The best man for the job

We may have embraced equal parenting, but a male nanny will still raise eyebrows at the school gate. Why, asks Nick Duerden, are they so thin on the ground?

Here's a quick exercise. Look at the photograph on the right and see if you can spot anything unusual about it. Take a minute. Give up? Well, one of them – the one with the spiky hair, to be precise – isn't the eldest son, but the nanny. That's right: a male nanny.

"Warwick is our first," the mother, Sue Woodman proudly asserts. "All his predecessors had been female, but we felt the time was right for a change. Admittedly, my eldest kids [14 and 16] don't really need looking after any more, but I still wanted someone to feed and water them occasionally and make sure they stay vaguely on the straight and narrow. And Warwick is a perfect role model: he plays guitar with them, goes skateboarding, and then comes home to do the ironing. What more could I ask?"

Warwick Oliver, a 24-year-old Australian living in London, is a man in a woman's world. There aren't many of them about, male nannies. Take this next story, the story of a friend of mine who unwittingly strayed on to a very unexpected, albeit temporary, career path.

It was, he now says, an accident. "Become a male nanny" was never at the top of his to-do list, and his career ambitions – perhaps understandably, given his first class degree – were always rather loftier. Nevertheless, accidentally or otherwise, that is exactly what he became: a 26-year-old live-in child carer.

"My old tutor was going on holiday and she asked me to house-sit," he says. "At the time, my own living arrangements weren't great [a falling-down semi in north-west London, written off by the council, and part-occupied by rodents], and so I jumped at the chance. It was a very nice house."

But when the tutor and her familial baggage arrived home, she asked him to stay on. Her working life was very busy, nobody had time to walk the dog and, if truth be known, the children were in need of a bit more attention. "So I agreed to help out from time to time." "From time to time" quickly became all the time; he was with them for the next 12 months. This young man, incidentally, would rather remain anonymous, lest his observations cause offence. So let's call him "Dave".

"I had no previous experience looking after kids, except for a couple of summers at Camp America," he says. "But I have to say I took to it quite naturally and, for a while at least, I really enjoyed it."

Dave was, however, undoubtedly an oddity, and quickly became the talk of the neighbourhood. This was in 1996 and, then as now, male nannies were very thin on the ground. The typical model (in Dave's chic west London locale, at any rate) was young, Swedish and female. Language was often a problem with these young women, as was occasional immaturity, while unbidden interest from the father of the family often caused marital disharmony. Dave, on the other hand, was pleasant and unthreatening, a sexual temptation to neither spouse. In other words, ideal.

"The family I lived with liked to think of themselves as trendy," he says. "The mother was an artist, the kids [a boy aged seven and a girl, five] were bilingual and encouraged to express themselves creatively. I think they liked to feel that having a male nanny gave them an edge. I fitted well into the whole scene: liberal families who wanted a different take on things. Having me made them very slightly radical, which they liked."

Dave quickly found himself looking after half a dozen local children (many of them the privileged offspring of famous singers and architects). His charges – both boys and girls, and ranging in age from five to 15 – were very fond of him.

"I was part-big brother, part-confidant," he says. "With the boys especially, there was a very strong bond. They could say things to me that they would never say to either their parents or a female nanny. I think they felt they could push things a bit more, be cheekier, and have a laugh."

Some even actively paraded him before their friends. One child in particular, the son of overworked parents, who regularly had difficulties in school, used to boast that Dave wasn't his nanny at all, but his bodyguard, the implication being that the child was important enough to warrant one. The attendant kudos was immeasurable.

"It made him feel special at a time when he really needed it, I guess. And maybe he wouldn't have got this elsewhere."

Despite Dave's success, he didn't exactly help turn the tide. When he went on to different things, the family was unable to find a male replacement.

"There is a perennial lack of male nannies," confirms Jean Birtles of London nanny agency, Top Notch. "They account for only about 5 per cent of all the nannies on my books. It just seems to be the way things are in this country. Since the beginning of time immemorial, looking after children has been seen as a woman's job, and that's a shame, because I feel men are very important indeed – increasingly so."

She argues that in today's dysfunctional family set-up, where so many marriages end in divorce, fathers and father figures are often absent. Enter the male nanny.

"It is enormously important that children, especially young boys, have a male role model early in life," she says. "Generally speaking, female nannies are more gentle and nurturing, while male nannies like to get stuck in and play sports, take the kids on five-mile hikes. It's a shame we have so few men to choose from. We could certainly do with more."

When Warwick Oliver first arrived in the capital last year, he decided not to do what his fellow Antipodeans almost automatically do when they come to London (that is, get a job in a bar). Instead, he was keen to work with children. He'd had previous experience helping underprivileged kids back home in Tasmania, and had found it very rewarding.

"It was difficult at first to get taken on by an agency," he says. "A lot of them weren't keen. Unfortunately, there seems to be a certain stigma attached to men who want to work with children. It conjures up a negative image, I guess."

For the last 12 months, Warwick has been living with a family in south-west London, in charge of four boys aged between eight and 16, and a dog and a cat.

"I love it," he says. "It can be very hard work, but it's also a lot of fun. I still get a lot of strange looks from other mums, though, and when I turn up to help with the school play, or if I bake cakes on school open days, jaws do tend to fall open. There are lots of reminders that, as a male nanny, I'm very much in the minority." He shrugs. "But I don't really mind, you get used to it after a while."

And his employer, Sue Woodman, has no complaints about him whatsoever. In fact, she is very keen to extol his virtues. When he leaves in September, she hopes to be able to replace him with a similar model.

"I would definitely employ another man," she says. "If I can find one, that is..."