Ask Dr. Helen: Should Men Be Kicked Out of the Church Nursery?
I teach in an LDS primary (of which nursery – and I agree with Jan that this sure does sound like one of us Mormons – is a part) and the rule as articulated to me was:
– have two teachers whenever possible,
– always follow the Scout rules when dealing with Scouts/Cubs (which means if it’s a Scouting activity they always go two-deep,)
– always have two teachers in Nursery,
– don’t have men teaching children alone,
– work to install windows in all the classroom doors, and
– only have team teachers of opposite genders if the two are married to one another.
It appears to be about protecting the reputations of the majority and the safety of an (important, but small) minority.
(For the original correspondent, assuming you are LDS: the official FAQ is , and says “Can a man serve in the nursery?
“At least two teachers should be called for each nursery class. If the teachers are not husband and wife, they should be the same gender. Both teachers should be in the class during the entire Primary time” (Primary 1 [2000], ix).)
We also have rules (at least in our ward) about keeping the door open when adults meet with children, or unmarried adults of opposite genders meet with one another: every individual interview I’ve had with our bishop and his counselors has taken place in a large room with a big table between us and the door open to the hallway.
Anyway, this year it looks to me like the nursery has at least two married couples teaching, the five-year-olds have a married couple teaching, and the ten-year-olds have a married couple teaching. Whenever the wife from those pairs is sick or has to be somewhere else, they find an adult male to take her spot. For the previous two years the nine- and ten-year-old classes had a pair of men teaching them, and last year I was the only teacher of kids between seven and twelve who didn’t have a team teaching partner for at least part of the year (we ran out of adults, I think.)
Given that there’s a former LDS missionary who was recently convicted of molesting two girls (I think it was in Nevada) over the course of about 45 minutes, in which half a dozen adults were in and out of the room, you can understand the reason for caution.
Incidentally: Jan, last year my class was all-girls, and when a boy moved in whose dad was in Iraq, they promoted him up a class just so he could have the interaction with the husband in that particular team-teaching pair. It’d be terrible to lose our male teachers, especially since they make up such a small percentage of public elementary school staff.
