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This story is part of Daddy Issues, GQ’s series exploring modern fatherhood in its many forms.
When the six-year-old boy wanted to buy a gun, Tom knew better than to protest. A 22-year-old Cambridge graduate with bright blue eyes, Tom is a male nanny. The boy’s father was a notorious mafia boss in Eastern Europe, and his birthday was approaching; the son thought a gun would please him. And so, along with a second male nanny and a bodyguard, the entourage piled into the family shuttle bus with its leather seats and television screens. At the gun shop, Tom gazed up at the weaponry on display. Feeling the pressure of his group, he bought the boy’s gun of choice. Later it surfaced that the father’s birthday was not for another six months – the boy had simply wanted to get his hands on a pistol. It was stored away with his collection of war knives.
With its revolving doors of jacked-up, armed skinheads, the family home felt like a military base. “I was the only guy not ripped and wearing camo,” says Tom, who left working for the family in 2020. The house was an all-grey homage to the gated mansions of Beverly Hills, with room after room of ashen marble. The parents would often fly off to locations like the Côte d’Azur in a private jet, leaving the four children supervised by two nannies and a bodyguard each. In the cavernous rooms with high ceilings, silver balloons and tinsel would spring up to mark birthdays.
Tom could see from his position that progressive examples of masculinity in the boy’s life were entirely absent. “In just six short years of life, he’d managed to absorb some of the most toxic male shit I’ve ever seen,” he says. His dynamic with the boy was that of dictator and subject, but not in the way you’d expect. During playtime, when Tom said that it was time to put the Lego away, the boy would storm out to tell his mother. Tom was reprimanded: you don’t say no. The boy worshipped violence, losing hours to Call of Duty and pretend games murdering robbers. When his sisters would go to ballet or riding, he would be taken shooting. Hypnotised by TikTok, he was at “the mercy of the algorithm”, says Tom. Regular verbal attacks and throttling of staff were to be tolerated, leaving the nannies cowering out his door, exchanging scared glances before retreating to their dim, plywood quarters.
Around 60 per cent of children between zero and 14 in England receive some form of childcare, but only two per cent of childcare workers in the UK are men. Those early years are vital in the impressions we form of gender: by two, toddlers have already started to define gender by observing patterns in their homes and care settings. One study of four-year-olds in England and Hungary found that when fathers performed more childcare, their children demonstrated less knowledge of gender stereotypes. Trying to fight those stereotypes was something that Tom found himself up against while working abroad. “I see myself as someone who is just there for a short while in their lives and I can push back a little bit,” he says. “But, ultimately, I’m not going to be their saviour.”
Tom is part of a growing trend of male nannies hired to be a saviour of some description, filling in as the man of the family in homes that are without one. While female nannies are hired to take care of children, male nannies – often stereotyped as effeminate men, a stigma that lingers today – are becoming a conscious choice. Some are hired to play football with a boy whose hard-working mother doesn’t have time for goalkeeping; others to be the disciplinarian in a household where the father is always travelling with work. Kim Kardashian recently revealed on The Kardashians that she had hired a male, Arsenal-loving north Londoner to diversify her “female-dominated” house and give her kids a positive male role model. But at a time when masculinity is a complicated and contested idea, what exactly do we want from the men we pay to raise boys?
Four years after moving back to London, Tom wonders what kind of man the boy is becoming. As a male nanny, Tom had been expected to reinforce what it means to be an alpha male but not discipline the boy. It was a duty that clung to him, awkwardly. The boy was being prepped to join the mafia. Tom hoped he could offer him a glimmer of something different. “I was giving him a slice of a different version of what a man could be,” he says.
Male nannies who are hired because of their gender often find themselves up against well-meaning but ultimately reductive stereotypes about what being a “real man” means. Dr Simon Brownhill, a senior lecturer at the University of Bristol and former reception teacher, remembers the moment that prompted his doctoral thesis on gender in early years education: when a parent told him he was the perfect male role model for their child. He felt elated walking home that night, but as the evening drew on he reflected more on their words. The next day he asked the parent what they had meant. They paused, then replied: “I don’t know.”
Through his research, Brownhill has found that parents looking for a “male role model” often seek out a projection of what they think a man should be – a counterintuitive method for challenging gender roles. “If you’re not naturally sporty, does that mean that you’re not a role model?” he asks. In one study of school principals in New Zealand, the second most-cited reason why they believed schools needed more male role models was to provide sports leadership. Likewise, when parents want role models from their mannies, this often involves an active and sporty man, several nanny agencies told me.
Men in care settings being used as disciplinarians or the “bad cop” at home is also common. Dr Laetitia Coles, a research fellow at the Queensland Brain Institute, has observed a “just wait till your dad gets home” mentality in how male workers are employed in early years education. “It reinforces this idea that men are domineering and aggressive,” she says, but the part of the job that men report flourishing at is when they can nurture children.
Male nannies often find themselves coming up against these outdated stereotypes and stigmas in their work. Aiman Rezk, a 30-year-old male nanny based in west London, has seen parents at the school gates assume he was a child’s bodyguard. Once, at a birthday party, another group of parents even tried to recruit him as security personnel for their own children. In a female-dominated workplace where being kicked or punched by children is seen as an inevitable part of the job, he will often be parachuted in to deal with violence.
