Yesterday the Mormon Newsroom announced long-promised changes to the youth programs of the Church, and older Primary-age children will be affected as well. The new “Worldwide Initiative for Children and Youth” will debut in January 2020. For young men, this will end Duty to God and deacon-age participation in Scouting (the Church pulled out of Scouting for boys ages 14-18 last year). For young women, Personal Progress will be replaced. For older Primary kids, the changes will apparently affect the Faith in God Program, Activity Days (for girls), and Cub Scouting (for boys). As a result of this new initiative, the Church is ending their 105-year-old partnership with the Boy Scouts of America in December 2019.
When the Church pulled out of the Varsity and Venturing Scouting programs for teachers and priests last year, they explained that changes to the global youth programs were still forthcoming. In the Q&A released at that time, they expressed awareness of concern about funding disparities between the Young Men and Young Women organizations.
Church leaders have long been aware of this concern. This new program brings the spending into balance for youth ages 14 through 18. This will continue to be a factor in the ongoing exploration and creation of a worldwide youth program.
At the time, there was no mention that new programs for older Primary-age kids were also being developed, though it makes sense with the complete withdrawal from BSA programs.
Last year, the Church said their decision to to leave the older youth BSA programs was made prior to becoming aware of plans to increase participation for girls (female participation had long been allowed in the Venturing program). Many people are aware that the BSA has since then announced that girls will be allowed in the full range of Scouting programs, beginning with Cub Scouts this year. Last week, the BSA announced the name of the Boy Scouts program would become more inclusive in 2019 as Scouts BSA.
It is hard to believe the BSA’s July 2015 move to allow openly gay leaders was not a factor in the movement away from Scouting, though. In a Mormon Newsroom statement shortly following that decision, the Church made clear “the century-long association with Scouting [would] need to be examined.”
However, as I noted in my post last year, W&T blogger Stephen Marsh reported that the Church has been considering a split from the BSA for decades:
In the late 1970s and early 1980s the Church did a lot of statistical analysis on what led to successful members. One of the interesting results was that they discovered that participation in boy scouts did nothing to improve outcomes for young men. That led to an assignment to develop an alternative program. Unfortunately, those assigned could think of nothing but cloning boy scouts and the initiative did not go very far.
So what will the new 2020 programs look like? It’s unclear. At the website for the new initiative, childrenandyouth.lds.org, the FAQ portion states,
The focus of this new approach for children and youth is to help young people strengthen faith in Heavenly Father and His Son, Jesus Christ. This approach is intended to help children and youth discover their eternal identity, build character and resilience, develop life skills, participate in outdoor activities and service opportunities, and strengthen their ability to fulfill their divine roles as daughters and sons of God.
Those sound a lot like the goals of the old programs as well but clearly things will be a little tweaked. I suspect the current trend of less rigidity and more dependence on individual discernment and participation will continue. It’s certainly been the case with the youth Come Follow Me curriculum, new Priesthood/Relief Society lesson structures, and the movement from home & visiting teaching to ministering.
What do you think of the planned changes to the youth and children’s programs?
Wheat & Tares 
I, for one, hope the new program will eschew an awards-based structure. Yeah, we all want to be recognized for our work, for doing something special. However, all too often, the award seems to the point of the program, rather than the process – and how it can shape an individual- being of primary importance. For example, I can’t count the times I’ve heard a YW leader (across multiple wards and years) encourage girls to work hard and earn their medallions so they can have a nice memento to remind them that they did it. I don’t know if I’ve ever heard any of those same leaders tell the girls they are excited or interested in seeing how these young girls might develop as they immerse themselves in opportunities for growth, full stop. If they (leaders) are circumspect enough to mention the process as being significant, they always seem to temper it by adding something about earning a trinket as the ultimate reward.
We (and Rafiki) need to be reminded that change occurred when Scar had Mufasa killed.
Thanks, markablog. The blanket idea that “change is good” needs to be retired. Change is neutral, some changes are great, some not so much. Try telling a parent who has lost a child that “change is good,” try telling someone who has been diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer that “change is good.”
“Change is good” has been a progressive mantra since the 60s but one of the great issues of our time shows it really to be code for “my kind of change is good.” The same kind of people who have been telling me for more than 40 years that “change is good” are now virulently against changes in global climate. If “change is good” why should we fear global warming?
I think the “change is good” mantra is a way to cope with the fact that “change is inevitable.”
Every time our ward leaders would high-pressure us into donating to Friends of Scouting I would always think, “Is Jesus ok with church leaders fundraising for an outside organization?” I’m pretty sure he wasn’t.
