FPHRC Spotlight: Harnessing vs. Controlling: A Year of Trail Life at FPHRC — Cameron Linder

It’s a one kind of challenge to launch a brand-new Trail Life troop that has 15 boys ages 5-17…but if you really want to be shown the necessity of self-control—launch of a troop of 90 boys (50 of which are under age 11) and put them all in a gym at the same time.  An utter cacophony of chaos.  That is, until we call “Fall in!”.

God has gifted young boys two undervalued virtues: high energy and physicality, which often combine into aggression.  It is the wrong solution to try to stamp these virtues out of a boy—it can kill his spirit and tell him that what God has put in him is bad, undesirable, and something that should bring him shame.  

We in the homeschool community likely recognize this, but sometimes we even struggle with how to control all of their intensity.  As a father of 2 such boys, and Troop Master over our large Troop, I would encourage families to change the way they view the problem.  In Trail Life, we do not attempt to control a boy’s nature—we try to harness it.   Boys, like a horse, are more powerful than they realize.  Put a horse in a harness and give him training, a job, and focus and he’ll be of greater benefit, loyalty, and beauty than any wild mustang.  The same is true with our Trailmen.  We give outlets, boundaries, and opportunities to apply their intensity towards a job; some useful accomplishment that a boy can stand back from and proudly say, “See that?  I did that!” 

Critical to harnessing a boy’s nature on his journey into manhood is training in self-control.  In Trail Life, we teach self-control first through concepts of military bearing.  Standing at attention, lining up in ranks, saluting, repetitive call and response sayings which signify our identity—we do these things because obeying commands is the first and most basic form of self-control.  By giving it the color and focus of military tradition, we focus the boys on something every boy loves to imagine himself as: a soldier who gets to fight! 

This is the foundation upon which we try to pour knowledge, skills, and principles into their thick little heads.  But it takes a strategy to get it to really seep in.  We embrace their competitiveness and incorporate the skills we’re teaching into games and races.  We try not to ask for complete silence except when absolutely necessary and do our best to corral, instead of shut down, a boy’s playful curiosity, penchant for banter, and bad jokes.  

Perhaps most importantly, we establish clear boundaries and escalating consequences for disrespect, defiance, and unsafe behavior.  And then we enforce them. Recently, with the help of our Chaplain Matt Ernster, we rolled out an official discipline policy along with Core Values for the Troop.  The Core Values lay out the principles we wish the boys to aspire to, but the discipline policy is what establishes the guardrails between which the boys must operate.  It hurts to hit a guardrail, but the Lord teaches us that discipline is painful for a reason—it teaches you what is good and produces a harvest of righteousness for those who are trained by it.  At its core, the Troop discipline approach is as tailored to boys’ needs as the rest of the program, emphasizing natural consequences and a path towards independence. 

As we look to the completion of the first program year at Firmly Planted, we are celebrating the boys who have put in the work and earned their first badges.  More importantly, we celebrate the lessons that came with them and the camaraderie that is growing among the boys and the men. 

Cameron Linder
WA-2016 Troop Master