Why Boys' Brigade is still totally relevant in 2018 and beyond....
The preceding quote from the Boys' Brigade founder, Sir William Smith in 1883 may give the impression that Boys Brigade is an out of date organisation no longer suited to the needs of boys in 21st Century Britain.
Well, you would be wrong. Many writers, researchers and observers - both christian & secular have concluded that Boys' Brigade provides exactly the right mix of activities, mix of community and mix of values and faith - that boys require to flourish today. There is a short list of some of these books below.
The latest and perhaps the most authoritative was published in March 2018 by distinguished and decorated American writers - quoting thousands of pieces of research. It's a must read. I have extracted below a few pages which speak to some of our key themes:
Well, you would be wrong. Many writers, researchers and observers - both christian & secular have concluded that Boys' Brigade provides exactly the right mix of activities, mix of community and mix of values and faith - that boys require to flourish today. There is a short list of some of these books below.
The latest and perhaps the most authoritative was published in March 2018 by distinguished and decorated American writers - quoting thousands of pieces of research. It's a must read. I have extracted below a few pages which speak to some of our key themes:
- The importance of building character
- The importance of mentoring and outdoor adventure
- The importance of sports
- The importance of faith in Jesus
- "Boys Brigade saved my life" - a powerful example of how BB works.
- Most of the book is given over to the importance of dads - you'll have to read that for yourself. To get a feel for the book - watch the TED talk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qi1oN1icAYc or read the intro & contents here https://www.amazon.co.uk/Boy-Crisis-Boys-Struggling-About-ebook/dp/B01N4UAA8I (scroll up for the contents) – and then buy it !
The Cub Scouts and Character (BB contain these elements with an added and vital ingredient of faith in God)
Most of us, if we had to choose between our children being trustworthy, kind, and cheerful on the one hand, and financially successful on the other, would choose the positive character traits. Of course, the wisdom of life experience tells us that boys with those positive character traits enhance their chances of career success, relationship success, physical health, and spiritual happiness. A study of the impact on a boy’s character of his involvement in the Cub Scouts started by dividing boys into two groups, each with equal scores on six character traits—trustworthiness, kindness, cheerfulness, obedience, helpfulness, and hopefulness. After three years, the boys who were actively involved in Cub Scouts scored considerably higher on all six character traits than the ones who did not join the Scouts.10 Source: Boy Scouts of America11 Since dad-deprived boys are more likely to be depressed and angry (as opposed to cheerful and hopeful), destructive and bullying (as opposed to kind and helpful), and disobedient, the Cub Scouts offers a powerful source of hope for boys deprived of dads. Although the study did not extend to the older Boy Scouts, I can identify from my experience with the Boy Scouts seven ways the Boy Scouts channels young male energy that boys without dads are often missing:
“The Seven Ways” the Boy Scouts Channels Boys’ Energy
1. Clear oaths, mottos, and “laws” for duty to self, and to others build boys’ foundation for manhood. These are a. internalized by repetition; b. externalized by saying them aloud in unison among peers; and c. channeled by male leadership for constructive use in real life.
2. Merit badges provide the opportunity to learn in a way to which boys respond: through doing, competing, and tangible measures of respect.
3. Weekly meetings reinforce each of these processes, inspiring further productive masculinity.
4. Matching your son to the merit badge. With about 120 merit badge options—including new ones on game design, robotics, programming, digital technology, animation, and sustainability—it is easy for any boy to find something positive that interests him.
5. Matching your son to a mentor. The actual work toward the merit badge often puts a boy in consistent contact for guidance with a male adult with similar interests.
6. Mastery of content that is measurable, tangible, and translates into respect. Because each merit badge puts him closer to his next increase in rank (e.g., six toward Star; eleven toward Life), he is inspired simultaneously by his sense of mastery at learning new content and the anticipation of a future, tangible acknowledgment that will increase his respect among peers, leaders, and parents.
7. Leadership and social skills are also rewarded with titles—ranging from Assistant Patrol Leader to Junior Assistant Scoutmaster.
In brief, over the course of more than a century, the Boy Scouts have honed what Margaret Mead had articulated—that boys are shaped by social reinforcement. Titles that offer measures by which boys can gain the respect of both male peers and adults are crucial motivators for boys to channel their enormous energy constructively before a purpose void seduces them to channel it destructively. Titles and ranks are often derided as “hierarchical,” and as reflections of men’s obsession with power. Yes, titles and ranks are “social bribes.” But those social bribes are the way we inspire boys to serve others and often sacrifice themselves—which is not exactly “power.” The Scouts use social bribes to channel male testosterone toward competence, character, leadership, and service, preparing them for the best of traditional masculinity. Which, by the way—not irrelevant to many of the boys—also increases their appeal to girls!