A 6ft 9in ex-basketball player, Rezk also works as a Special Educational Needs teaching assistant in a sixth-form college. Out of a faculty of 300, there are only three other men. He found nannying after an injury and the pandemic forced him to leave his basketball career in America behind. He worked as a labourer and a basketball coach before finding work as a teaching assistant. “I was indoors, I was warm, I was dry,” he laughs.
Despite his appearance intimidating some of the more sensitive children, he soon found he was pretty good at connecting with them. But Rezk has observed sexism from his students, his colleagues and the parents. One student – a professed fan of Andrew Tate – asked him: “Why are you a teacher at the school? Isn’t that a woman’s job?” Female colleagues will tell him: “You’re a man – you can take it.” Or ask: “Shouldn’t you be out on a building site?”
One of the dads that employed Rezk made sure to let him know he was a nanny, not a manny. It felt like a jibe intended to emasculate him about his role as a caregiver, the kind that male nannies commonly face – the implication being that it’s embarrassing for strong men to be looking after children.
Rezk also raises an anxiety that many of the male nannies I speak to share: what if I’m seen as a predator? Tom says that when the boy he nannies for tries to sit on his lap or hug him during bath time, he’ll awkwardly move away. “It’s a hindrance to the caring role,” he says. Similarly, when he tells other men his occupation, whether it’s a close friend or even a stranger at a wedding, jokes about being a paedophile will come up. When Cornwall-based nanny Peter Walters, 39, worked in a nursery, a parent moved their child out of his class because of his gender.
Raising a boy when the idea of masculinity is so politically charged and emotionally fraught is a difficult task for male nannies, as Allison Havey knows all too well. She’s the co-founder of The RAP Project, which organises workshops with young people to educate about consent and gender roles. “There’s an internal struggle: do I be dominant and [stereotypically] male, or do I be vulnerable and expressive?” she says. Many of the boys she meets have internalised a brand of masculinity that dictates boys should be calm, confident, successful and sexually virile – and also muscularly sculpted. “That is a hell of a lot of pressure.” Havey sees bubbling resentment and jealousy over the grade gap between genders, with boys almost twice as likely as girls to have fallen behind in language and communication skills by the age of five. “They act out towards them,” she says.
Male nanny agencies are witnessing firsthand how hard it is to be a boy these days. James McCrossen, who founded the agency Manny and Me, tells me he is dismayed that the progress he saw happening around 15 years ago has dissipated. “I felt like we were making a little bit of headway,” he says, but in the past five years he’s seen a rise in boys saying that mental health doesn’t exist.
Other worrying trends are emerging, too. Richard Goodman, cofounder of Athlete Mannies, an agency placing sporty men at universities in childcare roles, has observed an uptick in body-conscious boys. He’s noticed a rise in parents contacting him about personal trainers for their sons who want to lose weight and “look good” as young as primary school age.
Ben Wcislicki, a 35-year-old youth worker from London, works with boys and young men brought into hospitals in the aftermath of violent crimes. He has met boys as young as 13, stabbed over Snapchat disputes. When he talks to them, he says, “If you don’t want to talk to me, then I’ll just go away.” In the minutes, hours and days after an attack, Ben sees them transition through hurt, shock and then boredom. While some would greet him with apprehension, often they were vulnerable, chatty and pleased to have company.
Raised in Exeter, Ben puts people at ease. A Hinge date once likened him to a geography teacher – a comparison he resents. “I’m a bit worried that people think I’m like a boy scout,” he laughs. Ben lists his modern-masculinity credentials with pride: he enjoys novels and camping, and is the owner of two kittens. He’s curious about his emotions and well-versed in attachment styles. You’ll find Jane Austen novels and bell hooks’ All About Love on his bookshelf. But he’s also 6ft 3in, muscular, and sports a buzz cut. “Maybe I’ll challenge their ideas a bit about what a man is,” he tells me.
Boys tell Ben that they feel like they don’t have many options in life and that their failure is a deliberate feature of a rigged system. He and his colleagues have witnessed the ripple effect of Andrew Tate’s misogynistic ideology. Throughout his career, starting in an early years’ education centre in Brixton before progressing into youth work, his workplaces have been female-dominated. Meanwhile, absent fathers are rife in his referrals. “I feel like kids are craving men in their lives,” he says. “There’s a lack of positive male role models.”
Ben sits beside the hospital beds occupied by wounded boys, whose lives are miles away from his own, and looks to forge connections. “I’d capitalise on my ignorance,” he says, making his lack of cultural capital the butt of the joke. He asks them to tell him about their music and social media, and occasionally they would rap or sing for him. Those are his favourite moments. Do the boys think he’s cool? “You know, the thing is, kids don’t say the word ‘cool’,” he says. “That’s how far away we are from cool.”
