Hey! I’m back to writing blogs again after a short hiatus. Few things to mention as an update on what’s going on for Beef:
I GOT MARRIED! Finally after 3 years and 3 attempts at it, we finally tied the knot and it couldn’t have been a more perfect day; the sun was shining, everyone was smiling, Lauren looked stunning and I didn’t have a full blown panic attack while waiting at the end of the aisle. Yay! I will talk about wedding anxiety in another blog post, but for now I will say that while there were nerves on the morning of, my anxiety was nowhere near as bad as I thought it would be and I could do the whole day over and over again from the moment I woke up on the day to the moment I woke up the next day, I wouldn’t have changed anything about it.
I finally cut my hair and donated it to The Little Princess Trust for someone in need of a wig. They were a fantastic charity to deal with and I was happy to give away my beautiful long (18inches!!!) hair. I’ll miss being able to head bang like James Hetfield in his heyday but at least the hair will get put to good use and hopefully make someone happy. It was time for a change anyway.
I’m also moving to Berlin. Lauren, my amazing wife, has taken on a new role in a new company in a new city. Neither of us have been to Berlin but it is somewhere we have always wanted to see so it’s time to immerse ourselves in another culture, moving out of Amsterdam. We are both sad to be leaving Amsterdam as we have grown to call it home the last 3 years, but we are excited about starting a new chapter (heard the nightclubs are pretty cool in Berlin). I obviously finished my job working in a bilingual day-care recently and found saying goodbye to the kids really difficult as some of them have been my best friends since moving to Amsterdam. In moving country I feel like it’s a good time to park the childcare work and try something different. Working outdoors sounds quite appealing but I will see what the next career move is in the coming months.
I was really happy to see Tim J P Collins is back with The Anxiety Podcast after his own hiatus from it. It’s great to hear his voice again and I have already taken so much away from his first few new episodes (especially TAP427 Why You Can and Should Change Direction in Your Life as I’m making quite significant changes in my life just now and its good to have confirmation that change is good (see my previous blog post on why change is good), so thanks Tim.
Overall, I’ve had quite a busy few months but while I’ve been distracted, I have been paying attention to my mental health, doing what I know works for me and trying to avoid things that I know are not good for me. My sleep is quite decent as my phone is on charge in the living room when I’m in bed now which I would massively recommend doing. I still meditate and use Headspace almost daily, still do yoga as often as I can, still try and talk with friends, still not looking at the news too much and trying to keep a lid on the social media usage (despite setting up a new Instagram page for Storytime with Stuart). As often as possible I am keeping up with recording children’s stories and putting them up on YouTube (please give the page a like and a share and subscribe to the channel), which brings me joy.
I’ve got a few other blog posts up my sleeve (CBT, public speaking, medication, celebrities and mental health, attachment to nature etc) but I wanted to start off this new chapter of my life with a topic that has been very relevant to me the past 4 years.
MEN IN CHILDCARE – a topic close to my heart and as deserving of equal time as topics like women in mainly male dominated roles – pilots, engineers, firefighters etc. Why, when I feel good about what I do, when I enjoy what I do, when I’m good at what I do (not to toot my own horn here), do I still get the feeling of judgement on my back. The breaking down of the stigma of women doing a “mans” job is absolutely necessary and deserves every bit of attention and talking points it gets, and, while not being a female and therefore not really having too much of an opinion on that specific matter, I am always interested to hear views and opinions from women who have experienced discrimination in their industry for being female (if anything it makes me want to educate both boys and girls on the topic of equality more, so when I learn just how some women can be treated for simply enjoying what they do while being a specific gender, it makes me quite angry). But I am not a woman (which might come as a surprise to some people) and therefore I will likely never be subject to discrimination or judgement, based on the biological gender I was born into …or will I?
I have. I’ve had discrimination and felt, and will continue to feel, judgement based on a stigma, and because of my gender working in an industry that is somewhere between 95 and 99% female worldwide.
Ruth Bader Ginsberg was a lawyer and when she became a lawyer, the percentage of female lawyers was probably 1% or less (I have no idea the figures and I probably wont go back to look it up as I’m trying to make a point so exact figures or percentages aren’t really that important – she was a minority) and if you look at the number of female lawyers now, well, if TV, news etc is anything to go by, it seems like there is a fairly even split (maybe 60 male to 40 female (again, just a rough guess based on what you see in pictures on the news or Netflix series). Female lawyers has risen quite a bit in the last 50ish years. The same could be said for engineers (though still very much male dominated), police, doctors, pilots, but when it comes to men working as childcare workers, it has been shown that in the last few decades, the number of men in this industry is actually decreasing still.