Mentoring and Rite-of-Passage Programs (BB is based upon a mentoring/ high leader to boy ratio model and outdoor adventure and camps including the Duke of Edinburgh award)
Sending your son to a mentoring or rite-of-passage-type program is generally a life-enhancing experience for an already motivated boy, and often a turnaround experience for a boy who is rudderless, angry, or electronically addicted. The most widespread and well-tested of the rite-of-passage programs is the ManKind Project (MKP).12 Their signature program is its New Warrior Training Adventure. It is designed to immerse young men in a series of outdoor adventure experiences. The bonding and sense of camaraderie emanates from participants experiencing the best of traditional masculine values of service and courage without the facades of strength that have typically been men’s weakness. The program encourages authenticity and emotional intelligence. The MKP has also formed small groups of Men Mentoring Men (currently serving about ten thousand men around the world), called Integration Groups, in which young men learn communication, relationship, and conflict-resolution skills. The groups foster no-bs, empathetic-but-honest bonding, rather than bonding by hazing or bonding by creating in- and out-groups. Other rite-of-passage programs include the Young Men’s Ultimate Weekend,13 Young Men’s Adventure Weekend,14 and Mountain Quest,15 which all focus on outdoor adventure, team building, social skills, spiritual values, connection to nature, and the transmission of values such as responsibility and service to others. The Young Men’s Ultimate Weekend offers a simultaneous course for parents to help them capitalize on the growth their son experiences during the program. Mountain Quest, in Seattle, works with sixth-grade girls and boys to create a safe environment to share and process their feelings in real time. Their all-male program uses ceremony and initiation rites to lend the program a timeless, archetypal spirit, while encouraging comfort with “letting loose” and being goofy and exuberant. No demographic groups are in greater jeopardy than African American and Native American boys and young men. My Brother’s Keeper, formed by President Obama in 2015, focuses on their needs
Raising a Balanced Son in an Out-of-Balance World: The Importance of Sports (BB always has a high sports content - which seems increasingly frowned upon....)
We interview people who are extraordinary successes, so they are visible. We ignore people who create a balanced life, so they are invisible. That is, we rarely interview and make visible those who spend the amount of alone time, spiritual time, family time, friend time, and share-the-housework time that takes away from their success at work but adds to their love at home.
While your son’s internal security is most likely to be enhanced by the hands-on involvement of both parents, even one conscious parent can lead the way.
Perhaps the most-likely-to-succeed single vehicle for leading your son toward internal security is sports. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention finds that exercise helps build the muscle of a child’s brain even more effectively than studying.
Organized team sports also hone your son’s social skills, and the team and leadership skills needed for the workplace. Individual sports train him to work independently. A blend of both creates flexibility. But there are still two steps missing before sports can become an accessible liberal art for your son (or daughter) . . . First, while all children need sports, varsity and junior varsity sports permit only a small percentage to get competitively involved. Schools make their varsity sports so visible and their intramural sports so invisible that your son may receive virtually no support for participating in a combination of multiple intramural team and individual sports. You may need to take the lead to get his school to develop a broader intramural program that gets him involved for his good, not for the school’s good. And if you take that lead, have your son work with you. The experience of creating change is as important as the change itself. Second, there’s the big hole in what your son may be missing from sports: pickup games. Pickup sports are excellent preparation for entrepreneurship. For example, pickup games encourage entrepreneurship by giving your children practice in
• creating something from nothing;
• recruiting and organizing;
• creating their own rules rather than just following the rules of others;
• integrating friends with strangers without favoring friends (or losing because one favored friends);
• negotiating boundaries that give everyone an equal chance—or ones that give one’s team, with their skills, a competitive advantage; and
• creating consequences for rule breakers, and deciding when to enforce them.
When your son participates in individual sports, plus both organized and pickup team sports, he will be experiencing sports as a boy-friendly liberal art. Instead of manhood’s “rite of passage” being varsity visibility, it becomes his ability to develop a broad skill set, and implement it both in a team and by himself. However, using sports to develop a balanced boy involves more than a balanced sports curriculum. It requires your guidance in how he plays the sports. The siren song he will hear is “When the going gets tough, the tough get going.” But what he needs is to develop an internal radar that helps him tune into himself to know when to tough it out and when to get out.
