Title: Are Men the Solution to the Child Care Crisis?

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Amina Srna: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. I'm producer Amina Srna filling in for Brian today. Good morning again, everyone. Solving the problem of the high cost and low access to early childhood education opportunities is playing a big role in the mayor's race, but it's not just about opening more centers if you can't find qualified educators to work there. There's a big shortage of workers in early childhood education, and no doubt low pay is a leading cause of that, but my next guest explores another avenue to improve the situation. Hire more men.

Rachel Booth, a policy correspondent at Vox.com covering social policies, has a new piece on the site titled A Solution to the Child Care Shortage is Hiding in Plain Sight. She's here to talk about the cultural barriers that discourage men from seeking work in the field and employers from hiring them, and what could change the situation. Welcome back to the show, Rachel Booth.

Rachel Booth: Thank you. Thank you so much for having me.

Amina Srna: Listeners, especially men and women who work in early childhood education or parents with kids in daycare, if you want to share your thoughts on what would bring more men to the field, what advantages have you found? Is this a career you'd recommend to young men? Call or text us at 212-433-WNYC. That's 212-433-9692. We can hear calls from stay-at-home dads, too. Are you viewed with more suspicion, or has that role become more accepted? Call or text 212-433-WNYC. That's 212-433-9692. Rachel, how dire is the shortage of early childhood workers?

Rachel Booth: It is a struggle for centers and programs all across the country. They took a big decline in the pandemic, and it's been slowly and steadily increasing since then, but if you talk to really any center director, they are often hanging on by a thread. They do not have much slack in the system. It's no secret why. The wages and the benefits are extremely low. If you work in a program for a couple of years, you could get a much higher-paying job, even as a private babysitter or working in elementary school, or often in retail these days. The competition for higher wages is just extremely fierce. As it's definitely true, that would be the case with women or men to recruit.

Amina Srna: As you're acknowledging the low pay in this field, do you have a sense of how much early childcare workers are making, or maybe it's an issue of hours spent in these childcare centers?

Rachel Booth: It definitely does vary by-- I'm not sure what the New York City average is, but it was between $9 and $13 an hour. It's inching up a little bit. $15 in some jurisdictions, but still, on average, can be minimum wage in a lot of places. That is a big focus for advocates in pushing their legislatures, but we saw wage increases after the pandemic with infusions of funds, but a lot of those supplementary COVID-era funds are going away. It remains a very big challenge for cities and states, really, across the country.

Amina Srna: That was, I think, a stat that was not in your article. I'll ask you about a stat that is in your article. Only 3% of the preschool workforce, and just 6% of the childcare workforce, is male. I'm not surprised that it's not balanced, but that does seem shockingly low compared to other historically female fields, like nursing or teaching in general. Can you just talk to us a little bit more about that stat?

Rachel Booth: That's even significantly lower than we see in K12 teaching, where men make up a smaller percentage of the workforce. There are historic reasons for this. There are cultural, there are more practical reasons for this. It is a field that is perceived as very overtly feminine. Caring for children is something we associate with women strongly. It's a field that women are often steered into. Certainly, there is both a feeling for men that they're not really welcome or wanted, or that there might be something wrong with their masculinity if they do pursue that field.

Those expectations can be experienced at all sorts of stages of the career exploration process, in school, and hiring, from parents, from colleagues. When there are so few men, often if a center has any men working on staff at all, they might be the only men there. I went to a center for this story that has three men on staff. Research shows, and it's intuitive, that that can make a really big difference because it just helps normalize it, make people feel more part of a community, less unusual. Although even in those situations, it still can require some specific education and training to make people understand what's going on and help set expectations a little better.

Amina Srna: Here is, I believe, a clarifying question from a listener. "Is this suggestion holding salaries equal? Are you saying even at this low rate, they should get more men? "Rachel, do you want to just clarify that?

Rachel Booth: I think that to get more men and women, we're going to need to raise wages. I think that is very clear, at least to get more men and women, and then reduce turnover after they do come into the field. I think what we are seeing, though, is there are a lot of men out there who really shine with working with kids, are really good at it. We know from research that there are things that male educators, male staff can bring to a classroom, can bring to an early childhood setting that is really valuable, both in terms of some of the teaching methods and play strategies that they tend to bring or some of the mentorship that they can provide.

