The childcare profession skews heavily female, and the nanny industry skews even more so. Male childcare professionals exist, work at the same professional level as their female counterparts, and bring the same range of skills, experience, and genuine investment in the work. They also work in an industry where their gender is treated as a variable requiring explanation in a way that female nannies never experience, and they’ve developed clear-eyed understandings of what that means for their professional lives.
Families who are genuinely open to male candidates often don’t know exactly what that openness should look like in practice, what questions are appropriate, or what the male nanny’s professional experience in this industry has already taught him about navigating the situation. Understanding both sides of this produces better conversations, better hiring decisions, and access to a segment of the childcare talent pool that many families reflexively filter out.
Why Families Filter Out Male Candidates
The hesitation most families have about male childcare professionals is rarely explicit bias. It’s more often a combination of unfamiliarity, general cultural conditioning about who performs childcare work, and a specific anxiety about how it will look to other people: at school pickup, at the playground, in the family’s social circle. The family may be entirely comfortable with the idea in the abstract but anticipate friction with grandparents, with the child’s school, or with other parents who will have opinions about their choice.
These are real social considerations and dismissing them doesn’t help families navigate them. What’s worth naming is that they are social considerations, not professional ones, and that filtering out an entire category of qualified candidates based on anticipated social friction is a significant cost to the quality of the candidate pool. The male nanny who is passed over because of how it might look at school pickup may have been exactly the right person for the position.
What Male Nannies Have Already Figured Out
Male childcare professionals who have built careers in this industry have navigated the questions and the looks and the occasional suspicion enough times to have developed professional responses to all of it. They know that some families will be immediately comfortable and others will need time. They know that children generally don’t share adult ambivalence about caregivers and tend to respond to warmth and competence regardless of gender. They know which questions from prospective employers are reasonable professional inquiries and which ones are worth raising a professional eyebrow at.
What they bring to the professional dynamic, specifically, is often an ability to engage with children in physical and active ways that children love and that some female caregivers are less inclined toward. Rough-and-tumble play, sports, outdoor physical activity, the kind of engaged energy that some children crave and that a male caregiver may provide naturally. This isn’t universal, male nannies are as varied as female nannies in their approaches and inclinations, but it’s a genuine quality that some families are specifically looking for when they’re open to male candidates.
What Families Should Actually Ask
The interview questions appropriate for a male nanny candidate are the same questions appropriate for any nanny candidate. His experience, his approach to childcare, his references, his professional background, his specific skills and interests. Questions that are specifically prompted by his gender, particularly questions about why he chose childcare or whether he’s comfortable around children, signal an implicit suspicion about his professional legitimacy that a female candidate would never encounter.
The practical questions about situations where gender might genuinely matter, such as whether the family’s school has any policies about male caregivers at pickup or whether certain household routines might need adjustment, are worth addressing factually without framing them as reasons to doubt the candidate’s suitability.
At Seaside Nannies, we present candidates based on professional fit. When a male candidate is the right person for a position, we say so directly and we’ve had enough of those conversations to know that families who go in with genuine openness are consistently glad they did.