When the Biological Father Is Missing, Can God the Father Help? (refer back to the quote above by Sir William Hill
After giving a sermon/workshop at St. Paul Community Baptist Church in one of the country’s poorest communities, Bedford–Stuyvesant in Brooklyn, I met with a few men’s groups the church had sponsored. Of the approximately twenty-five young African American boys, about twenty had four more things in common:
1. They had little or no time with their dad.
2. They spent time in jail.
3. They found Christ and a strong church community with a committed reverend.
4. They felt inspired to discipline themselves toward constructive rather than destructive lives.
Did faith in God help these young men? Yes. Almost all the young men said that they would still be involved in the life that landed them in jail if they had not been redirected by their faith in God the Father. I saw in that experience how dad deprivation seems to engender a spiritual deprivation. The guidance, approval, and boundary voids the boys felt from their fathers’ absence led to their receptivity to guidance, approval, and boundaries from gang leaders and other pseudoauthorities, as we saw earlier in the case of ISIS. The Bedford–Stuyvesant community was one of the most dangerous in the country. When Reverend Jerry Youngblood came in and organized a strong church community with a strong message, he offered the boys the guidance, approval, and boundaries that helped fill that void.
"Boys Brigade saved my life" - was the response from one of our teenagers from a difficult home situation to impact which BB had had on him. Why? The story below from the author of the book gives an insight into the powerful transformation which BB frequently causes...
My Most Life-Changing Camping Experience
Some of the most enriching experiences of my first thirty years of life involved being a leader for the Boy Scouts and Boys Clubs, a counselor for the Y, and the founder of Liberation Camp in Rowe, Massachusetts—where we did role-reversal exercises that helped both older and younger campers, and men and women, “walk a mile in each other’s moccasins.” My most life-changing camping experience, one that may have planted the first seeds for this book, was as a counselor with the Y in Ridgewood, New Jersey. One of my summer campers was a boy I’ll call Nathan. Nathan had no social skills and a lower-than-average IQ. Within a day, Nathan had alienated all seven of his cabin mates, who pleaded for me to “do something about him.” So I did, sort of—I did something about the other seven campers. On our second night, I found a special assignment as an excuse to get Nathan out of the cabin for about an hour each evening. During that first absence, I convened with the other campers and, after empathizing with their complaints, asked them to guess whether Nathan was happy. The very question—asking about Nathan’s happiness—took them by surprise. Yet everyone concurred that he must be miserable. I asked, “If you could all do something this week as a team to make him happier than he had ever been, would you do it?” Every boy said, “Sure.” Then I asked if they were willing to become a team in a mission to give Nathan positive feedback. The first problem was that no one could think of anything positive about which to give him feedback. I couldn’t either. But I was the camp’s riflery instructor, so I promised I would teach Nathan to be a good marksman if they would agree to display Nathan’s best targets on the cabin wall and compliment him even if they had better targets that would not be posted. They loved the conspiracy . . . er, mission! The next day, Nathan’s first target was posted, and the compliments began. By the following day, one of the boys reported Nathan’s first smile. Another reported that he was being nicer, and yet another observed that he was walking with a bit more confidence. The boys were amazed, and were competing to show what they had said that they felt might have contributed to the change. The boys were glowing with that “mission accomplished” feeling. I then asked, “Do you think Nathan has ever in his life been sought out by anyone for his advice?” One of the boys mocked, “You mean, like, ‘Nathan, how can I be a doofus?’” After allowing a little outlet for their shadow-side laughs, I asked them how they felt when someone asked them for advice. Then I requested that they visualize together how Nathan would respond to, say, their asking Nathan to help them be better marksmen. One of the boys objected, “But we’re all better than he is.” Another volunteered, “That’s not the point.” Slowly, they saw the possibilities. The next evening, the two boys who had asked Nathan for advice were noticing that Nathan was walking even more “straight up,” rather than slouched, more confident than depressed and angry. One boy volunteered, “He actually taught me how to breathe as I was pulling the trigger, and it worked—I improved my score.” Before we said good night, we plotted that the following morning one of the boys would show Nathan how to make a hospital corner with his bedsheet, and shortly after another boy would ask Nathan to show him. By the end of the week, the esprit de corps in the cabin was palpable. The boys were saying how sharing a cabin with Nathan was the best thing that could have happened for them. For them, not just for Nathan. At the end of camp, one of the boys’ parents circled back to me as they were about to leave with their son. They said, “I don’t know what’s happened with John, but he’s being so kind and thoughtful—what a joy. What’s happened?” My response was a bit distracted by another couple, who seemed to be crying as they approached me. They stuttered through their tears that they were Nathan’s parents, and clarified that their tears were tears of happiness. “Nathan has never been happier. He’s walking like he’s confident and joyful, and he’s talking with the kids like he really has friends. He’s never had any friends.” While that summer was a good experience for Nathan and the campers, it also could not have been a more life-enhancing experience for me. And it is that type of experience that is waiting for other men who take leadership roles in the scouts, Y, Boys Club, ManKind Project, and Experience Corps.
