Brownies incident stopped me singing, starting to see how messed up it was.

All of the "I will always award a badge if a Brownie has shown she has put the effort in, even if the results aren't great" posts in this thread just make the whole exercise pointless and are no better than participation awards for sports

I had a similar experience where they made me sing solo at school to see if I was good enough to sing in a duo at school, and then they just went with the other girl doing a solo and excluding me entirely.

Also have never sung since.

In both scenarios it could have been managed more diplomatically - I am in fact not a good singer, so my exclusion probably wasn’t unreasonable… it was just the method that was poor.

I'm sorry @Magenta82 that was absolutely horrible of those 3 women.
Possibly they were taking the whole thing much too seriously.
But in a bigger picture, I think there is so much of this going on, with adults saying or doing shitty things to kids which stays with those kids for life.
When I was 8, I did ballet lessons and I had all the best ballet gear passed down to me second hand from my grandma's neighbour. I loved ballet, like lots of little girls do. Then one day at my grandma's house she was proudly telling her milkman (in those days, milkmen would deliver milk and stand and chat to people on the doorstep) about me doing ballet lessons, and he looked me up and down with a smirk and said "You're not ever going to be a ballet dancer, you haven't got the right build for it, look at that belly on you, a few less cream cakes I think hahahaha". It crushed me. I went on to believe I was fat and I dropped out of ballet lessons telling my mum I just didn't want to go anymore. I never did lessons to do it seriously or professionally, I only ever did it as an extra curricular Saturday morning class, but I truly loved it. Thing is, I've got a photo of me aged 8 in my ballet kit right before I stopped going, and honestly, I just look like a sweet little girl, perfectly slim, but yes I do have a little rounded belly in my leotard. Gosh I spent years after that thinking I must be fat and that led me to thinking I must look awful if grown adults could say that about me. I basically thought, in my young child's mind, that all adults must also have thought that when they looked at me. I know that sounds silly as an adult, but as an 8 year old it's how I thought.
I try so, so hard to be careful with the words I use to my own DC. I learnt how one sentence can crush a child. But I can't protect them from things other adults say, and when they (teenagers now) come home and tell me things teachers have said to them at school, or things teachers said to their peers in class, I just shudder in horror.
Anyhow OP, I think you should join a community choir and rediscover your love of singing 😘

There was no criteria - three volunteers decided whether her singing was good enough. That is fundamentally subjective. I agree that if you put yourself forwards for a competition then you, however old you are, need to understand you may not win. But Brownies is about building up confidence, not excluding people. Badges are about taking part and if you look at how they approach it now, you will see that they have moved away from the subjective approach and with good reason.

I was the only child in year 5 who wasn’t accepted into the school choir. Shocking by today’s standards, but probably normal for the early 90s!

I was a Brownie (1970s) and much more recently a Brownie leader, the badge process I remember as a child was much more formal, with external assessors being involved rather than just the unit leaders as it often is now. They were probably following the letter of the law as it was at the time.
I do recognise your trauma as I won’t sing in public. I was assessed as not good enough to appear on a local news show at the age of 8 when the rest of my class were singing about the Silver Jubilee. I wasn’t even allowed to mime!

36 years ago it wasn’t a case of ‘all must have prizes’. But in 1996, whilst, most teachers/ activity organisers had stopped lobbing board rubbers/ nearest object to hand at kids for misbehaviour, just taking part in an activity didn’t automatically mean you got a badge. I failed to get many a badge back in the early 80s and begged my mum to stop sending me to brownies….Brown Owl was fecking terrifying!
its good things have moved on and sounds brilliant that badges are easier to get now than some decades ago!
you sing away OP, sing till your hearts content, in someways the world is definitely a kinder place than it was (or perhaps we just have a better understanding of the psyche now), either way it makes all the gloomy stuff a bit easier to navigate.

I remember the entertainer badge from the early 90s when I’d have been doing it. My sister and I did a magic show and I can guarantee it probably wasn’t genuinely entertaining for adult audiences. But we practiced and rehearsed it and gave it our best shot and so we got the badge.
the point of the badge is to have done the work, yes, not to actually be great at it.
OP you’re probably actually a perfectly fine singer. Those women sound horrible.

