most rewarding GS badges we did were through partnerships with museums or similar organizations that provided specialists to lead the girls through activities. Our troop had to raise a lot of cookie sale money to pay for those experiences (and have parent volunteers subsidize other expenses to preserve the troop budget). The bare bones budget meetings are often the least inspiring ones.

I'm not sure why you felt the need to go on that rant. I agree with you and was making that same point. "Other than that, cookie sales and the volunteer time of an awesome group of parents cover everything."
So either OP needs to pay thousands of dollars, or she needs to be part of the volunteer apparatus to make it work.

I'm not sure why you feel the need to describe a more nuanced perspective as a rant. OP is obviously not facing a binary choice of either pay thousands to do those activities or dollars or do Girl Scouts. One can pursue the activities you mentioned through various other ways AND one doesn't need to spend thousands to do it. One doesn't need to buy expensive REI gear or lessons to go on a hike. Having personal experience with Girl Scouts, I can say that you are definitely overselling it, so I was attempting to provide some more realism. I think Girl Scouts can be a worthwhile experience but it comes with costs.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:One of the biggest surprises dual working parent families seem to have when their oldest hits school age is that all these activities they hear about kids doing require huge amounts of parent volunteer time. Its not like daycare, where you pay a fee and drop off. Almost every single activity your child does will involve a small amount or a large amount of volunteer time.

I send emails for our rec league every season begging for volunteer rec soccer/basketball/softball coaches and every season, without fail, a parent emails me to ask why we don't just hire some coaches. Every season.

Laughing but I totally understand those parents. I am an active volunteer in scouts and other groups .. but I would love to put money in the hat to hire an expert leader for some activities DD does. Some people (me) just do not have the personality or talent for certain activities (sports and theater). So I get it. If $500 would induce someone to coach, me and 4 other parents would have our wallets out already.

I have 3 kids. We pay a lot for tennis - clinic, private lessons and team.

The only activity that we know going in requiring time commitment is science Olympiad. We knew we had to coach.

I did not know or expect scouts was similar.

It sounds like you do private $$$ tennis. Rec sports need volunteers to run everything.

I guess it is private. They have played at the local pool and tennis, local rec center, racquet club and now country club. None of them required parent volunteers minus the pool and tennis club would ask for help organizing parties. It was more a potluck type sign up. Same with soccer. My kids have played both rec and travel soccer. They only asked for snacks.

It is hard enough just getting my kids to practice and games.

That's because you were lucky and those teams had coaches step up and they didn't need to beg the parents. I coached my son's U8 team one season because no one volunteered. That was experience.

Right? Talk about oblivious! That rec soccer team almost certainly had a volunteer parent or four coaching it. It sounds like you were lucky and happened to have a kid the same age/grade as parents that were enthusiastic and volunteered to coach before the organization needed to send out the annual "if we don't get a volunteer you don't get a team" email.

I am a Girl Scout leader. My girls pay $35 per year registration and that's it. Other than that, cookie sales and the volunteer time of an awesome group of parents cover everything. If you want your kid to go hiking and camping and do robotics and participate in democracy and you *don't* want to volunteer, you can do that. You can sign them up for paid courses at REI and the local art center and Pongos and Girls Inc. That will amount to several thousand dollars a year.
Or you can help out and volunteer to be part of a Girl Scout troop.

No, it’s not “$35 per year and that’s it,” that’s like saying breastfeeding is free. There’s the value of your time, the other volunteers’ time, the ways that volunteers end up subsidizing troop activities (buying up surplus cases of cookies, donating supplies to meetings, time spent selling cookies to your colleagues to supplement the cookie sales, hours and hours on largely pointless trainings, etc). And let’s be clear—most of the Girl Scout volunteer duties fall to the moms. The GS organization makes it more difficult for dads to volunteer, dads aren’t allowed to sleep in the same tent as their own daughter on the GS camping trips. I was a GS leader when my daughter was in grade school, so I know from experience how much effort it takes to make it work. I think it’s disingenuous to say it’s simply a $35 investment. It’s not. And sometimes the GS experiences are a bit contrived despite everyone’s best intentions. The most fun and most rewarding GS badges we did were through partnerships with museums or similar organizations that provided specialists to lead the girls through activities. Our troop had to raise a lot of cookie sale money to pay for those experiences (and have parent volunteers subsidize other expenses to preserve the troop budget). The bare bones budget meetings are often the least inspiring ones.

