In Praise of Men Who Opt For "Women’s Work"

Trustworthy, loving men improve the lives of the kids and adults they care for

For the past few weeks, I’ve been offline attending a silent meditation retreat.¹ I was able to keep The Auntie Bulletin running as usual with help from some lovely and generous colleagues. Huge thanks to Jessica Slice for the (for me, genuinely life-changing) interview on disability and carework, Elissa Strauss for sharing an excerpt from her truly must-read book When You Care, and Anne Helen Petersen, Auntie Coco, and the brilliant Culture Study community for a huge list of fun activities to do with kids.

In newsletters as in daily life, it takes a village.

This meditation retreat I recently attended was led by two former Buddhist nuns. Being a “former” monastic is a thing in Theravada Buddhism – people can ordain for life, or for only a short time – but these former nuns were in it for the long haul and only left because, unfortunately, patriarchy is just as toxic in spiritual communities as it is everywhere else.

So these are radical feminist ex-nuns, and most of the people who sign up for their retreats know it. And that means most of the people who sign up for their retreats are women. On this particular retreat, there were about 40 women and non-binary retreat attendees (known as “yogis”), and 4 men.

These men were lovely. On a retreat held in what’s called “Noble Silence” you don’t talk – you don’t even make eye contact – but you do get a strong sense of people’s vibes just by living and practicing in such proximity. Yogis each have a daily task to keep the overall community running – a lovely enactment of interdependence if ever there was one – and mine was to wash the dishes after lunch, in partnership with one of the male yogis. Another of the men was coming in and out of the kitchen dealing with the garbage, recycling, and compost at this time of day. Another drove my carpool to and from the retreat center. They were each so considerate, so mindful, so grounded. At the end of the retreat, as we were coming out of Noble Silence, we were invited to go around the circle and share a word or phrase we were really feeling at that moment. The fourth male yogi’s phrase – the one thing he most wanted to highlight after two weeks on silent retreat – was “the wisdom of women.” Bless him.

I just love and appreciate, so much, men who love and appreciate women. I love it when men opt into and participate well in women-centered and queer-friendly spaces. I love men who have lots of women friends (my partner is such a man). I love men who choose to be caretakers, whether informally, as Aunties (I suppose we can call them uncles, if we must), or formally, as childcare workers, elementary educators and special education teachers, social workers, eldercarers, home health aides, or nurses.

I love men who choose women-dominated fields because they are opting into a career that brings lower status and lower pay (which takes character), and they are also often choosing more meaning and more connection. As one male childcare provider puts it, “My emotional bank outweighs my monetary bank.” (Check out a truly sweet and thoughtful 7-minute video profile of this provider here, or embedded below).

Men who choose so-called “women’s work” are brave and wise, and they really deserve our respect.

My friend Chris, who was killed in a car accident in March, was a few months away from finishing nursing school. He would have been such an amazing nurse. Back when we first met, we were both working as caregivers for our grandmothers and bonded over our mutual affection for our matriarchs. During his nursing program, Chris’s favorite clinical rotations were in eldercare, and that was where he planned to work. He spoke so joyfully, so delightedly, of his friendships with the patients he cared for. They shared so many jokes. He was so good at cheering up the grumpy people and loving the lonely people and understanding what everyone needed to be well.

A bunch of Chris’s nursing school friends attended his memorial. A few were men. Bless them. I hope they channel Chris’s kindness and his care for his patients for the rest of their careers. In addition to Chris’s example, they will almost certainly have many wise and experienced women role models around them.²

Have you seen The Pitt? I made an exception to my practice of almost never watching TV, and watched it. Such wonderful nurses! These are Brandon Mendez Homer as nurse Donnie and Katherine LaNasa as the wisest, kindest, and most competent woman in the world, nurse Dana.

Now, when women begin to dominate a professional field, men typically exit. To pivot from nursing to my own professional area of expertise – teaching – I can tell you that well into the 19th century, most schoolteachers were men. This was because they had greater access to education, and school boards considered them much more desirable. Women were hired only in a pinch, and in many places getting married meant losing their job. But more and more girls were accessing education during this time period, and ideas about women’s natural domesticity were taking hold, and by the end of the 19th century – in cities especially – it had become typical for women to teach elementary students and men to teach secondary students. As more women entered teaching, more men left. The status of the profession declined, as did teacher salaries.

These days, teaching is dominated by (mostly middle-class, mostly white) women. I wasn’t able to find teacher demographic data broken down by grade level, but I have spent a lot of my adult life working with teachers in public and private schools, so I’m going to make an educated guess. I think somewhat less than 50% of high school teachers are men (and they cluster in science, math, physical education, and career and technical education),³ and then at the middle school level it’s about 25% male teachers, then maybe 10% at the elementary level, and finally well under 5% of early childhood educators are men. My youngest niece has a delightful pre-K teacher who’s a man, bless him.

