My hands, in plain sight

I’ve been the CEO of large early childhood providers and seen first-hand the amazing and wonderful work the rare male educations did, as well as some of the stigma they faced. Below is an all-too-common reality I have repeatedly seen.

At drop-off, there’s a moment that repeats itself so often it starts to feel like part of the curriculum. A parent kneels to kiss a child goodbye. A shoe is tied. A lunchbox is handed over. A little face crumples as the door closes. The child reaches for the adult they trust most in the room, an educator, and the educator steps forward to meet them.

If you’re a woman in early childhood education, that step forward is usually read as what it is – care. If you’re a man, the same step can be read as something else.

You feel it before anyone says anything. It lives in the extra beat of hesitation in a parent’s eyes. It lives in the way some people watch your hands, not your face. It lives in the small shift of posture when you bend down to comfort a child, as if the world has become slightly more vigilant because your body is in it.

So, you adjust. You develop a second consciousness – not just What does this child need? but how will this look?

You choose where you sit on the mat. You keep the door open. You narrate your actions. You make sure you’re never alone behind a closed door, not because you intend harm, you don’t, but because you know how quickly a misunderstanding can become a story, and how quickly a story can become a stain.

You learn to live “in plain sight.”

This is not a complaint against parents. Parents’ fear is not an abstract concept; it has a history. In Australia, recent allegations and revelations about abuse and regulatory failure in childcare have shaken public confidence and reignited calls for sweeping restrictions, including proposals to bar men from certain roles. When people are frightened for their children, they reach for the simplest lever they can imagine pulling.

And gender looks like a lever.

But it is also a blunt instrument, and the price of blunt instruments is paid by real people – by male educators who entered the sector to nurture and teach, and by children who absorb, early and quietly, the message that men are not safe in caring roles.

More Than Baby Sitting

Early childhood education is often spoken about as if it is babysitting with nicer branding. Anyone who has worked in it knows how wrong that is.

The work is pedagogy, emotional labour, safety management, and relationship-building at close range. It is language development and conflict resolution. It is the slow, skilled practice of helping a three-year-old learn that frustration does not have to end in hitting. It is the moment you notice a child’s speech pattern is changing, or that bruises are appearing more often than they should, or that a normally bouncy child has gone quiet. It is the professional instinct to see small signals before they become crises.

It is also, unavoidably, physical care – wiping noses, washing hands, helping with toileting, changing nappies, managing spills, assisting children who are too young to do these things alone. This physicality is part of what care means for very young children. And because it is physical, it is where suspicion attaches.

For a male educator, the physical tasks are not only tasks. They are a reputational tightrope.

The cruel thing is that the best early childhood educators are often the ones who are naturally warm – they crouch down, they look children in the eye, they hold space for big feelings, they offer comfort. Warmth is part of the craft. But when you are a man, warmth can be interpreted through a lens you did not choose.

Men remain a small fraction of the early childhood education and care workforce. An ABC piece published in November 2025 described male educators as about 3 per cent of the childcare workforce.

That small number matters because it creates a particular kind of pressure. When you are one of a few, you stop being an individual and become a symbol – the male educator. Your mistakes are not only yours. Your presence is political. Your body becomes a conversation other people are having about risk, trust, gender, and children, often without you in the room.

It also means that many people simply haven’t had much experience with men in early childhood settings. If you have never seen a man change a nappy, soothe a toddler, sing a ridiculous song, or patiently supervise snack time, then the idea can feel unfamiliar, and unfamiliarity, in an anxious climate, can curdle into suspicion.

A Female Dominated Profession

Globally, the sector is heavily female-dominated, research notes that in many contexts more than 90% of the early childhood education and care workforce is female.

That imbalance doesn’t just reflect personal choices. It reflects long-running cultural assumptions about what kinds of work are “natural” for men and women.

And it reflects something darker – the persistent cultural association between men, children, and sexual threat.

Most male educators can tell you the first time they felt it.

Sometimes it’s a joke, the kind of joke that pretends to be harmless while doing real damage.

“You’re brave, mate.”
“I could never do that, people would think…”
“My wife wouldn’t like a man changing our daughter.”

Sometimes it’s a comment framed as concern.

“I’m sure you’re lovely, but… you understand.”
“It’s not personal. It’s just… you know… what you hear.”

Sometimes it’s an informal policy. A parent requests that only female educators do toileting or nappy changes for their child. A centre quietly agrees, because it doesn’t want conflict, and because management is calculating reputational risk.

