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

[Magenta82]

When I (44) was 8 I went to a big division meet up, not many people from my pack went. There was show put on by another group as part of their Entertainer badge, they played the spoons. Someone then described the award and I thought it sounded like fun. I went back and badgered the leaders until they agreed to do it.

We did a big group show for all the parents and everyone had to do an individual piece as well, some at the show and some on a normal Brownies night. I chose to do it at the show.

I decided to sing from my school hymn book (the blue one with the ugly kids on the front #4 Autumn Days), on my own, in front of everyone with no musical accompliment. The "judges" were 3 quite elderly ladies from some kind of group of retired Brownie leaders or something (trefoil?). They failed me. I didn't get the badge.

Now admittedly I can't carry a tune in a bucket but still! I was basically put off singing for life, gave up trying, if I was so bad I couldn't get a brownie bade I must be the worst in the world.

It seemed unjust at the time, but now I have a child in Squirrels I really just how fucked up it really was.

AIBU

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.

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.

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 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!

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!

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'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 😘

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.

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

This made me so sad to read. I was also "failed" at a choir tryout with the same consequences re birthday singing etc., but at least mine was done relatively kindly. Singing is such a cathartic and emotional outlet and I really feel the loss when my husband's and daughters sing so beautifully around the house (but I'm so glad they inherited his voice and not mine!) I do sing now but I would love to sound like them.

I heard the phrase " anything worth doing, is worth doing badly" and I try to remember this when I'm feeling nervous about having a go.

I too had my confidence trashed by school play auditions in the 80s :(

'Autumn days when the grass is jewelled and the silk inside a chestnut shell....'

That was one of my favourites - and oh my did we sing it a lot! Not that I can sing either OP, as i found out when I auditioned for the end of year show in front of my whole Junior 4 class......

Ah the good old 80's, when nobody was afraid of making it clear to a kid just how shit they were. Apparently we were all so much more resilient back then, but it's pretty hard to believe when we still thinking about it and still won't sing in front of people 40 years later.

That's so harsh. You tried to entertain and entertainment comes in many forms. Even the most horrendous karaoke rendition has entertainment value regardless of the actual quality of the singing.

When I was at school I auditioned for the choir. I am not exaggerating when I say that everyone who auditioned but me got in.

I was quite a resilient child and could've handled the rejection but the way they announced who was in and who wasn't was absolutely humiliating. The successful children had to go stand up at the front which meant that by the time all the names were read out, it was just me left sat on my own. Looking back as an adult I can't understand why the teachers didn't think of a kinder way of telling me I didn't get in.

I was in the Brownies some years before you and you have reminded me that I also failed a badge! It was a Baking Badge and I made (I think) Chocolate Crispies, which of course didn't need baking. I was a bit miffed because I had told Brown Owl and Tawny Owl what I was going to make and they never pointed out it wouldn't qualify. I came back the following week with Empire Biscuits and smashed it. If your badge was Entertainer not Singer then I think you earned it.

She was 8, FFS! You shouldn't need to be Whitney Houston to get an entertainment badge in Brownies!

You would have loved me at Brownies. I was singled out at every meet because I didn’t attend church on a Sunday with the rest of the pack (I am not Christian)

I then got told to never return because I swore.

I lasted 6 weeks

They should have let you know how bad you were before you took part in the show, but if you couldn't sing in tune, you didn't earn the badge.

Incident? Is this some click bait?

Oh OP you have brought back my own (F38) trauma of being the only one of my friends not given a part in Bugsy Malone by our music teacher at high school age 14. Not even offered a back stage role 😭 I tell myself it built character resilience but it still hurts 24 years later.

8 is more than old enough to sing in tune. You shouldn't get a badge for singing if you don't sing the right notes.

Take some comfort in the fact that those nasty old trouts are dead now and you’re not 🤣

I got kicked out of Brownies 🙈😂

How?

Lovely last sentence, even though your own experience was horrible. Stupid milkman! Have you thought about looking for an adult ballet class to join?

I would say that everyone can sing. They might sound like Whitney Houston or Johnny Vegas but it’s still singing. It’s having the confidence to stand up in front of everyone and sing

As Eric Morecambe would say. You sang all the right notes just not necessarily in the right order.