Fear Beats Logic When Men Are Involved in Day Care

The defendants in the McMartin Pre-School child molestation case are not guilty. That’s what a jury pronounced after weighing nearly three years of testimony.

As a parent, I should be reassured by this. Ray Buckey and his mother really didn’t do those horrible things.

Yet I don’t feel reassured. Some part of me, deep down, where logic means very little, doesn’t believe. That part of me tells me that I am still afraid.

The line is fine, I realize, between concern and panic. From there, hysteria is but a small step away. And when it comes to protecting my daughter, or trying to protect her, I know that clearheaded rationality hasn’t always ruled.

But after writing these lines, and drawing in my breath, I’ve come to an inescapable conclusion. I would not want Ray Buckey, then or now, to care for my 3-year-old daughter. High on the lists of my reasons: He is a man.

This is not an admission that I am proud of. It is sexist, to be sure, and hypocritical. I know plenty of men, friends of mine, who are terrific with kids. I would not hesitate to leave my daughter in their care.

I am sympathetic, as well, to those who complain that child-care workers, many of them with academic degrees, have been ghettoized in the low end of the pay scale. That’s what happens when women hold most of the jobs. Society says they don’t deserve anything more.

But still the fear nags, stubbornly, along the borders of common sense. Why would a man choose to work in day care? Nurturing is suddenly suspect. Most child molesters, I remind myself, are men.

Karen Mestemacher, who operates the Mesa Verde Preschool in Costa Mesa, says she knows what I am talking about. She doesn’t like it, clearly, but she understands it. She says it is a feeling that other parents share.

“I know exactly where you are coming from,” she told me when I called the other day. “I have had parents go as far as to say they did not want any men around their children. They wanted to know if there were any males on the premises during operating hours.”

There are no men employed at Mesa Verde Preschool, but Mestemacher says that’s not by her choice. She would gladly hire a qualified male teacher, if she could find one. They rarely come around.

“Men add so much to the program,” she says. “They are a positive male figure in the childrens’ eyes. Unfortunately, they are not there. With the situation that has happened, I don’t blame them. They’ve become targets.”

As I was listening to Mestemacher, herself a mother of two, I found myself nodding in agreement, and I felt slightly ashamed. Her words, cooly logical, were cutting through irrational fears.

Then I asked Mestemacher if she would have entrusted her own children, now well beyond the preschool years, to the care of a male day-care provider.

“Thinking back,” she said, pausing with the thought, “I guess I would have to answer that I just don’t know.”

Other day-care teachers and operators throughout Orange County told me much the same thing. Men make parents nervous, and some are clearly afraid.

“If we’re talking about putting a child in the total custodial care of a man,” said one Cypress day-care operator, “then I would have serious doubts.”

Gary and Chris Brooks, husband and wife, began operating the Tiny Tots Development Center in Costa Mesa six years ago, just about the time that a child in Manhattan Beach told his mother that “Mr. Ray” had sodomized him at McMartin Pre-School.

“When I first got into the business, all this stuff with McMartin had just come up, so it was always in the back of my mind,” says Gary Brooks. “I don’t really think about that any more, but, naturally, I don’t put myself in compromising positions. I am a professional. I use good judgment.”

Brooks, who is 34 years old, told me he wasn’t offended by my feelings, or those of other parents, who over the years have asked him the types of questions that women usually don’t face.

“I understand the stigma,” he says. “It is different--I wouldn’t say strange--to have a man in this role. This is a very nurturing field. The stereotype of men is that we aren’t like that. If there weren’t so many stereotypes, maybe more men would be in this business.”

This, too, I believe to be true. Those in other fields that rely on women nurturers--nursing, counseling and physical therapy come to mind--have said the same thing.

And, surely, in the year 1990, most of us acknowledge that men have feelings too. Fathers freed from the stoic strictures of the past can hug and kiss their children, wipe off scraped knees and change their share of diapers. This is what most women say that we want.

But this gets put aside, unfairly it seems, when it comes to day care. We’ve read the newspapers and seen the movies on TV. Our fears take hold, and not even logic can always shake them loose.

“You change when you become a parent,” was how my husband was explaining this to an unmarried male friend. “You worry about all sorts of things. You just don’t want to take any chances.”