After my unsettling encounter with a dad, I get the fear about male childcare workers

The year is 2012. I’m 18 years old, in my first few weeks as a childcare worker. I’m on a traineeship and studying for a Certificate III in Children’s Services, which means I’m working full-time – eight-hour shifts, five days a week – and earning $8.65 an hour.

At the childcare centre I’m working at, I’m one of 25 staff members – 24 women and me. In those early weeks, tasks include things like supervising and interacting with the children, serving them food and setting up and packing away play areas. Another task is to change the nappies of the 20 toddlers in the room I’m overseeing – a job split between the three other educators in the room.

Are parents ready to trust male educators like me with their children? Credit: Monique Westermann

Initially, I’m nervous. Up to that point, I’ve only seen the process modelled once or twice, and I’m still building trust with the children. What if I ask if I can change their nappy and they say no? Thankfully, when I do approach the first child and ask if it’s OK, they nod yes.

A few weeks pass and I become more confident. It quickly becomes just another task to complete in a shift.

Thirteen years on, and Australia’s early childhood education sector is in crisis. A number of alarming cases of abuse have sparked national conversations. More recently, Melbourne has been shocked by allegations regarding a male childcare worker, who has been charged with more than 70 offences against children in his care.

Many questions have been rightly raised following this horrific story – about service quality, policy reform, the high turnover and casualisation of the workforce, and educator suitability. A difficult question has also been asked: should male educators be allowed to perform tasks like changing nappies?

While I feel a responsibility to stand up for male educators, my deeper concern lies in the minds of parents. I wonder what they really think – beyond polite support and social expectations – about someone like me changing their child’s nappy.

Do parents really see all educators as equally trustworthy? Or is it simply easier not to think about it?

In those early weeks of my training, I was changing the nappy of a girl when a broad-shouldered man I didn’t recognise walked into the room. He looked around, and at me, unsure. Then he saw, as I later learned, that his daughter was in the nappy area with me.

He stood at the gate that separated the room from the nappy change area and asked me bluntly, “Do you want me to do it?”

I froze. “Ahh – it’s OK.” Her nappy was already off, her small body exposed. The father watched silently as I finished the change before passing her to him.

For the rest of my shift I felt unsettled by the moment, and since then, I’ve imagined being that child’s dad. I’ve imagined walking into my child’s classroom to find a man I’ve never met wiping my daughter’s most private parts. A man whose hands I’ve never shaken. A man I don’t know caring for the person I love most in the world.

We owe it to our children to confront these instinctual fears – to examine our beliefs and reflect on what we truly want for them. Because if the past few weeks have taught us anything, it’s that the devil hides in the details. And sometimes, he is a male educator.

Some childcare centres are now planning to roll out measures that will allow parents to elect if male educators can change nappies. A decision that surely creates more fear and division as parents ask themselves the uncomfortable question of “can I really trust this man?”

Some people’s feelings go further – that men should not be working in early childhood at all; that the risk is simply too great.

But at the centre where I now work, in Tregear a disadvantaged suburb in Mount Druitt, the community is starved of good men. Roughly 40 per cent of children at the centre live without a father in the home, and many without uncles or grandfathers. For them, my colleague – Indigenous elder Uncle Ted – and I are the only male role models they will have in the early part of their lives. We are more than childcare workers to these children. Many other men working in childcare also carry this responsibility.

As the sector navigates its way through a tremendously difficult time, it must discover how to protect children from the harmful hands of bad men, while also allowing access to the good.

Nick Stephens is a childcare worker based in Sydney.

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