Women need time off work when they are having a baby, no room for discussion, and men have only just recently started to get “paternity leave”. That in itself actually shows a favour towards women in recent times – there was no need for the man to take time off work, he has to make the money otherwise how will he support the family? But because women also have their careers to think about now and they want to run their businesses, men need to be able to take time off to care for the baby too, to the extent where (and this is becoming more and more normal now) the mother is the bread-winner for the family so they go back to work after a few months while the dad takes a few months off his work on “paternity leave” (apparently this is what’s called nowadays a “House Husband”…must say I could get used to calling myself that). So we see a huge rise in women wanting careers, increased number of female engineers, GPs, lawyers, pilots, police etc. You also see an increase in male nurses, male hairdressers, male social workers etc, but men in day-cares/nurseries/preschools? It doesn’t match, and I see a very good reason for it. A man wanting to be a hairdresser – great, there have always been male barbers so men wanting to be hairdressers doesn’t make a huge difference; a man wanting to be a nurse – fine, who judges a guy for helping sick/injured people?; man wanting to be a social worker – maybe he’s got experience in addiction or abuse so being a man or woman won’t matter when you’re working with vulnerable people; a man wanting to work with babies and children – but women are better at it, men don’t know how to give care properly, men can’t soothe a crying child like a woman can, 90-something % of paedophiles are men so they’re just going to abuse kids. Bear in mind I say these things but I have never been a male in the hairdressing, nursing or social work industry so, again, I don’t really have a say as to how men in these sectors feel, but I’ve been a man working in childcare, and I’ve felt the judgement.
I imagine most men that think about a career in childcare have the thought “I would never do anything to a child, but people will think that of me, because I’m a guy, working with young children”, and I see that as a big reason why the number of men that work in childcare is so low. When I started working in a nursery, that thought didn’t actually cross my mind as I was completely new to the whole industry and didn’t see me working with kids as being something to be ashamed of – I have always enjoyed teaching and playing as I’m a big kid myself, a born entertainer some might say (mum). So I was a few weeks into my job and was really enjoying it, when a parent spoke with my manager one day and said “I’m OK with Stuart playing and doing the activities with my child, however if it can just be the female teachers who change her nappy or take her to the toilet” or something to that effect. So it was a fear that I would do something to their child when they were not there, but specifically the fear of a MALE teacher. Perhaps at home the mother does all the nappies and potty training and dressing while the dad has a career and just plays with the kid, so they don’t think it’s normal for a man changing the girls nappy and maybe they felt uncomfortable about that, either way it was discrimination based on gender. Luckily, my manager reassured them that I had been through all the same checks that any person working with children has to go through, and they will stick by their decision with me working with kids (nappy changing and everything) because to not hire me because I am a man would be discrimination. Sure enough the parent agreed, but there was still the tension of having parents’ eyes on me because I was male. From then on I realised just how demotivating being a man in childcare can be. I made the absolute most out of my career as a childcare worker and loved every minute of it, but there is no denying I felt some level of judgement because of my gender.
We have people like Ruth Bader Ginsberg being a role model to young women going against the odds having a family and still being one of the best lawyers in the history of the justice system, we need female role models to show girls that yes you can be an engineer if you want to because you can be good at that, yes you can be a firefighter or a pilot or work in the police if that’s what you want to do because you are a woman and you can overcome the social gender job role norms of society because we are a forward thinking world where woman can be these things. Your gender does not (or rather should not) mean you can’t do a role that was historically only for men. In the same way we have female role models for girls to get them into these male dominated industries and show them they can, we should have male role models for boys to get them into female dominated industries (childcare especially) and show them that if you like working with kids and you think you might be quite good at it, you should go for it if you want to, because life is too short to be stuck in a job that you don’t get any fulfilment out of. We are teaching our children that the girls can dress up in prince costumes and the boys can wear princess dresses in the same way we show children that women can grow up to become lawyers, doctors, business owners, and that men can be hairdressers, nurses, princesses or childcare workers.
This is all just my outlook on it and of course you can look into the subject of Men in Childcare at more depth at your leisure but just know that there ARE men out there who love working with kids, would be amazing at it, are willing to not get paid very little for the amount of responsibility, and yet will not work in that industry because of how society perceives a man working with kids. Of the parents I’ve worked with over the last 3 or 4 years, almost every one of them have said how great it is to have a guy working with toddlers and babies, because they want their kids growing up in a world where it is completely normal for a woman to be an engineer and a man be a preschool teacher. Unfortunately for men that work in childcare, I can’t see this ever being a sector where it’s a 50-50 male female split. I believe because of our genetic makeup and the millions of years humans have been on this earth where the woman cares for the children while the man goes to catch the food and more recently get money to provide for the children, men will not suddenly want to become the caregivers over a decade or 2. If the change is going to happen on a drastic level, it will be an evolutionary stage of hundreds of years. Our society doesn’t change overnight, but people’s views of society CAN change overnight. Men can be childcare workers, and should, if they want to. Woman can be engineers, and they should, if they want to.