NP. My kid has been in GS for three years now and for like 2/3 of the troop parents it is absolutely a “$35 and then drop the rope” situation. The other third of us are doing all the work.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:One of the biggest surprises dual working parent families seem to have when their oldest hits school age is that all these activities they hear about kids doing require huge amounts of parent volunteer time. Its not like daycare, where you pay a fee and drop off. Almost every single activity your child does will involve a small amount or a large amount of volunteer time.

I send emails for our rec league every season begging for volunteer rec soccer/basketball/softball coaches and every season, without fail, a parent emails me to ask why we don't just hire some coaches. Every season.

Laughing but I totally understand those parents. I am an active volunteer in scouts and other groups .. but I would love to put money in the hat to hire an expert leader for some activities DD does. Some people (me) just do not have the personality or talent for certain activities (sports and theater). So I get it. If $500 would induce someone to coach, me and 4 other parents would have our wallets out already.

I have 3 kids. We pay a lot for tennis - clinic, private lessons and team.

The only activity that we know going in requiring time commitment is science Olympiad. We knew we had to coach.

I did not know or expect scouts was similar.

It sounds like you do private $$$ tennis. Rec sports need volunteers to run everything.

I guess it is private. They have played at the local pool and tennis, local rec center, racquet club and now country club. None of them required parent volunteers minus the pool and tennis club would ask for help organizing parties. It was more a potluck type sign up. Same with soccer. My kids have played both rec and travel soccer. They only asked for snacks.

It is hard enough just getting my kids to practice and games.

That's because you were lucky and those teams had coaches step up and they didn't need to beg the parents. I coached my son's U8 team one season because no one volunteered. That was experience.

Right? Talk about oblivious! That rec soccer team almost certainly had a volunteer parent or four coaching it. It sounds like you were lucky and happened to have a kid the same age/grade as parents that were enthusiastic and volunteered to coach before the organization needed to send out the annual "if we don't get a volunteer you don't get a team" email.

I am a Girl Scout leader. My girls pay $35 per year registration and that's it. Other than that, cookie sales and the volunteer time of an awesome group of parents cover everything. If you want your kid to go hiking and camping and do robotics and participate in democracy and you *don't* want to volunteer, you can do that. You can sign them up for paid courses at REI and the local art center and Pongos and Girls Inc. That will amount to several thousand dollars a year.
Or you can help out and volunteer to be part of a Girl Scout troop.

No, it’s not “$35 per year and that’s it,” that’s like saying breastfeeding is free. There’s the value of your time, the other volunteers’ time, the ways that volunteers end up subsidizing troop activities (buying up surplus cases of cookies, donating supplies to meetings, time spent selling cookies to your colleagues to supplement the cookie sales, hours and hours on largely pointless trainings, etc). And let’s be clear—most of the Girl Scout volunteer duties fall to the moms. The GS organization makes it more difficult for dads to volunteer, dads aren’t allowed to sleep in the same tent as their own daughter on the GS camping trips. I was a GS leader when my daughter was in grade school, so I know from experience how much effort it takes to make it work. I think it’s disingenuous to say it’s simply a $35 investment. It’s not. And sometimes the GS experiences are a bit contrived despite everyone’s best intentions. The most fun and most rewarding GS badges we did were through partnerships with museums or similar organizations that provided specialists to lead the girls through activities. Our troop had to raise a lot of cookie sale money to pay for those experiences (and have parent volunteers subsidize other expenses to preserve the troop budget). The bare bones budget meetings are often the least inspiring ones.

I'm not sure why you felt the need to go on that rant. I agree with you and was making that same point. "Other than that, cookie sales and the volunteer time of an awesome group of parents cover everything."
So either OP needs to pay thousands of dollars, or she needs to be part of the volunteer apparatus to make it work.

I'm not sure why you feel the need to describe a more nuanced perspective as a rant. OP is obviously not facing a binary choice of either pay thousands to do those activities or dollars or do Girl Scouts. One can pursue the activities you mentioned through various other ways AND one doesn't need to spend thousands to do it. One doesn't need to buy expensive REI gear or lessons to go on a hike. Having personal experience with Girl Scouts, I can say that you are definitely overselling it, so I was attempting to provide some more realism. I think Girl Scouts can be a worthwhile experience but it comes with costs.

