A Scout Is Kind: What It Means, And How To Make It Normal In Your Troop

Kindness sits right in the middle of the Scout Law, as #6 of the twelve points, and for good reason. Your Scoutmaster brings it up, your senior patrol leader brings it up, and you recite it at the start of most meetings. For something that gets said out loud that often, it’s remarkably easy to go a whole month without doing anything about it. The good news is that fixing that is one of the easiest wins available to you in Scouting, and it doesn’t take a position of responsibility, a badge, or anyone’s permission!

What does “A Scout Is Kind” mean? It means noticing when somebody needs something and doing it, without being asked and without making a thing of it. The Scout Law point has grown a lot since 1911, when it was mostly about protecting animals. It still covers that, and now it also covers how you treat every person in your troop.

Hi, I’m Cole! I’m an Eagle Scout, and hopefully my 6 years of Scouting can teach you a thing or two about the Scout Law point that’s hardest to fake. I’ll be honest about where I started with this one. Right after I joined Scouting, someone asked me to explain each of the Scout Law principles and I couldn’t do it. I could recite them, but when I tried to say what they meant in my own life, I realized I knew the words and wasn’t living the message.

A reader asked me for something on kindness after watching Scouts around him get sharp with each other, and he was right that it’s worth writing down. So in this article I’ll cover what the Law point actually asks of you, what kindness looks like in six situations that come up at every troop meeting, twelve small things you can do at the next one, what the research says you actually get out of it, an old trick for remembering to do it at all, and the hard version, which is being kind when the people around you aren’t.

What The Scout Law Actually Asks For

When the Boy Scouts of America put out its first permanent Handbook for Boys in 1911, the kind point had a much narrower job than the one you’ve got. Here it is in full:

“A scout is kind. He is a friend to animals. He will not kill nor hurt any living creature needlessly, but will strive to save and protect all harmless life.”

That’s the entire thing. Be decent to animals, and don’t hurt anything that isn’t hurting you.

Today’s version still protects animals, in one shorter line, and then adds the half that’s much harder: knowing there’s strength in being gentle, and treating other people the way you’d want to be treated. That’s a much bigger ask than the 1911 one, mostly because a squirrel cannot tell your patrol you were weird about it. Being kind to a person means risking that the person, or somebody watching, makes it awkward for you. 🙂

That risk is the whole reason this point is hard, and it’s also why pulling it off feels so good. It’s why I think kindness belongs in the middle of the Law rather than tucked in at the end. If you want all twelve points broken down one by one, I’ve done that separately in The 12 Scout Law Principles. This article is about making the sixth one normal.

What It Looks Like At A Troop Meeting

Kindness stops being an abstract word the moment you name the situation you’re in. Below are six that come up constantly in Scouts BSA, what kindness looks like in each, and why that particular move works. None of them take courage, only attention, which is worth knowing before you read the list and assume it’s asking a lot of you. You’ve almost certainly done a few of these already without thinking of them as kindness at all!

The situation	What kindness looks like here	Why it lands
A new Scout standing by themselves	Walk over, use their name, ask them one question	Being known by name is most of belonging
Someone struggling at the back of a hike	Drop back and walk with them, don’t announce it	It turns a bad moment into company
A Scout who forgot gear again	Lend yours, say nothing about it in front of anyone	The lesson still lands, the embarrassment doesn’t
Someone’s cooking went badly	Eat it, then help them fix it next time	Effort gets protected, and they try again
A Scout who messed up a demonstration	Ask them a question they know the answer to	Gives them a way back into the room
Your patrol is deciding who does the worst job	Volunteer before anyone gets assigned it	Ends the standoff and costs you one hour

I’m not writing that fourth row from a great height, by the way. In my troop, our patrol once melted the top of a plastic table after cooking on it for about thirty minutes, which is the kind of thing you’d rather nobody mention again. Somebody eating your questionable dinner without commentary is a much bigger deal than it sounds when you’re the one who cooked it. I still remember who did that for me, which tells you something about how long these things stick.

Try this one: when you can tell somebody is having a rough day, you don’t need perfect words and you shouldn’t go hunting for them. Say “I don’t know what you’re going through, but I’m here for you if you need a friend,” and then listen properly. Unconditional kindness is the foundation of most of the friendships you’ll keep.

12 Small Things You Can Do At Your Next Meeting

The reason kindness stalls out as a concept is that nobody ever hands you the list. So here’s the list. None of these take more than a minute, none of them require a position of responsibility, and most of them nobody will notice you doing, which is rather the point. Read through and I’d bet you find two or three you could do this week without breaking a sweat!

Learn one new Scout’s name and use it out loud before the meeting ends
Ask the quietest person in your patrol what they think, and wait for the answer
Offer to take something heavy off somebody before they have to ask for help
Thank your Scoutmaster or an assistant Scoutmaster by name, specifically, for one thing
Take the worst job on the duty roster before it gets assigned
Offer to teach a younger Scout a knot you already know, and stay with them until they’ve got it
Sit next to whoever is sitting on their own
Let someone else answer the question you already know the answer to
Text the Scout who missed the last two meetings
Clean something you didn’t make dirty
Say “good catch” out loud when somebody else fixes a mistake
Congratulate whoever ranked up, even if you’re ahead of them

Watch this one (3:29):

That’s Scouting America’s own walkthrough of tying and using a square knot, and I’m recommending it for the teaching item on the list rather than the knot itself. Watch how slowly it’s demonstrated, then do it that slowly for a younger Scout. If you want the method behind that, it’s the BSA Teaching EDGE method, and the rest of the required knots are in how to tie the required Scouting knots.