I really don’t know what you do with the kids for mutual if you don’t do scouting. Every morning they’re already getting up for Seminary for spiritual enrichment. Now you’ve got to make an additional trip out to the church for night time spiritual enrichment?
I know the main reason I loved mutual was to be by the girls. Maybe do more co-ed stuff.
Andy,
For the next year and a half, I plan to select activities from merit badge options that the boys are actually interested in and not the Eagle Required and Trail to First Class rote material. Will use it to make a fun activity without emphasizing the passing off. We will continue service projects and combined activities. I am not a big fan of the Duty to God program. The steps are not as concrete as they need to be and it can be hard to know if a YM has done enough to meet the stop or not. Hopefully we can keep doing campouts without the pressure of making sure Joey passes of A, B, and C while we are on the campout.
The church’s replacement program for scouting:
https://i.redditmedia.com/uGO9sC4ZIvVHBEKCmMVTXw_XaZrULakShewIsHrh9NM.jpg?s=18a7c39d3e9e100e2b165520349c3a77
Andy, YM leaders have already been grappling with that issue for teachers and priests. The church has a website of ideas for these young men. https://www.lds.org/youth/ymactivities?lang=eng
Brjones, no joke, that is the first one listed under the “physical” activities recommendations on that YM website.
As a personal sidenote, you guys do realize that Activity Day leaders and YW leaders plan activities all the time without the benefit of Scouting, right? It can be done.
I bet that the new program will be a mash-up of personal progress with a smattering of camp-crafter. Sigh.
One of the flaws of personal progress is that it focuses (to a large extent) on character development through “reflection” as opposed to action.. The BSA on the other hand, develops character and values *through* service, skills, and leadership. I don’t think it is possible to build character by merely focusing on values and gospel-stuff. You have to live the gospel- put it in action. I know that corporate-think will say “stay-on-message”, which is a good way to build a brand and sell product, but it isn’t the best recipe for teaching kids. It’s graduation time across the country- listen to those valedictorian speeches. When those kids talk about what they learned- why graduation matters-they mention the hidden curriculum, the lessons learned along the way, not just the explicit one (the readin’, writin’ and ‘rithmatic). I argue that we can’t learn lessons along the way, if there isn’t a “way”.
We evidently insist on hammering away at teens directly. I don’t know many successful parents of teens who only employ that strategy. As Dr Phil would say, “how’s that workin’ out for ya?”
Mortimer,
I also have no good expectations regarding the new curriculum. If it is like everything else over the past several years, well, let’s just say I have no good expectations. I most sincerely hope to be positively surprised, but I have no basis for positive expectations.
Unfortunately, in my ward, this has initiated a “race to Eagle,” with the bishopric planning how each young man can earn the award before the end of 2019 (11-year olds included). It’s those people who really need scouting to go away – it’s a stumbling block / idol for them.
A few scattered thoughts about this change:
Like many others, I have wanted the church to quit using the scout program. It has been disappointing that the split from BSA appears to have happened only because BSA is no longer homophobic enough. This despite the fact that LDS wards have always allowed gay youth to participate (in violation of the old BSA rules).
I hated the focus on getting an eagle. The main reason the leaders always gave to earn an eagle was that it would look good on a resume. In my experience, the only people that care about people earning their eagle are LDS. It isn’t the award that matters, but the leadership skills and devotion to service and self improvement.
I wish I knew more about the personal progress program and its potential replacement.
I have mixed feelings about what the new program should be. It’s true that recent program changes to youth Sunday school have been less right and more repast in individual discernment. They have also focused less on canonical books and more on current church leadership like general conference. The adult curriculum for RS and EQ is now almost exclusively material from GenCon. Even sacrament talks in my ward have largely focused each on one single talk from the most recent GenCon. I don’t know what the new program will look like, but I hope that more worth is put into it than what went in to the adult curriculum.
I believe that the only reason the eagle award became the coin of the YM realm in the church was because it gave you extra points on BYU applications. Just like AP classes can inflate your HS GPA and therefore become a means to advancing and not a way to gain more education, eagle scout became a means to help get into BYU and not an end of having fun . If that never existed I think we would have seen not only a relaxed approach to scouting in the church but a relaxed approach to rank advancement. People might have actually done scouts for the fun of it instead of the BYU application bonus. If BYU would right now drop the eagle scout application bonus I think scouting in the US church would immediately become a lame duck and no bishops would be crafting races to eagle in their wards.