DP, but it absolutely was a rant. The PP you responded to said "Other than that, cookie sales and the volunteer time of an awesome group of parents cover everything." You added nothing to that except vitriol, hence calling it a rant.

(And I'm a heavily involved Girl Scout parent/cookie manager so I do understand)

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:i thought i would have wanted to be a troop leader, but the amount of training and rules you have to follow is unsustainable for me.

the way troops are usually organized is that they have a round up at the school at the beginning of school. you are seated by grades. they then say, look around. this is your troop. which one of you wants to be a leader? of course we all know there needs to be a leader, but i didn't really like how they did this.

parents are barely willing to help at all. it is annoying.

That is not how it worked at our school, FWIW. Our service unit tries to have a coordinator for each school, so parents can reach out to that person to express interest. Once several people have expressed interest, an email is sent out asking someone to volunteer to be the leader. If no one volunteers, they suggest a co-op troop. If no one is interested, parents can join troops at other schools or there just is no troop.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:One of the biggest surprises dual working parent families seem to have when their oldest hits school age is that all these activities they hear about kids doing require huge amounts of parent volunteer time. Its not like daycare, where you pay a fee and drop off. Almost every single activity your child does will involve a small amount or a large amount of volunteer time.

I send emails for our rec league every season begging for volunteer rec soccer/basketball/softball coaches and every season, without fail, a parent emails me to ask why we don't just hire some coaches. Every season.

Laughing but I totally understand those parents. I am an active volunteer in scouts and other groups .. but I would love to put money in the hat to hire an expert leader for some activities DD does. Some people (me) just do not have the personality or talent for certain activities (sports and theater). So I get it. If $500 would induce someone to coach, me and 4 other parents would have our wallets out already.

I have 3 kids. We pay a lot for tennis - clinic, private lessons and team.

The only activity that we know going in requiring time commitment is science Olympiad. We knew we had to coach.you’ve never been asked to volunteer at a swim meet?

I did not know or expect scouts was similar.

Similar. My 3 kids do swimming and tennis. They are completely organized and ran by paid professionals. I’ve never had to volunteer for anything. Maybe the end of year party..but that’s it

[Anonymous]

I lead a troop and we require a parent to volunteer and plan activities. If they don't volunteer for an activity, we assign them one. We give them a date, the badge, and the VTK plans and tell them to do it. This is the only way to get people to volunteer, btw, volunTELL them what to do.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Five pages keeps circling back to the same fundamentals of Girl Scouts:

1. It is run by parent volunteers. Without parents, there are no troops. The more committed the parents, likely the better the experience will be for the girls.

2. The activities are selected by the parents and girls, which circles back to #1. Parents really invested in Girl Scouts will identify lots of fun badges and experiences for the girls whether those are outdoorsy, cultural or museum-type things, or community service. As they get older, the girls will be the ones to make those choices.

3. Troops that are more laid back end up being more of a social setting with some easy badges or activities to provide the baseline structure for a meeting. This works great for some girls and their parents, but others find it really boring.

I’m the one who hasn’t had great GS experiences and I agree this is a great summary. Both our troops (2 different kids) were the #3 type and the leaders seemed to think that “girl-led” meant they didn’t need to offer any guidance or limited choices.

[Anonymous]

This thread has been an interesting read. What I come away with is that there is something fundamental about the membership and program business model that does not work quire right. I am not informed enough to venture a guess, but I suspect it has something to do with not recognizing or enforcing the need for adult involvement. Or, maybe there is something off-putting about the adult volunteer experience that discourages participation or retention. Is this a rational observation?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:This thread has been an interesting read. What I come away with is that there is something fundamental about the membership and program business model that does not work quire right. I am not informed enough to venture a guess, but I suspect it has something to do with not recognizing or enforcing the need for adult involvement. Or, maybe there is something off-putting about the adult volunteer experience that discourages participation or retention. Is this a rational observation?

It works fine as a model, but people are so overworked at their office jobs now that many don't want their kids to participate in things that require additional effort from them as parents. Which is a perfectly reasonable way to organize your kids' schedule - throw some money at it and get them off your hands for a few hours a week - but it gets ridiculous when those parents start demanding that GSUSA cease to exist so their kid won't know there's an extracurricular they're not signed up for.