Am I being unreasonable to question why preschool hasn't informed me that a male preschool worker is helping my daughter with toileting?

[GaqiNa]

This is a very sensitive topic.
My daughter is attending preschool and yesterday I found out a male worker has been helping her with toileting.
I had no idea there was a male worker looking after my child in the first place as he's not listed in the email the preschool has sent to me. I thought there were only female workers looking after my daughter and now out of the blue I find out there's a male in the room.
He's not listed on there website, I can't find any information about this man anywhere. I have seen him randomly when I pick up and drop off my child but I never thought he's looking after my daughter as he's not even listed as part of the team.
I feel I've been deceived by the pre-school not letting me know who's actually looking after my child.
Am I being unreasonable?

I guess the main point is: should men work in nursery or pre-school settings at all? The nursery my DS attends never specified who does his intimate care. I know who the regular staff are in his room - 3 women and 1 man - and I assume that all of them will occasionally change my son’s diaper. If a staff member is ill, they’d get temp staff in and I wouldn’t be aware of that, so there might be a stranger (male or female) who I’ve never seen before changing him. Maybe not ideal, but I can’t see how a nursery could call round each morning to let parents know which staff is in today and ask for permission who can change which child’s diaper.

OP you have the right to know your child is being changed by someone of the opposite sex. You also have the right to request that your child is not changed by someone you don’t consent to.

That’s because family members are more likely to have access. It’s an opportunity thing. Anywhere men have an opportunity is a risk.

The reasons don’t matter

family members are perpetrators far more often

Of course, the reason matters! Family members are the main perpetrators because it's their family's kids they have the easiest access to. If they had easy access to children at a nursery or at church or wherever, then that's who they would abuse.

People wave away the risk from strangers because "family is more likely to abuse" without taking into account the reasons why, and that makes everyone less safe.

So do you mean that because family members are more likely to commit these crimes we shouldn’t bother with any safeguarding when dc are outside the
home?

Because he's a nursery worker and that's what his employer is paying him to do?

I'm not saying OP shouldn't have the feelings she does and she clearly doesn't want a male doing that.

I personally would specify that before I enrolled my child. No toileting support from male staff.

As staff turnover in these places can be high or people work part time. You can't rely on a website with names and contact details for all staff to be up to date.

You certainly should if it's advertised/promoted as a single-sex nursery - which is what the sign on the public toilet door does.

FWIW I’m entirely happy to show my genitals to a man where it’s directly relevant to his job. I’m actually not even precious about there being a chaperone, but they’re often called in for the protection of the male.

Once the chaperone was the lady from the gym reception desk and I would have actively preferred her not to be there given it meant I was showing my genitals my strange woman presumably with little to no safeguarding checks and absolutely no medical knowledge.

(I appreciate all of that is my privilege, but I use to make the point that women wouldn’t necessarily be reluctant to show their genitals to men where it is necessary in the context of the contact).

The equivalent example here is that you go in expecting to see your regular male gynae who you know, and there’s another man in there you’ve never heard of or seen before. No one has told you he’s replaced your old gynae and there’s no comms or mention of him online as working at the practice. No chaperone. If you were really willing to drop your knickers and be examined by him without any questions or concerns, that’s your (naive) prerogative.

Also, you’re an adult who can determine whether the situation is safe, the person qualified and can challenge/fight back or complain if it goes wrong.

A baby at nursery cannot do any of those things to protect itself.

Think of a risk assessment where different people in the same situation get a different score based on level of threat they pose. Like car insurance - a 22 year old male gets a higher risk score than a 45 year old woman because statistically the 22 year old male is more likely to take more risks/be less careful/more likely to be in an accident.

Statistically children are more likely to be sexually assaulted by a man than a woman so the risk score for an unknown man wiping a little girl’s bum should be higher than a known female doing it.

Honestly op. With staff turnover levels being so high it would
Be a full time job to keep parents abreast of every change.

Now who’s being patronising. I’m pretty certain that if the concern were that a man was whipping her child’s bottom it would have been obvious from the very beginning!

When my children were at private nursery they pinned a note to the door saying which staff were in which room each day. We would be told if supply staff were working.
I'm pretty sure a childcare setting will know day to day who is caring for which children. They have to work out the ratios, the breaks, who's working late etc.

Your trust should be based on the correct protocols for safeguarding being in place and followed. Blindly trusting an institution to follow safeguarding instead of challenging them when they don’t is just risking your child’s safety. Nursery isn’t cheap either.

You should always be informed of a change in personnel doing intimate care, and using agency staff as subs for intimate care should be communicated to parents too. TBH you’d hope they have supervision of new staff particularly temporary staff, not just leaving them alone to care intimately for vulnerable people. If you found out something had happened, you and the school should at least know who it was that was on duty that day.

It should never be a surprise to see a stranger doing your mum’s intimate care! You should know beforehand - it’s not a difficult thing to communicate. And an organisation who doesn’t communicate this change or understand the safeguarding risk of not doing it, isn’t likely to be detail oriented around the recruitment and checks either.

You may not always know if protocol is followed or when a stranger is caring for your loved ones, but if you do find out it’s important to flag the risk and expect better comms /request something different.

My DC are adults now but I can remember asking their nursery if they employed any male care workers. If they had said yes I'd not have registered my DC there and I had a boy and a girl but would not feel happy with a male nursery worker as male abuse rates are much higher than female ones.

Hard to tell. Op had such a strong reaction and people do often drip feed or just big things up on some threads.

Agency workers shouldn’t be doing nappy changes.

I would be concerned too, OP. Too many horrible reports in the news of male nursery workers right now.

At DD’s nursery we could specify that we didn’t want our girls to be changed by a man. It can be a significant religious or cultural issue (travellers, in our area).

At DS’s nursery staff were never, ever alone in a room with a child. No male staff as it happened, but I wouldn’t have had an issue specifically because he wouldn’t have been alone in an environment where abuse could happen.

Op, there’s no harm in asking.

So if all the children are in the garden and one child needs a wee, everyone comes back inside?

It’s more like me turning up to my normal female gynaecologist and instead there being a male gynaecologist.

I am making the leap that the man in the OP is someone employed by the nursery, and not a random man who has wandered in off the street as seems to be the case in your example.

I think you have to trust your nursery is safeguarding your child, or you pull them out regardless of the number of male employees. I similarly trust my doctors surgery to not allow random men to sit in the treatment rooms waiting for me to expose myself so they can get a cheap thrill. If I didn’t trust the person they were sending me to see was a qualified health professional (male or female, intimate care or not) I’d be finding a new practice.

A new staff member being permitted to do intimate care is….iffy.

Not because he’s a bad man but he would be on probation, induction, etc. it seems to me to be poor practice to allow it fully unsupervised.

Seriously? You know of a nursery with only two staff?

There’s really no need to be defensive, you made an honest mistake and corrected it.
(And, I’m sure like many posters here, British and non-British, I speak one foreign language very well and can get by in two more. My spelling is mostly excellent but we all make mistakes sometimes. Equally irrelevant.)

You’re being wildly unreasonable. If you don’t trust the nursery; that’s a bigger issue: maybe he’s new and they haven’t updated the website yet? Our nursery has 2 male staff and I think it’s great.