Then there are the male Aunties and other male alloparents, including grandfathers, uncles, step-dads, foster dads, male friends of the family, and any others who choose to show up consistently in the lives of their loved ones’ children. These are the men who purposely learn to be good with kids. They joyfully join the scrum of neighborhood kids on the big trampoline. They may willingly discuss Minecraft for a full twenty minutes. If they say they’ll pick the kids up from school, they’ll pick the kids up from school – and they may even remember to bring snacks. Bless them!⁴

Now I’m going to acknowledge the dark and awful thing that often comes up when we think about men who care for children (or elders or sick or disabled people): abuse. The reality is that entrusting children or other vulnerable people to the care of men can be scary, because men perpetrate abuse – especially sexual abuse – at much higher rates than women do. According to a 2022 report on child maltreatment by the U.S. Administration for Children and Families, nearly 89% of child sexual abuse perpetrators are men.⁵

This is a hard topic and one I’ve been struggling to figure out how to write about since I started this newsletter nearly a year ago. Child abuse and its prevention are not my area of expertise. Also, I am not a parent and I don’t have to make parents’ hard choices. But as someone who writes about Auntiehood and alloparenting for a living, I feel it’s time to wade into the breach. Today I’m going to take a crack at it, while also making explicit my strong intention to “learn in public” (as one of my favorite social science researchers, Adrienne Keene, puts it). If you have perspective or feedback on what follows, I really invite it. You can reply to this email (if you got the post in your inbox), email me at auntiebulletin at gmail dot com, or drop your thoughts in the comments.

One option for protecting children and other vulnerable people from bad men is to limit kids’ exposure to men outside the family. This is a truly understandable impulse, but I’m not sure where it gets us. For one thing, something like a third of perpetrators of child abuse and child sexual abuse are family members, so restricting kids’ relationships with men to male family members isn’t necessarily safer. For another thing, if primary caretakers don’t purposely choose the men in their kids’ lives, that doesn’t mean the kids won’t encounter men. They just may not encounter as many men who are consistently trustworthy and caring.

In my view, having trustworthy, caring men around is worth a lot. Indeed, the greater the number of trustworthy and caring people – of all genders – who are part of a kid’s life, the greater the protection against predators, because there are lots of loved ones keeping an eye out and noticing what’s going on. More adults who love and truly know a child means more opportunities to recognize and respond to red flags.

For parents and other primary caretakers making decisions about who to trust with your kids, I did a little digging online for helpful resources. A lot of what I found was about selecting formal care providers, such as daycares and schools. However, I did encounter a few resources that feel relevant to the chosen family context. I think the following two sources, while maybe not perfect, are pretty helpful and insightful:

• From the international nonprofit Child Rescue Coalition, “6 Tips for Choosing a Babysitter You Can Trust.” I really like the parts about doing trial runs, finding out how the kids feel about the person, having open conversations with kids and caretakers about abuse and your family’s expectations around things like privacy and bathing, and trusting your gut.

• From the Colorado nonprofit CO4Kids, “How to Choose a Safe Caregiver or Babysitter for Your Child.” I like the questions primary caregivers can ask themselves about how the prospective caretaker behaves. “Do they think it’s funny to scare your child?” “Do they tell you that your child is a nuisance or annoying?” If so, they are probably not good Auntie material.

Here’s to the men who are good Auntie material. There are lots out there. I know some personally, including my own lovely partner, who is truly great with and beloved by the kids in our life. And according to the always-ongoing Auntie Bulletin reader survey (fill it out here if you haven’t already!), something like 5% of Auntie Bulletin readers identify as men. That’s a few hundred more dudes who are prioritizing showing up lovingly and reliably for the families in their lives. Bless them.

Male Aunties, you’re the best. Keep up the good work – and if you’re up for it, tell us about yourself in the comments! What’s your relationship to the kids in your life? How, if at all, do questions of kids’ safety and security come up? How, if at all, do you talk about these in your community? We’d love to hear from you!

Finally, a quick ask: Does anyone know (or know of) any experts on men and childcare, or men and carework more generally? Especially if they focus on the positive and protective factors around men who do carework, I’d love to talk to them! You can reply to this email (if you received the post in your inbox) or email me at auntiebulletin at gmail dot com. Thank you!

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1. It’s worth pointing out that being an Auntie makes a two-week retreat possible. Parents of young kids can sometimes make a weekend retreat work, or maybe up to a week if they have a really supportive partner or reliable grandparents and Aunties on call. But you do not encounter parents of young children on longer retreats. It’s strictly older adults, young adults, and childless people.

2. If only we could surround all of the men in male-dominated fields with wise and experienced women! A council of wise women to advise every tech entrepreneur! A council of wise women for every elected official! And the rule is, the tech entrepreneurs and elected officials have to retain the wise women’s approval, and if they lose that approval, they have to go work fulltime in a childcare center for five years.

3. As a longtime educator of high school teachers, I’ve observed that many men who pursue secondary teacher certification imagine they will get to spend their careers pontificating on their areas of expertise (the laws of thermodynamics, World War II battles, etc.). A good teacher preparation program will disabuse them of this idea, then teach them to support their students to be the ones doing most of the talking and thinking.

4. Remembering to bring snacks when you pick up the kids is the gold standard. I only remember about half the time.

5. According to the 2022 report on child maltreatment from the U.S. Administration for Children and Families, “sexual abuse [of children] is mostly perpetrated by males (88.7%) with less than 10 percent (8.4%) by female perpetrators.”