The graphics below shows how Boys Brigade tries to incorporate all of the above values and activities - and more - and just some of the books which also speak into this subject in a similar way - and are all highly recommended.
Most of us, if we had to choose between our children being trustworthy, kind, and cheerful on the one hand, and financially successful on the other, would choose the positive character traits. Of course, the wisdom of life experience tells us that boys with those positive character traits enhance their chances of career success, relationship success, physical health, and spiritual happiness. A study of the impact on a boy’s character of his involvement in the Cub Scouts started by dividing boys into two groups, each with equal scores on six character traits—trustworthiness, kindness, cheerfulness, obedience, helpfulness, and hopefulness. After three years, the boys who were actively involved in Cub Scouts scored considerably higher on all six character traits than the ones who did not join the Scouts.10 Source: Boy Scouts of America11 Since dad-deprived boys are more likely to be depressed and angry (as opposed to cheerful and hopeful), destructive and bullying (as opposed to kind and helpful), and disobedient, the Cub Scouts offers a powerful source of hope for boys deprived of dads. Although the study did not extend to the older Boy Scouts, I can identify from my experience with the Boy Scouts seven ways the Boy Scouts channels young male energy that boys without dads are often missing:
“The Seven Ways” the Boy Scouts Channels Boys’ Energy
1. Clear oaths, mottos, and “laws” for duty to self, and to others build boys’ foundation for manhood. These are a. internalized by repetition; b. externalized by saying them aloud in unison among peers; and c. channeled by male leadership for constructive use in real life.
2. Merit badges provide the opportunity to learn in a way to which boys respond: through doing, competing, and tangible measures of respect.
3. Weekly meetings reinforce each of these processes, inspiring further productive masculinity.
4. Matching your son to the merit badge. With about 120 merit badge options—including new ones on game design, robotics, programming, digital technology, animation, and sustainability—it is easy for any boy to find something positive that interests him.
5. Matching your son to a mentor. The actual work toward the merit badge often puts a boy in consistent contact for guidance with a male adult with similar interests.
6. Mastery of content that is measurable, tangible, and translates into respect. Because each merit badge puts him closer to his next increase in rank (e.g., six toward Star; eleven toward Life), he is inspired simultaneously by his sense of mastery at learning new content and the anticipation of a future, tangible acknowledgment that will increase his respect among peers, leaders, and parents.
7. Leadership and social skills are also rewarded with titles—ranging from Assistant Patrol Leader to Junior Assistant Scoutmaster.
In brief, over the course of more than a century, the Boy Scouts have honed what Margaret Mead had articulated—that boys are shaped by social reinforcement. Titles that offer measures by which boys can gain the respect of both male peers and adults are crucial motivators for boys to channel their enormous energy constructively before a purpose void seduces them to channel it destructively. Titles and ranks are often derided as “hierarchical,” and as reflections of men’s obsession with power. Yes, titles and ranks are “social bribes.” But those social bribes are the way we inspire boys to serve others and often sacrifice themselves—which is not exactly “power.” The Scouts use social bribes to channel male testosterone toward competence, character, leadership, and service, preparing them for the best of traditional masculinity. Which, by the way—not irrelevant to many of the boys—also increases their appeal to girls!
