Secure in His Mannyhood

Adam Good, 25, tries to spray insect repellent on one of his charges, Jake Solomon, 2, in Alexandria. Good has worked at the home almost a year. (By Kevin Clark -- The Washington Post)

Across the hall, Abby rushed up to Good and flung her arms around him. As he lifted her to give her a hug, he and Gary Mayes, one of the few male teachers at the preschool, talked about the previous night's "graduation." Mayes said Good, as a manny, is a rare bird. But then again, so is he. Nationwide, men make up less than 3 percent of all preschool teachers and 9 percent of all elementary school teachers.

"From a kid's perspective, it keeps things gender-blind," Mayes said. "In this profession, sadly, you become stereotypically gender-identified. You know, women are nurturing. Men are not nurturing."

That's at least what David Geary, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of Missouri, might say. "This bias, where you see moms tending to kids, taking greater interest in kids, is found in 95 to 97 percent of the millions of species on Earth. In most species, males don't do anything in terms of offspring," he said. "Humans are, in fact, pretty unusual in that we have male parenting at all."

Geary doesn't understand the manny phenomenon.

"I don't know what's going on," he said. "I hate to be cynical. I think some of them may actually like it, but, for others, it's just about making money. It's not in the nature of many males to do that."

Not so fast, say the scientists on the other side of the debate. Although it's true that males don't parent or care about young in 97 percent of the species on Earth, the number is almost as high for females. "It's misleading to say the vast majority of males don't care. Well . . . the vast majority of females don't care, either," said Patricia Gowaty, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Georgia.

Further, Gowaty said, studies have shown that some men whose wives are pregnant develop higher levels of a nurturing hormone called prolactin. The studies prove that males can become biologically conditioned to care, she said.

"I suspect that a lot of what we say about human potential and human patterns associated with gender are nothing more than politics," she said.

Adam Good didn't plan on being a manny. And he probably won't be one forever. The truth is, he had recently graduated from American University with a degree in English and was writing experimental poetry and working odd jobs, painting, teaching SAT prep courses and baby-sitting to supplement his income while he figured out where to apply for graduate school. (He plans to study information science.) It was getting old. He saw a posting for a live-in nanny on Craigslist and decided to answer. He had been baby-sitting since high school, starting with his two younger brothers, and was a youth counselor at his family church in North Carolina. He makes a mean grilled cheese sandwich. And he really likes kids.

At first, Laura Dove and Dan Solomon, who live in Alexandria, were taken aback. "But the moment he walked in the door, the kids just loved him. My husband loved him. It was obvious he was the guy for us," said Dove, who sometimes works long hours on Capitol Hill.

When they hired him last August, Dove had just finished decorating the nanny's bedroom with yellow walls, a pretty floral rug and a white iron bed. Good took it all down. "He put in a brown rug." Good lives in the attic, reading and writing poetry. He works 30 hours a week -- leaving plenty of time to hang out with his friends in Washington's alternative poetry world and see indie bands at the 9:30 club. He has health care benefits, and Dove does his taxes for him. The couple have even paid for cooking classes for manny professional development. So his friends don't tease him about being a manny. "It's more like envy," he said.

At the preschool, Good finally loaded Abby and Jake into his manny mobile and put on their favorite music about vowels. When talking about preschool pickups, "I almost always say, 'One of the other mothers,' " he laughed. "Sometimes I catch myself. Sometimes I don't."