My daughter did Sparks & Brownies and it ended up being a big clique of kids who all went to the same church & school and in the end she (a hyper sensitive, artistic, intellectual type child and a more solitary, introverted type) hated it and asked to quit it.
I went through the same thing with Scouts when I was a boy.
The kids that remain after the first couple years of cute crafts and silly games are the kids who like following along with group activities, like doing group organization stuff, and deal well with social groups and (often) cliques.
Basically like sports, like a lot of elementary-level school (and a lot of other things in our society) -- the "odd" kids are selected against.
So no surprise there's "good mental health" for people who are good at conforming to the norm. Because that's literally the definition of "good mental health" encoded in the DSM.
A disorder there is a deviation from the norm.
Yeh. The paper claims to have controlled for this by comparing against kids in other groups, I suspect that might not be a very good control. E.g. if your daughter went on to join a different type of group that she did fit in with better, then that's a very clear selection bias. If I'm understanding correctly their control assumes kids just randomly select a group then stick with it.
Consider this; if those kids that would normally avoid scouts/guide were now forced to go because their parents saw reports of this study, then the effects could very well be negative, in turn cancelling out or even reversing the reported overall beneficial effects.
1. Define mental health in terms of adherence to the mean.
2. Find a group where adherence to the mean is mandatory in order to continue in the group.
3. Success, the group makes you mentally healthy!
My daughter did Sparks & Brownies and it ended up being a big clique of kids who all went to the same church & school and in the end she (a hyper sensitive, artistic, intellectual type child and a more solitary, introverted type) hated it and asked to quit it.
I went through the same thing with Scouts when I was a boy.
The kids that remain after the first couple years of cute crafts and silly games are the kids who like following along with group activities, like doing group organization stuff, and deal well with social groups and (often) cliques.
Basically like sports, like a lot of elementary-level school (and a lot of other things in our society) -- the "odd" kids are selected against.
So no surprise there's "good mental health" for people who are good at conforming to the norm. Because that's literally the definition of "good mental health" encoded in the DSM. A disorder there is a deviation from the norm.