Male carer changing daughter’s nappy

[FirstTimeMummyHK]

AIBU to expect the nursery to tell me in advance that a man has now joined the nursery and will be changing my daughter’s nappy? We have been with this nursery for a while and there were only female carers there. The other day I went to pick up my daughter and there was a man sitting in there and I asked the nursery manager quietly
whether he changes my daughter and she said yes he would do. The nursery manager was very grumpy that I mentioned it. I was very nice and
polite to her. I felt that her reaction to my
question was unnecessarily grumpy. I am part of a religion where it’s quite a big deal to separate men and woman although we are not orthodox. I understand that nurseries wish to preserve equality etc and I am
a huge supporter of
men taking on caring roles. However AIBU to expect to be told in advance that a man would be changing my daughter / taking her to the toilet/ wiping her private area??

Hopefully the male member… as the females should be being left to the many many women who will also be on duty that day!

Legally I think you’ll find there’s no guarantee a current nursery with only female carers will always remain female only carers.
That’s sex discrimination.

However
Given half the kids there could be boys then they’d need half the staff to be men.

So women can want to work in nurseries and that's fine but decent, sane, normal men won't want to do this work? Alternatively, personal care to young children should only be done by female staff? I doubt nappy changing is the most popular task for any nursery worker but I don't see why the male staff should get to avoid it.

You can choose any nursery for your child. You can move them to another nursery if you don't like the staff. It may be more harmful to your child's development and mental health to repeatedly change their childcare provider.

I thought that that quoted part was clearly implicit of the whole quote and was obviously not a point in isolation - I was not intending to misrepresent you.

Also, as I clearly said in my quote - "as we're reading on here" - I was referring to some of the prevailing themes and mindsets and I didn't ever say or suggest that you personally had called men/male childcare workers paedophiles.

But yes @FirstTimeMummyHK you can LEGALLY insist only females change your daughter. Girls and women have rights protected by law and you are within your rights to insist on female carers, doctors etc!
It is the same reason why women’s refuges by law are allowed to advertise for female only staff!!

Equally families can expect nurseries to just employ men to look after their sons.
How does that work.

I agree! It appears the parents on here are being deliberately obtuse or very naive.
No male nursery member of staff would be touching my girls genitals.
A responsibility very easily devolved to a female nursery carer.

I find it incredible that women on here would even contemplate allowing that given nursery staff training and professional supervision is lesser than that of medical practitioners.

Ok. Well I’m being very clear here, I’ve worked with some outstanding male carers, and some horrific female ones…
I still feel there is never an occasion where personal care should be carried out by a male cater on a female …. If anything for as much the male carers protection as anything else.
The nursery should be putting measures and policies in place to protect this male nursery worker from accusations as much as anything else.

Paedophiles are more likely to be men than women.

They could yes… but the answer is obvious and you’re being deliberately argumentative … but I’ll humour you…
The care profession is massively out numbered by females….. employing males and females on an equal ratio would be literally impossible… so while you have a right to ask for male staff you would be a long time waiting.. so might as well just keep your son home till he’s potty trained!

But surely the same is true of the rights of baby boys then.
So how does that work with so few male carers.

Or is the same issue irrelevant with boys.

I do agree though the likelihood of accusations against the male carer, just from what I’ve read here and the whole point of this thread, is clearly much higher than against a woman.

Despite the nurses and carers we ve recently seen jailed…..all female.

Women who have been abused as children are so often dismissed because we must be damaged, our trauma must be tainting our interpretation of what's going on around us.
But your intuitions here are now being held up by research.
Prof Michael Salter at the University of NSW lead a study of 3,500 men, results published in November last year.
The study asked the men about their attitudes and behaviours towards children. On in five expressed sexual interest in children. One in six had acted on that interest.
Of the men who had perpetrated abuse they were prdominantly in high governance positions (that is, they were the ones developing policy and procedure in the industries they worked in), were married with children, and they were THREE TIMES MORE LIKELY TO BE WORKING WITH CHILDREN than men who expressed no sexual interest in children.
I was always very down on the tendency to be suspicious of men who worked with children, but this year I started doing management job for the first time in my life so I had mandatory ChildSafe training to do. That's where I heard about the study I've described above.
I don't know what to do with this information. I don't want to stop male people who are in no way interested in abusing kids from working with them. But the stats are horrifying and sickening. We can't even trust the policies and procedures that a child care centre or school or other children's service might have in place, because these men deliberately get into positions where they are the ones writing the policies and procedures.
I also agree with previous posters that this thread seems to have caught the attention of the darker corners of the internet and the troops have arrived to stop women talking openly and honestly about this.