It's both. I think not every man would be good in this, of course. I'm sure we're going to talk more about that, just like not every woman would be. I think we can say safely that there are more talented people out there who would do well in these jobs that we need to fill, that we're not currently trying to reach, trying to create opportunities and pathways to recruit in the way that we are trying to do so for men in other fields and the way that we are trying to do for women in other fields.

There's been an intentional resistance to trying, and I think those are for reasons-- While understandable, there are better ways to try to mitigate some of the fears that have, I think, prevented people from wanting to do that kind of outreach.

Amina Srna: I want to invite those people again, one more time, men and women who work in early childhood education, or parents with kids in daycare. Share your thoughts with us. What would bring more men to this field? What would bring more workers to this field? 212-433-WNYC. That's 212-433-9692. You talked a little bit about the cultural barriers for men going into the field, some of it around masculinity and work traditionally done by women, but let's talk about the fear that children would be more at risk of abuse from male workers. Is there any data to back that up or refute it?

Rachel Booth: It's absolutely understandable that parents and center staff would want to protect kids. That's the most natural and important instinct in the world. The reality is that most perpetrators of child abuse are men. That is really, I think, where a lot of this ambivalence comes from, that families feel nervous if they see a man in a childcare role. They feel like the risk is not worth it, but the data doesn't show that men in early childhood education are inherently more likely to harm children than women.

The best way to prevent abuse isn't to exclude men entirely. It's to have strong safeguards for everyone on staff. Rigorous background checks, clear policies for vetting and hiring, transparency measures, even including cameras or windows in classrooms or a lot of centers have rules that can never have an adult alone with a child. There always must be two adults present. I think the people who really think about child abuse and how to prevent it and creating cultures to workplaces that make reporting much more possible and safe, they're not saying, "Don't hire men." That's not their recommendation.

There's a lot of things we can and should be doing around creating cultures to make child care safe, but just blanketly excluding half the population, especially when we know some men are just extremely good at this kind of work, I think that it's a tough conversation. I think when I've spoken with a director who employs men on staff, she said, "Look, I understand some parents just won't want to do this, and that's okay, and they can go elsewhere, but we have a lot of standards and policies here, and this is how we do it here."

Amina Srna: You spoke to men that work in this field. What led them to it generally?

Rachel Booth: It was really interesting. Almost every man that I spoke-- These men didn't wake up when they were young children and think, "Oh, I always wanted to do this job." It wasn't really on their radar. They were definitely steered in other directions, but through various life circumstances-- One educator took a class on early childhood in college because he thought, "This could be good for helping me when I one day become a dad." Then, through that class, he realized, "Wow, this is a really humane field and really nice." That changed his trajectory.

Another staffer that I spoke with had gotten exposure because he needed to fulfill a service requirement for his high school. The childcare center was where he did it. Through that, he realized, "Oh, wow, I really enjoy this work. I really relish it." Now he's been doing it for the last seven years. I think one of the takeaways I got from speaking with men about how they ultimately got into the field is just that most men don't have much practical exposure to this kind of work, unlike women, where we're often steered and encouraged from very young ages.

I think just viewing the teaching and care work as something that we could create more opportunities for people to just explore it, normalize it as something that might be suited to their interests and skill sets, I think, would help. Obviously there are other strategies that people are thinking about, like targeted mentorships and scholarships and certain kinds of communication around the job, but I think it was interesting to hear so many different versions of people saying, "Yes, this wasn't what I thought I was going to do, but once I ended up in this situation, I realized, oh, this is really meaningful work. This is more meaningful than that government contractor job I did for nine months," that kind of thing.

Amina Srna: Let's take a call. Sue in Red Bank, New Jersey. Hi. Thank you so much for calling in.

Sue: Hi. I just wanted to let it be known I was a preschool teacher many years ago. At that time, NYU had a program to train neurodiverse men to be preschool teachers. It seemed to have worked out very well. After a lot of training, they were fine, helpful, perfectly able to fill the job.

