Young ladies face a cultural up-hill challenge with STEM expectations. Girls are told, for example, that they shouldn't bother with video game construction, but instead should learn knitting. As a parent, I have first hand experience with well-meaning social institutions that actively discourage science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.
Girls do not come to Scouting to learn about financial literacy and cybersecurity. They come to spend time with their friends, to be outdoors, to have parties, to do craft-y things.
In an enthusiastic environment, my 7 year old daughter and her friends enjoy MIT Scratch just as much as the boys. She's very into her transaction journal where she records her allowance income and outgoing expenses, adding up the numbers weekly with a new account balance. She likes to take her microscope outside to look at bug wings, etc.
Which is just as true for Boy Scouts.
That's true—like in the schools! But, since girls aren't getting the support and the role models that they need there, it's good if they're at least getting them somewhere.
While I can't argue with the sentiment, I think that this is unnecessarily dismissive of the efforts of teachers (as opposed to administrators or politicians), most of whom do not bear the blame for the current de-prioritisation of education. Certainly I got both support and role models in school, and it was from excellent teachers; and I can't believe that there are no such teachers left.
If my kid shows an interest in a thing I will support him in that, but I will never push him. Recognition comes from being exceptional, not for being able to open a command prompt or writing a Hello World app.
Hey who knows. You're probably right. I'm probably right. That's parenting. I try to facilitate his learning by letting him play. It's how I grew up. And yes, I'm not that naïve that I think I can give my child my childhood.
He's a human being, and a human beginning. As such he must (and will) find and tread his own path. My job is to show him how exceptional his path might become. His job is to choose the degree of exceptionalism he desires.
See, there you have provided a push :) For anyone else reading, it doesn't need to be complicated or overbearing to still be a push. Think of it like mass-ejecting material from an asteroid on a collision course with Earth. It's a slow process, but the asteroid is still an asteroid, and it doesn't explode and destroy life on the planet.
Edit: It might crash into something else though...Good luck!
The tricky part is that sometimes you have to push a bit to expose them to something out of their comfort zone. Take learning a musical instrument, as an example.
The first couple of months of learning an instrument aren't a huge amount of fun (for most people). It's legitimately frustrating. IMO, it's okay to push your kid a little bit. For example, make the child take at least 3 months of lessons with two different instruments, of their choosing, and if at the end of that, they still have no interest in learning an instrument, okay, that's fine. We can move on to sculpting or painting or programming or origami or gardening or dance or whatever.
The point is that kids are discovering the world and to a large degree, don't really know what they like or don't like yet. You have to expose them to a lot of things to find something that resonates with them, and at times, you may have to push them a bit, to get past the initial hump of awkwardness or frustration. I think that's healthy and responsible.
That doesn't mean you should force your child to take 10 years of violin when they hate it. I think a lot of parents fall into the trap of trying to force their kid to enjoy hobbies the parents enjoy or hobbies they think their child should enjoy. It's fine to start with those (hey, why not), but ultimately you have to listen to the child and understand the difference between temporary frustration and permanent personality incompatibility with some activity.
I was one of those kids who hated guitar and piano lessons for years as my parents pushed me into them. I was never very good and hated practicing but nowadays, I really wish that I had taken it more seriously. There are so many uses for my time now that I can't bring myself to commit to learning a musical instrument from scratch but I crave the creative outlet of playing music. My parents' approach to many such subjects was the complete opposite to their approach to programming, which started with the guidance and material help of an IT admin from my mother's university even before the first music lessons. They were completely hands off and I was all the better for it, but I can't help but think that if maybe they had combined the two approaches to music, like they did by hiring a really good teacher for painting & drawing, I wouldn't be lamenting the way the chips fell.
The company http://playhorrorgames.com is doing everything they can to bring this story to life, and make sure that if you're playing the game, you become part of the game.
It's a difference between "pushing unwanted interests on a child" vs "pushing the child's effort for interests he already desires".
The result of the first type of push is the child resenting her parents' forced violin lessons that she hated. (E.g. Tiger Mother's youngest daughter rebels.)
The result of the second type of push is the child's gratitude for his parents because they pushed him out of bed to make swim practice because he wanted to compete in the Olympics. The parents didn't push the love of competitive swimming on the child but they once that desire was identified, they helped maintain the child's discipline for training.
Earning badges for your achievements is socially important if you take part in Scouts. Having badges for STEM subjects helps with the sort of stigma you are talking about by normalising them alongside less stigmatised activities.
Maybe the solutions is to send your daughter to a school/organization that teaches programming, not an organization that has always taught children crafts and outdoorsy things.
That is such a strange thought to me. I joined boy scouts for camping, but I also went to special events where I earned merit badges in stem topics. It probably occupied less than 10% of the time of my total scouting experience, but it was great in that it exposed me to topics and career paths that I may not have found otherwise. It would be wrong to completely replace campouts with lan parties, but that isn't what this sounds like.
Requirements for badges will change, but the local unit has a lot of control over its direction and purpose.
If a girl-led troop wants to explore this option, get out of the way and make it happen. Otherwise, as you were.
I don't have knowledge of the existing badges though. Certainly, Financial Literacy doesn't sound very outdoors-y :-)
It's a great opportunity to teach basic accounting skills. Simple stuff: summing costs, figuring out which costs are shared by the group and which ones individuals should be responsible for, planning ahead for forms of payment. More advanced: amortization of big expenses across N years of trips (and related cash flow issues), parameterizing cost calculations over weather conditions and terrain, doing all of this in a spreadsheet so that when we do the trip next year we can change some values and know immediately how much it'll cost, etc.
Could you elaborate more on this? I'm curious, since I was a scout in a different context (time and culture wise).
As a Scout up in Canada, I vastly prefer the non-gender-segregated approach Scouts Canada takes. They've even openly welcomed LGBTQ members for some time now [1].
It would be pretty shocking if they didn't in this day and age.
https://www.aclu.org/blog/speak-freely/dont-clap-just-yet-bo...
And I'm not sure it's a bad thing to have activities for kids that are not 100% STEM focused. I think you don't push STEM by pushing STEM at a young age, but by encouraging curiosity, exploration, reasoning, etc.
There are lots of results for googling ["personal finance" "home economics"] and ["financial literacy" "home economics"]