Which is probably the answer if anyone isn’t happy with their nursery care, I quite agree.

I'm with you, OP. I've been asked if I would like a female chaperone when a male GP examined me. A female nurse stayed with me when a male gynae did an examination. I get these courtesies. Why does a little girl incapable of defending herself, or her mother, not get the same?

I’d also be pretty pissed off if the male PE teacher walked in the girls changing room!

But surely you can understand the difference between girls at school who are already/will soon be noticing and experiencing sex-based changes and puberty - and babies who don't even know what sex they are (or indeed what M/F sex IS)?

Even most adults won't know what sex a baby is if they're just wearing a nappy and haven't been given any 'giveaway' hairstyles or accessories.

It's an entirely normal thing for pubescent/pre-pubescent children to be mindful of sex, reproduction, impending adult development and clear biological differences between males and females - and for adults to 100% respect their feelings and sensibilities surrounding these. This is shown in the fact that, as well as male PE teachers not going into the girls' changing rooms, neither do the female PE teachers go into the boys' changing rooms.

The only single way that sex (as in the sex act) is relevant to a baby - not that the baby would have the faintest clue - is that it's the way the baby originally came about!

Yes the same can be said!…. But as I’m sure you’re very aware… it is near on impossible to employ male carers on the same ratio as female ones…. So if you only wanted men cleaning little Jimmy you’d have a hard job finding a nursery with male workers… where there are male workers then yes they should absolutely be doing the make nappies as I’ve stated several times… there is literally never an occasion where all carers on duty need to be male though, so where there are females on duty they should be doing the female personal care!

I am pretty sure you do not have that legal right.I think if you tried to demand it you would just be shown the door.

My point is that a parent can and should be able to insist their female baby is only washed and cared for by female staff (where there is plenty of females to do so!).
Where there are male staff parents can also ask that their sons personal care is looked after by him.

Exactly
and with so few people going into the job and so few nurseries to accommodate all the kids we need more people employed in the industry
Men and women doing the job.
At some point it would be great to see 50/50, so let’s encourage male carers.

That isn’t the point of this thread though…. It’s about males not performing personal care of females.. which they shouldn’t be as there is never a situation where a male carer needs to die to the huge ratio of female staff.

Threads divert and I was responding to your comment on there being not enough carers.

Of course you do!
You legally have every right to choose who does personal care on your child!
of course you can’t insist on one member of staff as that wouldn’t always be possible due to Rotas etc but you legally ah E a right to insist a male does not do personal care on a female.

A case could be made, though, that one of the prevailing attitudes on here, that all men are simply too dangerous to consider employing in a childcare setting, is actively leading to a constructive 'ban' on men who may want to pursue a career in childcare from doing so.

This is similar, the opposite way around, to a number of STEM industries - but thankfully, this is now being firmly tackled and measures being taken to ensure opportunities for girls. Nevertheless, although it must be deeply unpleasant and insulting for a woman to not be taken seriously and be accused of 'just wanting to flirt with the hot shirtless guys' or whatever, that's still not comparable in the nastiness stakes with a man being accused of wanting to abuse babies.

One way that these kinds of issues have been addressed in the past is by putting in preferential terms for under-represented demographics for 'levelling up' or 'positive discrimination' - financial awards, bursaries or benefits to help counteract the fact that their pathway is much less smooth than that of the majority demographic. I'm not entirely sure how it would promote women's causes or please the existing hardworking female child carers were the government to have a concerted drive to recruit more male child carers, and offer them a higher wage/financial incentive than the women in recognition of the huge barriers that they face?

The Department of Education disagrees
and here’s a run down of advice given to nurseries.