12 Reasons Joining Scouts Enhances Your Child’s Development

A friend recently sent me an article from Wild Bloom Families titled “12 Reasons Joining Scouts Enhances Your Child’s Development.”

The author (a mom whose husband serves as a Scout leader) wrote about watching children grow through Scouting firsthand. Her family has been through local camps and international Scout experiences. And what she observed in all those children, including her own two, is exactly what Latter-day Saint Scouters have been watching for over a century.

Scouting changes kids.

Not in the abstract, inspirational-poster way. In the specific, measurable, this-child-is-different-than-they-were-last-year way.

Here are the 12 reasons she identified, and what each one looks like through a Latter-day Saint lens.

1. Builds Confidence and Self-Esteem

When a child successfully builds a campfire, navigates a hiking trail, or earns a merit badge through real effort, something happens to how they see themselves. They discover abilities they didn’t know they had. That discovery compounds. A Scout who learns a new skill almost every week is a child whose self-esteem is quietly expanding.

For Latter-day Saint families, this matters eternally. A young person who knows that they can do hard things is FAR better prepared to accept a mission call, make and keep covenants, and trust God through difficulty.

2. Develops Leadership Skills

Scouts take on real leadership roles. Not pretend ones. A patrol leader actually leads people – plans the camping trip, makes the decisions, manages the conflict, delivers the result. Planning a community service project teaches the kind of leadership that no classroom simulation can replicate.

The Church has always needed leaders. Every Bishop, every Relief Society President, every Mission President was once a young person who either had or lacked real leadership development. Scouting develops it systematically, starting young.

3. Encourages Teamwork

Setting up a campsite, hiking as a group, completing a service project together – Scouting teaches teamwork as a daily requirement. You can’t pitch a tent (well) by yourself in the dark. You can’t complete an Eagle project alone. The program is designed so that cooperation isn’t optional.

The covenant community of the restored Gospel is built on the same principle. Zion – the society Moses 7 describes where there was no poor among them – doesn’t emerge from individual achievement. It requires people who have actually learned to work together. Scouting practices that.

4. Promotes Outdoor Skills

Pitching tents. Navigating trails. Reading a map. Starting a fire. Identifying plants. Scouting offers hands-on outdoor experiences that most kids would never encounter otherwise – in an age when the average young person spends more than 7 hours a day in front of a screen.

Latter-day Saints have always believed that the outdoors is sacred space. Alma 30:44 says all things denote there is a God. The trail teaches that. The summit teaches that. And a Scout who is genuinely comfortable in the natural world has access to a classroom for faith that builds on top of everything they do on Sunday.

5. Prepares Kids for Life

Cooking. First aid. Navigation. Time management. Problem-solving. Social skills. The article notes that Scouting develops all of these – and that they’re all valuable far beyond childhood.

The Church’s self-reliance program teaches the same principles to adults. Scouting teaches them to teenagers. A 15-year-old who can cook a meal on a camp stove, apply a pressure bandage, and navigate with a compass is a 15-year-old who is already building the skill set our prophets have consistently counseled us to develop. Be Prepared isn’t just a Scout motto. It’s prophetic counsel in two words.

6. Encourages a Love for Nature

The Wild Bloom article notes that through regular contact with the natural world, Scouts develop a love for the outdoors that stays with them for life. They become stewards. They notice things others may walk past. They appreciate what most people take for granted.

For Latter-day Saints, stewardship of the earth is a gospel principle. D&C 104 teaches accountability for the Lord’s creation. A Scout who has learned to leave no trace, to pack out what they pack in, to care for the natural world as something given rather than owned – that Scout is practicing covenant stewardship in hiking boots.

7. Builds a Work Ethic

Scouting teaches children to embrace tasks and push through them. Goal-setting. Celebrating completion (mostly with patches). The satisfaction of finishing something hard. These habits build a work ethic that carries into every area of life.

Elder Neal A. Maxwell once said that the Church needs men and women who can “endure well.” Scouting is one of the few youth programs that systematically trains endurance – not just physical endurance on a trail, but the harder kind. The kind that finishes an Eagle project when motivation ran out 3 months ago. The kind that shows up to a troop meeting after a hard week because you made a commitment. That is the endurance of discipleship.

8. Fosters Independence

The article highlights that Scouting gives children opportunities to make decisions & solve problems without constant adult intervention. They learn to trust their own judgment. To handle uncertainty. To act when nobody is telling them what to do.

D&C 58:27–28 says the Lord wants people who are “anxiously engaged in a good cause” of their own free will – not waiting for a command. Scouting builds independence of character. And it’s exactly what the Lord asks for.

9. Promotes Physical Fitness

Hiking. Camping. High adventure activities. Scouting keeps youth physically active in a culture that seems to make physical inactivity the default. The article notes that the habits of physical activity established in Scouting tend to carry forward into adult life.

The Word of Wisdom is the Lord’s law of health – a principle the prophets have expanded in our time to include physical fitness and caring for the body we’ve been given. A Scout who is physically active, who has pushed their body on trails and at high adventure bases, is taking that principle seriously in a way that benefits them their entire life.

10. Creates Lifelong Friendships

Through shared experiences – the campout that went sideways, the Eagle project that almost didn’t happen, the summit they reached together – Scouts form friendships built on something more substantial than proximity. The author describes these as lifelong friendships, and research consistently confirms it.

For Latter-day Saint youth who may be in diverse, interfaith troops, those friendships cross boundaries of faith and background. A Scout who has built deep trust with someone who believes differently than they do has developed the kind of charity and understanding that the Gospel asks of us. And the Latter-day Saint Scout who brings their faith into that friendship authentically is doing missionary work by simply being WHO THEY ARE.

11. Develops Responsibility & Accountability

Merit badges require actually learning something. The Eagle rank requires actually leading something. Advancement isn’t given – it’s earned. Scouting is one of the rare youth environments that consistently holds young people accountable for their commitments.

That pattern – make a commitment, follow through, be accountable – is the pattern of covenant living. Every Latter-day Saint who understands covenants knows that they are not suggestions. They are promises with conditions. A Scout who has learned that their word means something, that the work is the point – that Scout is learning to live covenants in practice before they make them in a temple.

12. Instills Values and Ethics

The Wild Bloom article closes with what is, for our community, the most fundamental reason of all. Scouting instills values and ethics through the Scout Oath and Law, through the consistent modeling of Scout leaders, through the culture of a program that takes character seriously.

Trustworthy. Loyal. Helpful. Friendly. Courteous. Kind. Obedient. Cheerful. Thrifty. Brave. Clean. Reverent.

The 13th Article of Faith: “We believe in being honest, true, chaste, benevolent, virtuous, and in doing good to all men… if there is anything virtuous, lovely, or of good report or praiseworthy, we seek after these things.”

Two different documents. ONE description of the same person.

Scouting doesn’t teach values that are separate from the Gospel. It teaches the same values – on the trail, around the campfire, through service projects and merit badges and Courts of Honor – that our faith has always taught. The program and the Gospel are not parallel. They are converging. They always have been.

The article’s author is not a Latter-day Saint. She’s a mother who watched what Scouting did for her children and felt compelled to write 12 reasons it was worth it.

Latter-day Saint Scouters have a thirteenth reason she didn’t mention.

Because we believe that character is eternal. That what a young person becomes in this life carries forward. That the 12 points of the Scout Law describe qualities the Lord has been asking His people to develop since the beginning of scripture.

Scouting doesn’t just enhance a child’s development. It prepares them for a life of discipleship.