Josh Brooks hadn’t planned for a career taking care of young children, but in tenth grade he started spending time with his friend’s younger brother and discovered that he had a real knack for it.
At 18, Brooks took a job at Common Ground, a child care center in northern Virginia, and enjoyed it so much he kept working there throughout college, where he studied psychology. After graduating, though, he felt pressure to get a “real grown-up job” and applied to work as a government contractor. He maintained spreadsheets all day and was miserable. “After nine months I realized how ridiculous that notion was, to keep myself from something that I loved,” he said. And so he returned back to Common Ground.
Brooks, now 28, knows his career path is unusual: In the US, only 3 percent of the preschool workforce, and just 6 percent of the child care workforce, is male. But he works in a progressive part of the country, for an organization that explicitly touts the value of having men in the classroom. Common Ground’s executive director, Liz Badley Raubacher, is married to a man who runs another child care center in town.
It also helps that he’s not the only male teacher on staff. Brooks works alongside Jordon Farrell, 30, who started volunteering at Common Ground to fulfill a high school requirement and, like Brooks, was surprised by how much he liked it. Farrell’s been working there for the last seven years. They both teach alongside Zach Davis, 24, who originally went to trade school for hospitality. When the pandemic hit, most hotels shut down and Davis took a role as a recess attendant at a private school, and realized how much he liked working with kids. But when that school also closed due to Covid-19, he stumbled on Common Ground, and has been happily working there ever since.
Despite severe worker shortages in child care, most centers across America employ no male teachers. Men tend to steer away from a field that’s both low-paying and perceived as overtly feminine. They’re also heavily deterred by parental suspicion of inappropriate contact; because most convicted sexual abusers are men, many families perceive any man interested in working with children as a threat. Hiring managers at the centers themselves worry about liability and consumer demand, reacting to fears more than data.
“I’m not going to say we haven’t had those concerns, we’ve had to navigate those gut reactions with parents,” Raubacher told me. “We say, ‘Listen we understand, it may seem strange until you’re here, but we’ll help you through it.’ We have women doctors, women accountants. And there are a lot of men who really just shine working with younger kids.”
The general ambivalence toward male early childhood educators has persisted despite research underscoring the value that caring male adults can bring to a child’s development. Men often bring different approaches to play and teaching, while challenging the stereotype that nurturing young children is a woman’s job alone. They can serve as trusted role models, especially for boys.
Building a stronger pipeline to recruit and retain men in child care could help bring sorely needed talent into the field. Yet unlike in K-12 education, where there have been national efforts to recruit more men, there’s been no similar systemic push to alter the gender ratios in the female-dominated child care space.
Smaller scale-efforts are starting to emerge, though. In 2023, Hopkins House Early Childhood Learning Institute, a Virginia-based educator training program, hosted a conference to explore the idea.
“Programs are starving for qualified personnel,” J. Glenn Hopkins, the chief executive of Hopkins House, said. “Looking only at one half of the population is a mistake.”
What it’s like to be a man working in child care
Being the sole man in the classroom hasn’t always been easy for Julian LaFerla, even as he felt sure that he brought something distinctive and valuable.
LaFerla stumbled into his child care career when he took a college class on early childhood learning. He considered it a quasi-training course for one day becoming a father “and then I just discovered it felt like a really humane field,” he said. “You know, the play and the story time, and the snacks, and the singing — it just felt like a nice workplace.”
Now 48, LaFerla has spent 12 years working across various preschool, child care, and kindergarten settings in St. Paul, Minnesota — plus another 10 years as a stay-at-home father. But unlike the men at Common Ground in Virginia, LaFerla has never had a male colleague or male mentor, leaving him to navigate complex gender dynamics alone.
“In some circumstances with certain kids, the expectation is I should be more masculine, and with others it’s to be less masculine,” he said. “Compared to my female colleagues, I’m just more engaged in high-energy, rough-and-tumble play — picking kids up, wrestling, letting them climb all over me, that sort of thing.”
Nine years into his teaching career, LaFerla decided to pursue a master’s in education to better understand his own experiences. Through scouring the literature on men in child care for his thesis, he learned that many of his confusing moments were widely shared: The lack of support from his father for his career choice, the assumption that he could serve as the school’s default handyman, and the ongoing tension of when to emphasize gender difference, sameness, or neutrality.
Researchers find that men often feel that they’re scrutinized more closely than their female colleagues. Men sense that they’re excluded from tasks like diapering or comforting upset children, yet are then expected to take on the role of disciplinarian when kids misbehave. The biggest hurdle men report, though, is the fear that parents will see them as a threat. Unlike other fields where women dominate — like nursing or even elementary school teaching — working with kids under 5 involves a lot of physical contact. For male workers, routine tasks like helping with bathroom needs or soothing crying children become potential liabilities.
“A lot of men I’ve spoken to are scared of the prospect of accusations or things being taken the wrong way and that just completely puts them off from wanting to do anything involving children,” Brooks, of Common Ground, told me. Until programs can overcome these cultural barriers and biases, schools and programs will keep struggling to recruit men — and to hold on to the few they do have.
And while it’s natural to worry about abuse or neglect by anyone, advocates focused on reducing child abuse emphasize that risk should be mitigated through training and rigorous vetting, including criminal background checks, for all staff. Some child care centers incorporate security cameras and windows in interior doors, or have rules about having multiple staff present with children at all times, to help build trust and transparency.
Trying to bring men in
Over the last decade, some child care advocates have started speaking up about the need to better support men in their industry and address the challenges that LaFerla and others face.
“Men, if they’re working in early childhood settings, or even fathers if they come into the building, tend to be uncomfortable because the settings don’t make them feel comfortable,” said Hopkins, of Hopkins House. “It’s an unintended consequence — it’s not a purposeful decision but [reflects] how child care has evolved.”
Last November, at a second conference hosted by Hopkins House, participants proposed strategies to recruit more men, including targeted scholarships and mentorship programs. Participants also emphasized the need to challenge gender stereotypes through public awareness campaigns and improve pay to attract stronger candidates.
Their suggestions are in line with researchers who have been advocating strategies like providing mentorship and direct support to new male teachers from other men. Some studies suggest that men may also be more likely to stay in early childhood settings that actively engage with gender — through measures like anti-bias training, curriculum design, or even parent outreach — than in environments that ignore it altogether.
To appeal to men’s interest in important work, the group recommended highlighting early childhood education’s impact on young minds and communities. Participants suggested emphasizing that teaching and caregiving requires strength, leadership, and creativity, and expanding internship and apprenticeship opportunities to give more men hands-on experience and exposure.
Hopkins said he’s part of a new group of men working in early childhood education in Washington, DC, and knows a similar program may launch soon in Virginia. He pointed to growing national interest in supporting employment for young men, which may provide an opportunity to leverage those resources for his work.
Child care and early learning are also fields less susceptible to automation by artificial intelligence than many traditionally male-dominated jobs — a reality noted by several men I interviewed. “I hold tight to this job because I feel like child care isn’t going anywhere,” Brooks of Common Ground told me. “People will always need other people to watch their children, no matter what.”
Davis said the small, everyday moments make his career decision feel simple. “It’s just great working with the kids and watching them grow,” he said. “Every day I come in and they always say good morning to me, or like, give you a hug or something.”
This work was supported by a grant from the Bainum Family Foundation. Vox Media had full discretion over the content of this reporting.
Comments