Mentoring and Rite-of-Passage Programs (BB is based upon a mentoring/ high leader to boy ratio model and outdoor adventure and camps including the Duke of Edinburgh award)
Sending your son to a mentoring or rite-of-passage-type program is generally a life-enhancing experience for an already motivated boy, and often a turnaround experience for a boy who is rudderless, angry, or electronically addicted. The most widespread and well-tested of the rite-of-passage programs is the ManKind Project (MKP).12 Their signature program is its New Warrior Training Adventure. It is designed to immerse young men in a series of outdoor adventure experiences. The bonding and sense of camaraderie emanates from participants experiencing the best of traditional masculine values of service and courage without the facades of strength that have typically been men’s weakness. The program encourages authenticity and emotional intelligence. The MKP has also formed small groups of Men Mentoring Men (currently serving about ten thousand men around the world), called Integration Groups, in which young men learn communication, relationship, and conflict-resolution skills. The groups foster no-bs, empathetic-but-honest bonding, rather than bonding by hazing or bonding by creating in- and out-groups. Other rite-of-passage programs include the Young Men’s Ultimate Weekend,13 Young Men’s Adventure Weekend,14 and Mountain Quest,15 which all focus on outdoor adventure, team building, social skills, spiritual values, connection to nature, and the transmission of values such as responsibility and service to others. The Young Men’s Ultimate Weekend offers a simultaneous course for parents to help them capitalize on the growth their son experiences during the program. Mountain Quest, in Seattle, works with sixth-grade girls and boys to create a safe environment to share and process their feelings in real time. Their all-male program uses ceremony and initiation rites to lend the program a timeless, archetypal spirit, while encouraging comfort with “letting loose” and being goofy and exuberant. No demographic groups are in greater jeopardy than African American and Native American boys and young men. My Brother’s Keeper, formed by President Obama in 2015, focuses on their needs
Raising a Balanced Son in an Out-of-Balance World: The Importance of Sports (BB always has a high sports content - which seems increasingly frowned upon....)
We interview people who are extraordinary successes, so they are visible. We ignore people who create a balanced life, so they are invisible. That is, we rarely interview and make visible those who spend the amount of alone time, spiritual time, family time, friend time, and share-the-housework time that takes away from their success at work but adds to their love at home.
While your son’s internal security is most likely to be enhanced by the hands-on involvement of both parents, even one conscious parent can lead the way.
Perhaps the most-likely-to-succeed single vehicle for leading your son toward internal security is sports. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention finds that exercise helps build the muscle of a child’s brain even more effectively than studying.
Organized team sports also hone your son’s social skills, and the team and leadership skills needed for the workplace. Individual sports train him to work independently. A blend of both creates flexibility. But there are still two steps missing before sports can become an accessible liberal art for your son (or daughter) . . . First, while all children need sports, varsity and junior varsity sports permit only a small percentage to get competitively involved. Schools make their varsity sports so visible and their intramural sports so invisible that your son may receive virtually no support for participating in a combination of multiple intramural team and individual sports. You may need to take the lead to get his school to develop a broader intramural program that gets him involved for his good, not for the school’s good. And if you take that lead, have your son work with you. The experience of creating change is as important as the change itself. Second, there’s the big hole in what your son may be missing from sports: pickup games. Pickup sports are excellent preparation for entrepreneurship. For example, pickup games encourage entrepreneurship by giving your children practice in
• creating something from nothing;
• recruiting and organizing;
• creating their own rules rather than just following the rules of others;
• integrating friends with strangers without favoring friends (or losing because one favored friends);
• negotiating boundaries that give everyone an equal chance—or ones that give one’s team, with their skills, a competitive advantage; and
• creating consequences for rule breakers, and deciding when to enforce them.
When your son participates in individual sports, plus both organized and pickup team sports, he will be experiencing sports as a boy-friendly liberal art. Instead of manhood’s “rite of passage” being varsity visibility, it becomes his ability to develop a broad skill set, and implement it both in a team and by himself. However, using sports to develop a balanced boy involves more than a balanced sports curriculum. It requires your guidance in how he plays the sports. The siren song he will hear is “When the going gets tough, the tough get going.” But what he needs is to develop an internal radar that helps him tune into himself to know when to tough it out and when to get out.
When the Biological Father Is Missing, Can God the Father Help? (refer back to the quote above by Sir William Hill
After giving a sermon/workshop at St. Paul Community Baptist Church in one of the country’s poorest communities, Bedford–Stuyvesant in Brooklyn, I met with a few men’s groups the church had sponsored. Of the approximately twenty-five young African American boys, about twenty had four more things in common:
1. They had little or no time with their dad.
2. They spent time in jail.
3. They found Christ and a strong church community with a committed reverend.
4. They felt inspired to discipline themselves toward constructive rather than destructive lives.
Did faith in God help these young men? Yes. Almost all the young men said that they would still be involved in the life that landed them in jail if they had not been redirected by their faith in God the Father. I saw in that experience how dad deprivation seems to engender a spiritual deprivation. The guidance, approval, and boundary voids the boys felt from their fathers’ absence led to their receptivity to guidance, approval, and boundaries from gang leaders and other pseudoauthorities, as we saw earlier in the case of ISIS. The Bedford–Stuyvesant community was one of the most dangerous in the country. When Reverend Jerry Youngblood came in and organized a strong church community with a strong message, he offered the boys the guidance, approval, and boundaries that helped fill that void.
