On My Honor, I Will Try to . . . Handle Stress

It isn’t all sewing, building campfires, toasting marshmallows and peddling cookies door-to-door. These days, Girl Scouts are earning badges in up-to-the-minute topics ranging from exploring the Internet to stress management.

Stress management? Well, what better way to prepare girls for their futures as women juggling jobs and families, say several Scout leaders, who happen to be busy working moms themselves.

“What could be better than learning a few ways to take care of stress?” asks troop leader Joanne Meyer-Jendras of Garden City, N.Y., who recently helped lead some Scouts in two days of training in meditation, deep breathing, foot reflexology and other techniques to chill out and help others do the same.

Stress is a concept familiar to Meyer-Jendras, a mother of two and a full-time guidance counselor for the Garden City school system. Preparing the Scouts in her charge for over-full lives is one goal of the From Stress to Success badge.

“Girls should know that most women aren’t going to marry Prince Charming-- that they’ll have to have a job and possibly take care of a family, too,” says Meyer-Jendras. “The things they learn as adolescents will really come in handy in the future.”

The country’s 2.7 million Girl Scouts, who celebrated the organization’s 88th anniversary last month, try to keep up with the times, earning badges that certify know-how in everything from car care to video production to architecture and environmental design.

Plenty of traditional badges are still represented among the hundreds of thousands earned by Scouts each year. But newer badges, including From Stress to Success, Desktop Publishing and Exploring the Net, are gaining popularity.

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The stress-management weekend attracted Scouts from several troops. Under the guidance of Meyer-Jendras and three other troop leaders, 18 girls from grades eight to 12 spent a Saturday and Sunday in East Hampton, N.Y., at Camp Blue Bay, a tranquil, wooded waterfront property owned by the Girl Scouts of America.

The weekend’s curriculum came about when Meyer-Jendras, a Girl Scout herself when growing up, decided to take half a dozen Scouts on a sleep-away weekend, and chose stress management as their activity.

One of her co-leaders, Winnie Sylvester, agrees that relevancy is one of the best things about the stress badge. “I try to pick badges that are applicable to what girls experience in teen and preteen life,” says Sylvester, who works as a florist and has two daughters--both Scouts--and a son. “I look at my girls and see they’re under a lot of stress, much more than when we were in school.”

Even though Samantha Lademann originally had no interest in a stress-management badge (“I just needed a weekend away,” she admits), she’s already used some of the techniques she learned. The big stresses of applying for college are behind her, but she’s still got worries--whether, for example, she’s made the right choice.

Samantha’s original qualms about the weekend activities quickly gave way to enthusiasm. “Massage therapy was completely new for me,” she says, “and it was great.” She’s already put “pros and cons” lists into play for making decisions, and now follows the suggestion of looking over her schedule each week and breaking it down into more manageable bits.

Among the topics covered during the weekend were simple meditation techniques, basics of hand and foot massage, and a look at how stress plays a part in many diseases.

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Two of the other leaders, Liz Colantonio and Debbie Giambrone, are registered nurses. “So we really had the health and medical aspects of stress covered,” says Sylvester. And Meyer-Jendras could speak from what she’s learned working daily with teens anxious about college entrance exams and essays.

The sharing of the older generation’s real-life wisdom is one of Scouting’s most endearing aspects, says Sylvester. “Women with family and careers get to pass on the knowledge that comes from their own experience.”

Marilyn Proios, executive director of Girl Scouts of Suffolk County, N.Y., said that Scouts’ lives have definitely gotten more rushed. For one thing, the girls no longer have time to sew on badges.

“Velcro is very popular, so is Crazy Glue,” says Proios. “And a while back . . . I saw a bunch of badge sashes hanging up” at a dry cleaners shop. When she asked why they were there, the owner gave her the secret and, perhaps, another stress-relief technique: “The girls bring the badges and have us sew them on for them because they’re too busy to do it themselves, and so are their moms.”