Many of the nanny agencies I speak with say that of the parents looking for mannies, many are single mothers with sons citing the absence of a father figure. Demar Brissett is one of these male nannies, having been hired in the past by single mothers with boys in crisis. Six feet tall and stacked, with slits in his eyebrows, the 28-year-old often encounters surprise that he is a nanny. Brissett has even shown dates photos of the families he looks after on his phone to prove it. The disbelief he faces underlies a common prejudice that male nannies are expected to be effeminate, rather than macho and athletic. People will tell Brissett that he looks like “the scary type”. He loves the gym and a boys’ night out, but he also starts his days with Taylor Swift and gushes over seeing her live in 2018. He swears by yoga and meditation retreats.
He’s also Black, which he says makes him stand out even more; out of the small pool of mannies in the UK, even fewer are men of colour. Brissett’s presence in the playground also disrupts the “absent Black father” stereotype in pop culture and the media more broadly, a narrative born of prejudice. In fact, among those who live with their children, a US report found that Black fathers are more likely to feed, eat with, bathe, change, dress, play with and read to their children on a daily basis than white and Hispanic dads. “I’m not who people perceive me to be,” says Brissett.
Brissett once worked with a primary school-aged boy who would fight other children, throw chairs and books, and ignore his teachers while on a rampage. Brissett’s approach was to engage him in conversations about his feelings on the way home. He would come into school to observe his temper from afar. After one particularly heated tantrum, Brissett pulled him aside and sat him down. The boy sat with his arms folded, cheeks red. “What’s going on?” Brissett asked. “I’m mad,” the boy replied. The root cause was feeling rejected; his siblings wouldn’t play with him, or his mum wouldn’t put him to bed herself. And, most tellingly, his dad didn’t have an active role in his life. He’d return crying from school and ask: Where’s my dad? Brissett wasn’t sure how to reply, but he kept showing up for him.
Tom, who started his nannying career in Eastern Europe, now looks after the young son of a wealthy Russian family in London. Under 20-foot-tall ceilings, in a house so vast that he can rarely decipher if any parent is home at all, he finds himself wrestling with what influence he has over who this boy will become.
The boy lacks the tools to express his feelings, and Tom worries about how he’ll form relationships in adulthood. Early into the job, Tom began to play a game with him called “the blob tree”, which the boy would struggle with. In the game, little drawings of blobby men hang from branches, each embodying a different emotion. Tom would encourage him to point to the blob that he most identified with at that moment, but he didn’t know.
The boy receives no more than a daily 10 minutes with his father, and all crucial conversations for emotional development are down to Tom. It’s “worlds apart” from the gendered expectations of the boy’s sister, who has a significantly less strict academic programme. One day, when the boy arrived home from school, he’d soiled himself with nerves, but was ignored. “He just needed a hug, you know?” he says. “I do try my best to be that person, but I’m not perfect, and I’m not trained either.”
Still, Tom can see that being a steady presence in his life is having an effect. Now, after years of playing the blob tree, the boy’s convictions about where to point to and why are slowly growing.
Being present like this is something that Richard Goodman of AthleteMannies puts at the centre of what it means to be a role model. For him, it’s not just about sport and running around but men who communicate, consistently show up, arrive on time and avoid disappointing the children. While these are not gender-specific traits, when a man regularly demonstrates them in a child’s life he may evolve into the role-model figure. “Some parents arrive with a slight stereotype, but the reality is messier and more nuanced,” adds Rachel Carrell, the CEO and founder of childcare agency Koru Kids. Parents who have hired male nannies through her agency for sports benefits tell her that the lasting qualities they’ve brought to their children are nurture and kindness.
Brissett agrees that the exact brand of masculinity that arrives at the school gates is less important than showing up on time, day after day. After witnessing his own parents’ separation at a young age, he knows what it’s like to one day notice an absence. But despite the circumstances, it was his parents’ efforts to remain a stable presence in his life that shaped him more than the gaps in between. “I grew up in a home where my parents were early, and I know the impact that had on me,” he says. “If I can have an impact on another child, I’m 100 per cent for it.”
Brissett recently worked with a boy who attended an expensive London prep school and whose mother had a high-flying career. But what stood out to him was the boy’s sense of isolation. Friends and playdates were few and far between. Instead, he was living online, watching YouTube on an iPad from the moment he woke up and then resuming upon returning from school. Explicit rap videos, people pulling out guns and chasing each other with knives. Brissett would walk by his room and overhear music and content too explicit for his own ears. “It was scary for me – I saw it all creep in.” he says. “I had to step in and shut that down right away.”
Brissett gradually pulled him away from YouTube in exchange for trips to the park or the cinema. They started cooking dinner together when his mother got home. Carrell of Koru Kids says that this part of a child’s day goes overlooked, but it’s in these interstitial moments [that] they digest, process, play and reflect. Being “genuine and fully invested”, is the key.
The father of the boy he looked after travelled for work and on days he was meant to see him, he often didn't show up. One day, when he went to school to pick him up, Brissett overheard the boy referring to him as his dad. He playfully laughed it off, but it forced him to wrestle with the sad, unspoken truth of being a male nanny when you are filling in the shoes of an absent parent: this is a job that will inevitably end. As he says, “It broke me a little bit.”
Some names have been changed.