"Boys Brigade saved my life" - was the response from one of our teenagers from a difficult home situation to impact which BB had had on him. Why? The story below from the author of the book gives an insight into the powerful transformation which BB frequently causes...
My Most Life-Changing Camping Experience
Some of the most enriching experiences of my first thirty years of life involved being a leader for the Boy Scouts and Boys Clubs, a counselor for the Y, and the founder of Liberation Camp in Rowe, Massachusetts—where we did role-reversal exercises that helped both older and younger campers, and men and women, “walk a mile in each other’s moccasins.” My most life-changing camping experience, one that may have planted the first seeds for this book, was as a counselor with the Y in Ridgewood, New Jersey. One of my summer campers was a boy I’ll call Nathan. Nathan had no social skills and a lower-than-average IQ. Within a day, Nathan had alienated all seven of his cabin mates, who pleaded for me to “do something about him.” So I did, sort of—I did something about the other seven campers. On our second night, I found a special assignment as an excuse to get Nathan out of the cabin for about an hour each evening. During that first absence, I convened with the other campers and, after empathizing with their complaints, asked them to guess whether Nathan was happy. The very question—asking about Nathan’s happiness—took them by surprise. Yet everyone concurred that he must be miserable. I asked, “If you could all do something this week as a team to make him happier than he had ever been, would you do it?” Every boy said, “Sure.” Then I asked if they were willing to become a team in a mission to give Nathan positive feedback. The first problem was that no one could think of anything positive about which to give him feedback. I couldn’t either. But I was the camp’s riflery instructor, so I promised I would teach Nathan to be a good marksman if they would agree to display Nathan’s best targets on the cabin wall and compliment him even if they had better targets that would not be posted. They loved the conspiracy . . . er, mission! The next day, Nathan’s first target was posted, and the compliments began. By the following day, one of the boys reported Nathan’s first smile. Another reported that he was being nicer, and yet another observed that he was walking with a bit more confidence. The boys were amazed, and were competing to show what they had said that they felt might have contributed to the change. The boys were glowing with that “mission accomplished” feeling. I then asked, “Do you think Nathan has ever in his life been sought out by anyone for his advice?” One of the boys mocked, “You mean, like, ‘Nathan, how can I be a doofus?’” After allowing a little outlet for their shadow-side laughs, I asked them how they felt when someone asked them for advice. Then I requested that they visualize together how Nathan would respond to, say, their asking Nathan to help them be better marksmen. One of the boys objected, “But we’re all better than he is.” Another volunteered, “That’s not the point.” Slowly, they saw the possibilities. The next evening, the two boys who had asked Nathan for advice were noticing that Nathan was walking even more “straight up,” rather than slouched, more confident than depressed and angry. One boy volunteered, “He actually taught me how to breathe as I was pulling the trigger, and it worked—I improved my score.” Before we said good night, we plotted that the following morning one of the boys would show Nathan how to make a hospital corner with his bedsheet, and shortly after another boy would ask Nathan to show him. By the end of the week, the esprit de corps in the cabin was palpable. The boys were saying how sharing a cabin with Nathan was the best thing that could have happened for them. For them, not just for Nathan. At the end of camp, one of the boys’ parents circled back to me as they were about to leave with their son. They said, “I don’t know what’s happened with John, but he’s being so kind and thoughtful—what a joy. What’s happened?” My response was a bit distracted by another couple, who seemed to be crying as they approached me. They stuttered through their tears that they were Nathan’s parents, and clarified that their tears were tears of happiness. “Nathan has never been happier. He’s walking like he’s confident and joyful, and he’s talking with the kids like he really has friends. He’s never had any friends.” While that summer was a good experience for Nathan and the campers, it also could not have been a more life-enhancing experience for me. And it is that type of experience that is waiting for other men who take leadership roles in the scouts, Y, Boys Club, ManKind Project, and Experience Corps.
The graphics below shows how Boys Brigade tries to incorporate all of the above values and activities - and more - and just some of the books which also speak into this subject in a similar way - and are all highly recommended.