Maybe it's not that straightforward. I've been and had a look at the actual criteria for the badge (1989 edition, making a guess from OP's age, but the criteria don't change much from one edition to another around that time).

Either alone or with a few other Brownies entertain an audience in three of the following ways:
a) Recite a poem or tell a short story.
b) Act, mime or use puppets to tell a story or an event from history.
c) Dance a national dance or make up a dance to a piece of music.
d) Sing with or without accompaniment.
e) Play a piece on a musical instrument.
f) Perform an item of your own choice, such as juggling, conjuring.
N.B. You must do at least one thing alone.

So nobody who got up on the stage and just did one "turn" should have got the badge based on that alone.

But it was meant to be about keenring a skill and showing you can do it.

The other pack learned to play the spoons - they actually made an effort learning a skill and then used it to entertain. OP used her school song book to sing when she wasn’t a natural singer. That’s not really putting any effort in to earn an entertainer badge.

There are just two types of people - those who give awards to everyone and those who think kids need to put in some effort and actually learn a skill:

That’s awful.
It takes a lot to get up there in the first place.
so wrong.

Yes it is, you have to meet criteria, which the OP did not meet.

And this is why dd went to scouts. Much more fun and less prissy!

a brownie badge isn't a competition.

Love that. Bet it sounded amazing. I'm going to have to YouTube it as I can't remember any lyrics except the grass, bacon and bellowing out not to forget to say a big thank you!

Massive hug 🫂 for you OP
That is absolutely horrible. Even if you were the worst singer in the world (and I am absolutely sure you were not!) the fact that you got up and sang so boldly in front of everyone was reason enough to give you your badge.
Good for little 8 year old you for trying and having such a great sense of confidence and fun!
🎖️

If awards are given to everyone no matter how bad their performance what is the point of them.
I strongly disagree with encouraging children to be competitive then saying oh well they all have to win- what on earth is the point, you are teaching them there is no point learning to avoid unpleasant outcomes-is that really a good lesson , are you really helping them?

I mean how would you like it if you'd been born clever back then? I'd have lost my mind. Cursed to indulge snot nosed brats as they caper hopelessly before you.

I had this song at my wedding! Was my fave hym at school. All together now: Autum days when the grass is jewelled and the silk inside a chestnut shell!

I recall my Brownie pack in the early 1970s spending one meeting doing activities to try to get the Athlete badge. I failed on everything apart from the rope skipping, which I'd taught myself to do well because it was an essential playground skill. It's filed among a bunch of negative experiences of organised sport from my childhood, but I can't argue with it because the criteria weren't open to interpretation, and I did go away determined to do better next time and work on throwing and catching a ball and jumping.

Getting up in front of a bunch of people you don't know and a panel of judges and belting out a hymn? That seems worth a badge to me. You were robbed, OP. Maybe the stern old women had been watching too much New Faces on television.

There were too many of this type of old biddies in those days who thought they actually were important - in actual fact they were just loons. Of course you should have got the badge for singing solo! You were 8. Who are they to judge anyone's singing? It wasn't a singing exam like ARBSM. It was a 'do something in the sphere of entertainment.' And it's a hobby.

I had a similar experience, not quite the same, but had a similar affect. Was demoted from being cub scout Seconder and THEY CUT THE SECONDER BADGE FROM MY ARM in front of whole cub troop. Apparently I was too shy to be a seconder. Never really got over it.

WTAF! That is awful OP! Sorry 😔

Surely you have noticed that people are getting progressively shitter at their jobs and social interactions? Imo the absurdly brutal and high standards of the frustrated old ladies of yore (could have been surgeons but born in an era when they had to assess brownie badges instead) made for a better society. Watching small children fanny about and get praised for it annoys me.

Also I know you were joking (maybe not entirely) but get over it.

@Magenta82 YADNBU but thank you for unlocking a lovely nostalgic memory for me asI haven't thought about Autumn Days for years, the one that sings about the crunchy grass and sizzling bacon? Banging hymn!