Sometimes it becomes formal – in 2025, after high-profile allegations, some centres, and voices publicly advocated gender-based restrictions on intimate care tasks, with at least one reported policy banning male staff from nappy changing or toileting duties.

Whatever form it takes, the message is consistent – Your presence in this work is suspect.

It is important to name what that message does psychologically.
It teaches male educators to see themselves through other people’s fear. It trains them into hypervigilance. It makes them cautious about the very behaviours that good care requires. It can make them withdraw from touch entirely, which sounds safe until you realise what it means in practice for children who need comfort.

Early childhood is not an era of distance. Small children learn safety through closeness – a hand held crossing a room, a steady body beside them when they’re overwhelmed, a gentle lift onto a change table, a reassuring presence in a new environment. Of course, boundaries matter. Of course, consent matters, and the sector is increasingly explicit about building cultures of child safety and bodily autonomy.

But no-touch is not the same as safe touch. And a culture that drives men away from appropriate care doesn’t automatically make children safer. It often just reshuffles risk without addressing it. The fear is real. The scapegoat is wrong.

A hard truth sits inside this debate – sexual abuse does occur in institutions, including childcare. When it is exposed, it is devastating. It creates trauma that can last a lifetime. It shatters trust not only in individuals but in systems.

It is also true that sexual offending, in the general population, is overwhelmingly committed by men, a statistical reality that fuels public fear. Some academic commentary in Australia has argued that, in early childhood settings, abuse has been mostly committed by men and that attempts to avoid discrimination can sometimes lead to inadequate scrutiny of male workers.

But here is the ethical distinction that matters: A pattern in offender demographics is not a licence to treat every individual man as a likely offender. Child safety requires robust systems that apply to everyone, not fear-based rules that target a gender.

When we reach for gender bans, we are doing something emotionally understandable but politically lazy – we are mistaking a visible category (“men”) for a reliable prevention strategy. It isn’t.

If you want to prevent abuse, you don’t start by excluding a gender. You start by designing environments and systems where abuse is harder to perpetrate and easier to detect, regardless of who is employed.

This is exactly how the debate has been distorted by recent events. The public conversation can become consumed by the question, should men be allowed? while neglecting the more important question – What systems failed, and how do we fix them?

A Guardian investigation in 2025 described a pattern of systemic shortcomings – inconsistent regulatory responses, difficulties in substantiating allegations involving very young children, and challenges in acting against individuals where police do not prosecute, leaving concerns unaddressed and information fragmented.  That is a systems problem. Gender bans don’t repair it.

Similarly, SBS reporting on calls to ban men from childcare framed such bans as “fear-driven policies” that would not address the “real failures” in the sector, while noting men make up only a small minority of the workforce.

If your house has faulty wiring, you don’t fix it by banning left-handed people from using the kitchen. You fix the wiring.

The result is predictable – fewer men join, and the men who stay learn to keep their heads down, which is the opposite of what a healthy, transparent child-safe culture should encourage.

Anti-Male Stigma

This is the part that often gets missed. Stigma doesn’t only hurt male educators. It can inadvertently create conditions that make child safety harder, because it can:

Reduce workforce diversity and deepen staff shortages, increasing reliance on casuals and constant churn, and high churn can weaken relationships and oversight.

Discourage open conversation about boundaries, because men in particular may fear that talking about touch, toileting, or safeguarding will itself make them seem suspicious.

Create informal, inconsistent rules (“men don’t do nappies”) that shift tasks onto women and can reduce clarity about who is responsible for what, when, and under what supervision.

Promote the illusion of safety – parents feel reassured by a gender restriction while systemic vulnerabilities, supervision, reporting, information sharing, remain unresolved.

If your goal is child safety, you want more clarity, more professional standards, more transparent practice, not whispered exceptions.

Australia’s Framework

Australia already has a framework for thinking about this. The National Principles for Child Safe Organisations set out a nationally consistent approach to building cultures of child safety and wellbeing, giving effect to child safe standards recommended by the Royal Commission.

In early childhood education and care, the National Quality Framework embeds safety expectations. ACECQA’s guidance under Quality Area 2 emphasises safeguarding children’s health and safety, minimising risks, and protecting children from harm. It is explicit about adequate supervision, including that approved providers and supervisors must ensure children are adequately supervised at all times, and that ratios alone don’t guarantee supervision.   ACECQA also provides child safety guides and policy guidance specifically aimed at building child safe environments.

Notice what is absent from these frameworks – gender bans.

