Josh Brooks hadn’t planned for a career taking care of young children, but in tenth grade he started spending time with his friend’s younger brother and discovered that he had a real knack for it.

At 18, Brooks took a job at Common Ground, a child care center in northern Virginia, and enjoyed it so much he kept working there throughout college, where he studied psychology. After graduating, though, he felt pressure to get a “real grown-up job” and applied to work as a government contractor. He maintained spreadsheets all day and was miserable. “After nine months I realized how ridiculous that notion was, to keep myself from something that I loved,” he said. And so he returned back to Common Ground.

Brooks, now 28, knows his career path is unusual: In the US, only 3 percent of the preschool workforce, and just 6 percent of the child care workforce, is male. But he works in a progressive part of the country, for an organization that explicitly touts the value of having men in the classroom. Common Ground’s executive director, Liz Badley Raubacher, is married to a man who runs another child care center in town.

It also helps that he’s not the only male teacher on staff. Brooks works alongside Jordon Farrell, 30, who started volunteering at Common Ground to fulfill a high school requirement and, like Brooks, was surprised by how much he liked it. Farrell’s been working there for the last seven years. They both teach alongside Zach Davis, 24, who originally went to trade school for hospitality. When the pandemic hit, most hotels shut down and Davis took a role as a recess attendant at a private school, and realized how much he liked working with kids. But when that school also closed due to Covid-19, he stumbled on Common Ground, and has been happily working there ever since.

Despite severe worker shortages in child care, most centers across America employ no male teachers. Men tend to steer away from a field that’s both low-paying and perceived as overtly feminine. They’re also heavily deterred by parental suspicion of inappropriate contact; because most convicted sexual abusers are men, many families perceive any man interested in working with children as a threat. Hiring managers at the centers themselves worry about liability and consumer demand, reacting to fears more than data.

“I’m not going to say we haven’t had those concerns, we’ve had to navigate those gut reactions with parents,”........

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