Mormon culture has a problem with perfectionism (our Potemkin villages) and building hedges. I don’t think the BYU application process was the reason becoming an eagle scout became such a big deal. It’s the same reason that this trend of professional photographs, baptism announcements, and fancy white dresses for 8-yr-olds has now become a thing for a lot of people I know – what was important to only a few people is beginning to turn into an expectation for many. We are masters at complicating our lives, often for the wrong reasons.
The BYU application was one of the major reasons—perhaps the major and sometimes the only reason—why we struggled through with very little support in our small ward to get two Eagle Scouts and one Personal Progress award. It was also a major reason for putting up with the severely mediocre early morning seminary curriculum.
Mary Ann, all I can say is that as a father of two now RM sons the BYU bonus was the only reason we sweated out the Eagle award. If it hadn’t existed I still would have required my sons to participate in scouts since it was the church’s official youth program for boys but I would not have cared about rank advancement, not one little bit.
KLC, fair enough. My kids aren’t college-age yet. Among my siblings and with my husband, it was pretty clear that while seminary completion was helpful in gaining admission to BYU, getting an eagle never seemed to be a factor (my husband never got an eagle, and he had a 4-yr heritage scholarship). Things must’ve changed.
Not that I loved Scouting (most of the LDS guys I went through YM were jerks (not a strong enough word)), but when I went for my AFROTC scholarship application interview, the interviewer told me he was putting my Eagle Scout accomplishment first on his written recommendation. The interviewer was most certainly not LDS. So, at least 20 years ago, the Eagle Scout rank had some cachet outside of Mormon circles.
I’m pleased that we will be shutting down the LDS “eagle factory” troops, which I believe is largely responsible for diminishing the significance of the award. I’ve seen too many instances of parents and leaders carrying their boys across the finish line, and sometimes engaging in other unethical practices in pursuit of the coveted rank. The ward I grew up in had a years-long unbroken streak of eagles, which started to fall apart when I became old enough for scouts. My then-bishop gave the appearance of being emotionally invested in scouting, but at the end of the day he only cared about his own sons’ progress toward eagle, and directed the program and its resources thusly. He rode them hard, and also bent rules to get them to eagle at an accelerated pace. Ultimately, neither of them had any real leadership or outdoor skills to show for it. One of them was later kicked out of BYU for academic fraud/grade manipulation. The rest of us boys pretty much gave up on scouting when it became obvious that they were getting special treatment. No more eagles came out of that ward for awhile, at least until a new bishop was installed.
Not A cougar:
My son asked what we could do to strengthen his application during his interview at Cal Tech. The professor looked through it and said it was already a pretty strong application, he was what they were looking for. Then he saw the last page describing scouting accomplishments. He told my son, lets tear this page off your application. Just say you earned your Eagle and don’t say too much more about scouting. The selection committee has two gay women on it including the chairwoman.
My son asked if he could speak with her. The professor said, it is unusual, but I will go to check and see. Shortly she entered the room and my son gently asked her what her concerns were about scouting. She described having an 11 year old son who was interested in being a scout and admired her father who was a retired naval officer. But she just could not bring herself to be excluded or shunned by such a homophobic organization.
My son said that although he had zero knowledge of scout troops in Pasadena
California, he would bet next year’s tuition that he could find a scout troop there that not only would welcome her with her son, but had at least one other gay mother of a scout, within 24 hours. She sort of scoffed at the idea.
After the interviews he got on his phone and found a Pasadena scout troop with a gay mother of a scout and none of the several troops indicated they would have a problem with her sexual orientation. It would not be an issue or even be discussed. My son sent her an e-mail with the information, including phone numbers of scout masters, addresses, meeting times, etc., late that night and encouraged her to allow her son to give scouting a try.
My son was accepted to Cal Tech. He didn’t go there because he said a school with that attitude towards scouting would not be a good fit for him. He also did not like the graded together as a team and the pass/fail system because, although he was willing to carry another scout’s backpack when they had given it their all, he was not willing to carry the academic water of lazy but smart college students. And he did not want to live in a house together with 20 boys and 10 girls. Not that he cared if his friends were sleeping with their house mates, but at that age these intense relationships do not last long and he didn’t want to live with the drama of a bunch of people who were perpetually hacked off at each other after they broke up and reconnected intimately with other housemates repeatedly.
“Making love in the afternoon/ with Cecilia up in my bedroom.
I got up to wash my face / When I come back to bed someone’s taken my place.”
From Cecilia, you’re breaking my heart- by Simon and Garfunkel
The eagle rank is not respected by some on the other side of the cultural wars racking this nation. It can be a sifter and help you stay away from places where you will face the intolerance of traditional values in the name of tolerance.
Oops. Not A cougar should be Not a Cougar. No insult intended, I just can’t type well.
