Katie Rose and Pete are in Girl Scouts and Cub Scouts, respectively. I have been a den leader for Pete’s 2 years in Cub Scouts, and Debbie has been a troop leader for Katie Rose this year and her initial year in Daisy Scouts.
Katie Rose sometimes gets envious of all the fun things Pete is doing–for example, earning belt loops or going on campouts–when her troop was mainly just doing arts and crafts when she was Pete’s age. Debbie and I have agreed that one thing BSA does differently than GSA is Cub Scouts and Boy Scouts organize in packs/troops over multiple ages, whereas Girl Scout troops are smaller groups of girls all about the same age–equivalent to a single den of Cub Scouts. The Cub Scout pack has the advantage of institutional knowledge handed down Webelos->Bears->Wolves->Tigers (i.e., 4th/5th grades -> 3rd -> 2nd -> 1st grade). However, the Junior Girl Scout troops do not formally associate with the Brownies or the Daisy Scouts, so traditions and methods are not being passed along.
Our kids have cousins who are also in Scouts: a girl 3 years older than Katie Rose, a boy Katie Rose’s age, and another boy 10 months younger than Pete, but who made the cutoff so that he is in Pete’s grade. While we were eating dinner with them one night, the Girl Scout with two younger brothers launched defensively into her assessment of the differences: “Boy Scouts teaches you how to survive when your plane crashes in the middle of nowhere, and you only have your Swiss army knife. Girl Scouts teaches you how to survive the other 99.9% of the time.” To which Pete responded excitedly, “We get to have Swiss army knives?!!!”