Daniel, who is rotund, with dark hair and glasses, enjoys people and thrives on a certain amount of bedlam. I met him and his boyfriend, Patrick, for lunch one summer at a popular Toronto Thai spot called Salad King.

Daniel explained that as he worked his way up through various preschools in Toronto, he occasionally faced judgment from parents. One mom asked the principal not to leave Daniel alone with her kids. At one job, if he was the first to arrive to work, a mom would wait in the room awkwardly with him until a female staffer arrived. More typically, moms would second-guess his opinions. “Mum knows and that’s it,” he told me. “Upon giving birth, there’s a beam of light that imbues you with knowledge.”

Perhaps it was no wonder moms were so skeptical of male early-childhood experts: they are vanishingly rare. In the U.S., men make up just over 2 percent40 of all preschool and kindergarten teachers, and the numbers are similar in Canada. Most of the men Daniel studied early-childhood development with had left the field almost immediately. Kids, apparently also unsure what to make of him, tended to call him “Miss Daniel.”

When Daniel did an Ask Me Anything interview with Reddit, the social network, it attracted the attention of so-called men’s rights activists. They wrote things like, “What is this stupid man doing? Why is he working with kids, he’s gonna get himself accused, and his life is over,” Daniel recalled.

At the time, he laughed it off.

When we reached this point in the interview, Patrick interjected, trying to sum up how people think of his partner: “He’s either a unicorn or the scary penis.”

In 2017, Daniel became the supervisor of a daycare center in Toronto. The role put him in charge of hiring, training, billing, and otherwise running a center for children aged nine months to four years.

The new job was fun and rewarding, but stressful. The entire staff was new, so there was a lot of turnover at first. There were cameras in all the classrooms, and in one case, Daniel had to fire a male teacher because he saw him yelling at a child.

The sudden disappearance of a male teacher clearly rattled the parents. “Ooooh, I’m so sorry about Mr. Michael,” the moms said. Then, more hesitantly, they’d add, “Did anything happen? Is there anything we should be…concerned about?” Daniel estimates he reassured about forty moms that day that essentially, no, Mr. Michael did not molest their children.

That’s on top of the more run-of-the-mill disasters, like the toilets exploding or the virus that mowed down all the teachers in one week. Out of forty-five children, eleven had anaphylactic allergies. One girl was allergic to cold (yes, in Canada). One boy, unbeknownst to his parents, was allergic to legumes. One child’s parents claimed he was allergic to “anything red.”