Amina Srna: That is a very cool story. Thank you so much for your call, Sue. Please call us back anytime. Rachel, I see that you also report on some problems that men in this field encounter. You wrote one was about how they were expected to fix things around the center, like handyman work.

Rachel Booth: It's interesting, men just face-- Of the men who do enter the field, there are just a lot of really competing expectations around gender and performing gender. On the one hand, they are bringing diversity of gender to a center and there's expectation that they can provide that more male or masculine presence or role modeling or activities to a classroom, but then they're also aware of all the suspicion and the distrust, and there's definitely feeling, "Well, don't, don't be too male. Don't be too masculine. Make sure you are a little more than your female colleagues, but not too much."

That's a constant battle that they are navigating in all these different contexts. That could come up, as you mentioned, whether they are perceived as, "Oh, you could be the default school handyman, or you shouldn't take this child to the gender-neutral bathroom, because who knows what might happen?" A lot of colleagues are often trying to help and protect their male colleagues because they want to protect them as well from any misunderstanding or challenging situation, but it can be very taxing, and it can be so taxing that it leads a lot of people to say, "This is too much for me. I'm tired of feeling so heavily scrutinized and distrusted."

There's also a lot of research about how maybe they get more support from their colleagues, but a lot of men who go into childcare face a lot of negative feedback from their dads or their grandfathers or people actually close in their social circles outside of work. That's something that a lot of men who enter this field have to deal with as well.

Amina Srna: Rachel, we're getting a few callers and texters who have similar questions on how to get into this field. Let's take one. Joe in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC. Hi, Joe.

Joe: Good morning. I was just telling your screener that there are guys like me who are semi-retired or retired who would definitely be interested in being able to augment their retirement check by getting into a child care program or helping out, but I don't think there's enough incentives to do that by the city or by the state. I think there's an area-- lack of incentives to drive men or make men think that this could be a second career or something that would supplement retirement.

Amina Srna: Post-retirement.

Joe: I'm a former employee from New York City, and I would also be looking at it from even a business perspective if there could be a business model that could be set up, full oversight, obviously, safety, and everything else. I'm an ASO coach, I have safe harbor certifications, but it's just not enough to be able to-- Especially in a city like New York, where it's so expensive living here, the cost of living in the city-

Amina Srna: Joe, thank you so much.

Joe: -and then taking this on as a full career.

Amina Srna: Thank you so much for your call. We really appreciate it. Rachel, do you want to respond to maybe some of what Joe was saying, or do you want to talk about some recruitment efforts to attract men to these jobs?

Rachel Booth: I think Joe is completely right. There currently aren't really enough incentives, let alone targeted incentives, but I think that that is a key piece of it. There needs to be that investment. One of the things that struck me doing the reporting is we actually are seeing more of those kinds of targeted and more intentional recruitment strategies in K12 for male teachers, for Black teachers, teachers of color. I think we know how to do this. We know how to create opportunities for pipelines.

I think just while there's been some conversations around it and some efforts, and I think the guest that you had call in earlier, that is a really good example. There just hasn't been a systemic nationwide push. I think it's going to be interesting. One thing a leader told me who is working on this in Virginia is that the federal government is talking a lot more about, "Well, how do we help young men get back into the workforce?" I know Joe is talking about retirement, and I think that's another important question because after-school programs for a long time they rely on retirees for help. I think assuming everyone can do it unpaid is not very reliable.

Oftentimes, we do need to make sure that people are going to get compensated for the help they provide to these programs. I think that's just a key part of thinking about this, but it's also doing so recognizing that maybe some of the outreach strategies and communications and things you do once you bring people into the program, like anti bias trainings or talking a little more openly about gender will be important to keep people once you get them in.

Amina Srna: We will have to leave it there for today. Rachel Booth, a policy correspondent at Vox.com covering social policies. Her new piece on the site is titled A Solution to the Child Care Reporting is Hiding in Plain Sight. Thanks so much for coming back on, Rachel.

Rachel Booth: Oh, thank you for having me.

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