Child safety is achieved through strong recruitment and screening, clear codes of conduct, professional training, active supervision and safe environments, transparent practices around intimate care, reliable reporting and investigation pathways, information sharing that prevents “problem individuals” from simply moving on, and an organisational culture that takes concerns seriously without defaulting to moral panic.

If there is a lesson from recent scandals and investigations, it is that working with children checks and good intentions are not enough, systems must be designed to pick up patterns, respond to concerns, and support regulators and providers to act. That is the real work of safety.

The Double Bind

Male educators are often asked to provide “male role models,” as if their gender is their job description. In the next breath, they are warned not to be too close, too affectionate, too physical, too present.

This creates a double bind: If you are distant, you are criticised for not being nurturing but if you are warm, you are scrutinised for being “too” nurturing.

That bind can distort practice. It can push men toward stereotyped roles in the centre, the “rough-and-tumble play guy,” the “sports guy,” the “discipline guy,” because those are the socially sanctioned forms of masculinity around children. They are also, sometimes, the forms that reassure anxious adults – rough play looks less intimate than soothing tears.

But early childhood education isn’t meant to reproduce gender stereotypes but rather expand children’s sense of what humans can be.
When children see men doing gentle work, they learn something quietly revolutionary – that care is not female, and tenderness is not shameful.

This is moral education by example. And that is why stigma matters. It doesn’t just police men. It teaches children what kind of world they live in.

“I’m worried about my own son, and also about the future of men in the sector”

One of the most striking things about the ABC’s 2025 first-person account from “Ben,” a male early childhood educator, is that it holds both truths at once – he describes feeling anxious as a parent in a shaken system, while also worrying about what the crisis will do to men in the sector. He notes that men are only about 3% of the workforce and argues it matters that children see men in care work, so it isn’t learned as “only women’s work.”

That combination, fear plus commitment, is the honest emotional reality for many male educators right now. They are not indifferent to risk. They are not asking parents to “get over it.” They are often as horrified as anyone by revelations of harm. What they are asking for is the right target – not gender, but systems.

Men in early childhood settings are often isolated – they may be the only man in the centre, sometimes the only one across multiple centres in a region. They may have no mentor who understands their experience. They may have no safe space to talk about the specific dilemmas they face without sounding defensive.

Research and commentary on men navigating this “gendered terrain” points to exactly these dynamics – being interrogated rather than supported, being treated as an exception, and having one’s presence constantly explained.

If Australia genuinely wants more men in the care workforce, and if we are serious about workforce shortages and gender segregation, we need to stop recruiting men with one hand while shaming them with the other.

Parents are not villains in this story. They are doing what parents do – trying to keep their child safe in a world that sometimes fails.
But there is a line between understandable anxiety and discriminatory practice.

A parent has a right to ask – What are your safeguarding policies? How do you manage intimate care? How are incidents reported? Who supervises staff? What training is provided? What oversight exists?

A parent does not have an ethical right to demand, as a default, that an entire gender be excluded from core duties in a profession, any more than a parent has the right to demand that only white staff, or only staff of a certain religion, care for their child. (Those comparisons are uncomfortable, but they clarify the principle.)

If you normalise gender exclusions in childcare, you entrench the idea that men are inherently suspect and women inherently safe, and both ideas are false, and both can harm children.

Children are safest when the adults around them are well-trained, well-supported, well-supervised, and operating in cultures where concerns are acted upon and information is shared.

The debate we keep having, “ban men” versus “don’t ban men,” is, frankly, too small.

There’s a moment at the end of the day, when the room is thinning out and the children are tired in that soft, wobbly way that comes after a full day of learning and feelings.

A child runs up, arms open, face bright. They want a hug because a hug is what comfort looks like in their small universe.

If you are a male educator, you still do the quick calculation – Who can see? Is the parent here? Is this okay in this centre’s culture?

And then, if you are lucky, if the workplace is healthy, you do what the job requires – you accept the hug with ordinary warmth, as if it is no more suspicious than a band-aid or a storybook.

Because for the child, it is ordinary. It is safe. It is care.

The tragedy is that our public debate keeps trying to solve deep system failures by narrowing the field of who is allowed to care.

If we want children to be safe, we need to build robust child-safe cultures and oversight that do not depend on gendered myths. If we want boys and girls to grow up in a society where care is not coded female and men are not presumed dangerous, we need to stop treating male educators as walking reputational hazards.

A country that can’t trust men to care for children will end up with fewer carers, more exhausted women, deeper workforce shortages, and children quietly educated into fear.

We can do better than that.

We can build systems that are genuinely safer, and a culture in which a man can comfort a crying toddler without feeling he must first prove, again, that he is not a threat.