Good for you, Pete, and all the other dads and men who get involved in Girl Scouts. I’ve been an assistant troop leader and now troop leader for, geee, eight years?, and I still occasionally get the “we don’t need no men around” attitude from some leaders. But most of them are accepting and used to the fact that on a lot of overnight trips I am the only guy with sometimes hundreds of girls and women. I’m used to it, and just kind of grin to myself when the late-night campfire talk gets to the girl talk phase.
But as for outdoor skills, that is where my Boy Scout days have really come into play, because as you and others have noted, many kids today cannot even light a match, let alone start a fire. I always spend at least one day/overnight at the council summer day camp, on the day that they get to build a fire, and it’s almost always the same – the girls drag in tree trunks, the leader puts some thumb-sized “council-issue fire starter” under this pile of logs and tries to light it by throwing matches in the general direction of same.
I watch with detached interest (if we don’t have a fire we don’t get to eat) and then suggest an alternative method, i.e., the Boy Scout way. That turns into a lesson on the differences between tinder, kindling and fuel, how to get a hot fire going quickly and how to light it. I’ve started bringing my own boxes of matches because so few of the girls even know how to hold one, let alone light it. But to see that gleam of accomplishment in their eyes when we have a tidy little blaze going makes it all worth it.