And double oops, for the extra long space between Pasadena and California.
And thank you for your service in the armed forces.
From a UK perspective, I’ve got to give this a shrug. We haven’t had LDS affiliated scouting here for maybe 20yrs and the sky hasn’t fallen. The YM do sports and the YW often fall back on crafts. Is it great? Not really, and I say that honestly as a leader and a parent. Am I looking forward to a potentially more correlated youth activity programme? *Sigh* Not really, unless it’s a significant improvement on what we already have.
No one makes a fuss about Personal Progress, no one does Duty to God, because they aren’t recognised externally, thus in a world where youth are under increasing time pressures to choose smarter, if we want to run a weekly programme, it’s going to have to be really, really good to get a look in.
Well… I don’t know where you are in the UK M, but where I am some of the kids do complete Duty to God, and Personal Progress. My kids did both, with encouragement and support from their father – I am not the goal setter in our family (and found the Personal Progress book nearly incomprehensible… but that’s just me). Scouting at church was a a brief foray of 2 or 3 years only back in the 80s, a couple of my brothers were old enough to take part, and it didn’t go well, at all.
Shrugging too here in the UK, my kids did PP and DTG, and we have an excellent youth programme in this ward-never known anything like it, it’s been beautiful. Even then, having had kids with musical and other interests that meant many extra curricular activities, my kids were under way too much pressure and sadly dropped seminary, largely because they did not attend the school local to the seminary classes location, no time for travel and then getting to school, and honestly they were at the pint of getting up before they went to bed. Not sure how the church can square this circle globally, I’ve seen how powerful a great youth programme can be but also how hard it is to meet all the academic and other demands of our poor over stressed kid’s timetables. How all this can work somewhere like Singapore I have no idea.
Sorry hedgehog, I wasn’t very coherent, but plenty flippant in my comment above. That will teach me to try and multitask without thinking about it first.
You’re right, there are plenty of youth who complete PP and DTG, but I don’t see it as institutional here – it really can come down to having a parent to drive that train. I personally don’t see the loss of that programme as a loss. (Particular favourite was one Stake that rewarded their YW PP progress with a wooden spoon. Yep. Words fail)
Youth who are goal driven have plenty of other opportunities outside the youth programme.
We’ve lived in a few locations mainly in the mid and south of the UK and I’ve seen and been involved in both some awesome youth programmes and some distinctly mediocre ones. I also remember the UK LDS scouting fiasco that continued well into the 90’s where we lived!
I think what I was trying to say was that we’ve managed in the UK without Scouting, and the US will too, but I suppose I’m mildly irritated that NOW we get a shiny new programme. It was fine for all the non-US locations to wander in the youth programme wilderness all these years, but now we all need to be correlated to the new US standard. Think I might just have been letting that chip on my shoulder escape out of my keyboard.
I personally am elated that the Church is severing ties with the Boy Scouts. I had scouting forced on me from ages 12-14, and eventually put my foot down and told my parents I wanted nothing to do with it. At age 16 we relocated and found ourselves in a ward with no scouting program. It was Heaven. All mutual activities were co-ed, and they were fun. But then, right around the end of my senior year in high school, the stake presidency brought the hammer down and required the ward to charter a scout troop. At that time was spiritually inactive, meaning I still attended church under the rule of “if you’re going to live in our house, you’re going to attend church.” Once mutual activities turned to scouting for young men I stopped going. Any reason I had for attending mutual was taken away from me.
Over the years I have watched ward after ward ostracize most of the young men in the ward by trying to force scouting on them by making it the only option for young men’s activities. For a while I was in a young men’s leadership role in my current ward. The other leaders were all hardcore scouters. In one planning meeting I suggested we have separate activities for those young men who don’t want to be involved in scouting. They all looked at me like I had just sprouted a second head. One of them even asked me “What young man wouldn’t want to be involved in scouting?” I picked up the list of young men we had just been discussing, young men from active families, but who weren’t attending mutual, and who regularly skipped out on quorum meeting s on Sundays. I pointed to the list and said “It’s a pretty safe bet that these young men don’t.” That was brushed off with a bunch of excuses.
I’m glad to see the Church dropping the scouting program. I just hope the replacement isn’t worse.
I’d agree on PP and DtG not being institutional M, in the main. Youth leaders make sporadic attempts to push the program, but as per your first comment our youth are very busy, and whilst my kids did complete it their attendance at week night youth activities lessened the older they were, especially during the mock exam/ exam seasons. We’ve been in the south-east and east-mid.
Not sure the new program will be any better fit if it is geared to Utah and the US, but perhaps there’ll be flexibility for local adaptations.