So pick three! If you do three of those at one meeting, you’ll have done more for your troop’s culture than most Scouts manage in a month, and you can absolutely give yourself a big pat on the back for it. 🙂 For more on the friendship side of this, how to make friends in Scouting goes deeper than I can here.

What Kindness Actually Gets You

Here’s where I’d usually tell you that being kind makes you happier, and there is research on exactly that question. The honest answer turned out to be more interesting than the one I went looking for, and it changed how I’d argue this to a Scout who isn’t sold yet.

In 2012, researchers ran a study called Kindness Counts with 415 students in 19 classrooms, average age 10.6. For four weeks, half of them performed three acts of kindness a week, and the other half visited three places a week. Both groups got happier by the end, and there was no significant difference between them on well-being, which means doing kind things made those kids about as happy as going somewhere fun did.

The difference showed up somewhere else entirely. The kindness group gained significantly more friends than the other group, an average of about 1.5 more classmates naming them as someone they’d like to spend time with. That effect held even after the researchers accounted for the happiness changes, so it wasn’t just that cheerful kids attract people.

I find that a much better argument than the one I went in expecting. Being kind won’t necessarily feel better than a good campout, but it changes how many people want you around, and in a troop that compounds fast. As I’ve written before about selling popcorn, in life we often get what we give, and Scouting is a small enough world that it comes back around quickly.

The Knot Trick, From 1911

That same 1911 Handbook didn’t stop at telling Scouts to be kind, which is the mistake most advice about this makes. It gave them a mechanism, and it called the daily good turn the chief test of a Scout:

“And then the final and chief test of the scout is the doing of a good turn to somebody every day, quietly and without boasting.”

Then it told them exactly how to remember to do it:

“When he gets up in the morning he may tie a knot in his necktie, and leave the necktie outside his vest until he has done a good turn.”

You wear the reminder. It sits there looking wrong all morning until you’ve done the thing, and then you get to fix it, which is a far better system than hoping you’ll remember. It’s also part of why Scouting has always been full of knots and neckerchiefs, and their examples are charmingly of their era: help an old lady across the street, clear broken glass off the road before it wrecks a bicycle tire.

Put it into action: tomorrow morning, put something small and slightly wrong on yourself. A rubber band on your wrist, your watch on the other arm, your neckerchief slide upside down. Fix it once you’ve done one thing for one person. It feels silly for the first couple of days and then it starts catching you, which is exactly what it’s for. Give it a week before you judge it. 🙂

The Hard Version: When Your Friends Aren’t Being Kind

Now the part my reader was actually asking about, because everything above is easy one-on-one. None of it is easy when the group has already decided somebody is the joke, and any article that skips that part isn’t worth much.

You may be thinking, “so am I supposed to lecture my friends?” Definitely not. That usually makes you the next joke and it doesn’t help the person you were trying to help. What works is smaller, quieter, and takes about two seconds.

Say this:

“Wait, what do you mean by that? I’m not following.”

No speech, no confrontation, and nobody has to lose in front of anyone. It buys the person being talked about a few seconds, and in my experience the bit usually dies right there, because it’s hard to keep going once you’ve been asked to explain it out loud. When I hear a stereotype about a whole group, I use a longer version of the same move: I kindly do an offhand mention that “that’s a wild thing to say,” ask people to explain their thought process, then gently point out where it doesn’t hold up.

I won’t pretend any of this is comfortable. My biggest regrets from selling popcorn were never the rejections, they were the people I was too afraid to walk up to at all, and I resolved after that to at least try to do the thing that scares me. It’s easy to be selfish and hard to be forgiving, and speaking up for somebody in front of your friends sits squarely in the hard category. Believe it or not, your attitude about that is a choice, and it’s one you get to make again every single week.

Note: if it’s gone past unkind, if somebody is being targeted rather than teased, that isn’t yours to carry on your own. Tell your Scoutmaster or a parent. That’s the right move, and it’s the one adults can act on.

Conclusion

The 1911 Scouts had the easier version of this job and the better system for doing it, so borrow their system and skip their assignment. Pick a reminder, wear it, and don’t take it off until you’ve done one thing for one person that day. Then pick three things off the list above and do them at your next meeting. A troop where kindness is normal is simply a troop where enough people did the small stuff often enough that it stopped being remarkable, and there’s no reason that troop can’t be yours.

Nobody hands you a badge for any of it, and you rarely get to find out which ones mattered. On a high adventure canoeing trip in Canada, one of my favorite Scoutmasters, Mr. Browne, found a stick a beaver had gnawed and burned our troop number and the trip details into it by hand, then gave it to me. I still have it more than a decade later, and looking at it puts me straight back on that canoe trip. He had no way of knowing that when he did it, which is rather the point of spreading kindness anyway. 😀

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Until then, be the kind of Scout the younger ones copy. I’m rooting for you!