Imagine this. A two-year-old girl is toddling cheerfully around a Kitsilano house party 30 years ago, and approaches one of the young men in the kitchen. “I peed and I’m wet,” she tells him. “Will you change my diapers?” The young man recoils in horrified surprise and tells the little girl that that task is her mother’s job. Sturdy, confident, arms akimbo, she tells the reluctant man in ringing tones, “Donnie changes my diapers at daycare!”
While the girl in the story probably didn’t have the vocabulary to tell the reluctant young man he was being sexist by refusing to do one of the foundational tasks of child rearing, the message was abundantly clear.
And her beloved “Donnie,” the career childcare worker Don Hann, has delivered that message, and many others, for decades now. Last Friday when Hann left his final shift at the toddler room at City Hall Childcare — where, for 40 years, he has cared for children between 18 months and three years old — he was retiring from a remarkable career.
Hann has, over those decades, not only changed diapers. He has wiped runny noses, comforted crying children, mediated fights among the toddlers, led and supervised outdoor play and nap time, all the while bathing the hundreds of children he has helped raise with a signature blend of gentle affection, firm limit setting and good humour.
“We typically work rotating shifts at the centre,” Hann told the Courier in early November, when asked to describe his workday. “Today I started at nine, and one of my first tasks was to scan and track the emotional states of the children as they arrived. Today was pretty harmonious, but of course sometimes kids will arrive stressed and anxious. You have to tune into them and help them manage their moods.”
Much of his work, he said, involved encouraging play and relationships.
“Sometimes, when kids hit each other or fight over toys, my job is to help them talk to each other instead. We are really helping them become social beings. In a way we help birth them psychologically and socially.”
Geoff Peters, a former CHCC parent who served as chair of the childcare’s board for several years, has a vivid memory of Hann’s nurturing warmth with his child.
“When Alexandra would cry,” he said, “Don would pick her up and cuddle her. His love for children is very evident.”
Hann, who was hired at the childcare centre in 1975, sees his work as explicitly feminist practice, an example to children and to the public that men can and should do the essential, humanizing and exhausting work of childcare side by side with the women to whom it has been by and large relegated over the years.
Claudia McDonald, who has seen Hann care for her child and grandchildren over the years, recently sent him this email.
“I never thought of you retiring, so melded you are with City Hall Daycare in my mind! But of course, we are now of that age. You have been so devoted to caring for all those precious beings, my son, Bram, grandchildren, Asher and Eva, Maya, Johan, Ellie and Liam among them. You have demonstrated that men can be caring and nurturing of babies and toddlers; you have gotten right down there on the floor!
You never lost your view of your place in history, of the significance of your work, of the wider perspective. You have been [an] unflagging supporter of women and an advocate for improved and accessible daycare. You should have a plaque on the wall, mister! A wee bit of you travels into the future lives of all those beings you have cared for.” (Full disclosure. McDonald, like Hann, was part of my social circle in the 1970s, and I have known and respected them both for decades.)
Minority within a minority
Hann was born in Corner Brook, N.L. in 1946 to a father who was a small business owner and a mother who worked at home. With his father publicly confronting racism in the 1940s and his mother active in a provincial women’s organization, Hann’s family taught him strong values about equality and respect for all and supported him actively when he came out as gay. Hann credits this family tradition for his early interest in radical sociology, labour activism and feminism.
Hann, as an openly gay male childcare worker, is a minority within a minority. Fewer than five per cent of childcare employees in Canada are men, and few of those men are openly gay. In the face of homophobia and social unease, not many men of any orientation choose childcare work. Fewer still stay with it as a career (although one expert I consulted thought there were a couple of men on Vancouver Island who had been in the work for 30 years.) Retention of trained, skilled staff is an issue across the sector. According to the Child Care Human Resources Sector Council of Ottawa in 2012, 65.5 per cent of childcare employers lost at least one full-time worker that year. While it is not possible, in part because the Courier’s search of national records did not find the appropriate data, to say with absolute certainty that Hann has served as a childcare worker for longer than any man in Canadian history, it does seem likely that his four decades represents a record.
“Don breaks the mold,” said Tina Wight, Hann’s supervisor at City Hall Childcare and co-worker since 1992. “He has a unique approach to childcare. He is calm, and he sees children as unique individuals and he values their uniqueness. I have never heard him raise his voice to a child.”
Activist roots
Soft spoken with his toddler charges, Hann is far from silent politically. He has been out publicly as a gay man since 1971, and since moving to Vancouver in 1973, he has conducted an active and ongoing political practice campaigning for gay and lesbian rights (originally with the pioneering Gay Alliance Toward Equality in the 1970s) and as an active member and sometime officer within his union.
Hann is a tireless archivist and historian of movements for social justice on both the local and the global scene. If you know Hann at all, you are likely to be on his mailing list and receive an impressive volume of his original essays and poems intertwined with extensive quotes from scholars of feminism, Marxism, child development, gender theory and other critical perspectives on sexism, homophobia and class.
These reflections inform his lifelong career as a childcare worker, said Cy-Thea Sand, a Women’s and Gender Studies professor at the University of Manitoba and longtime friend of Hann’s.
“Don is an extraordinary intellect. He can both deal with critical theory and taking a toddler to take a poo. The children in his daycare have the rare experience of a man as a nurturing adult. This is more common now, but it was very rare indeed when Don started.”
Alan Zisman, who served on the City Hall Childcare board in the mid-1980s, echoed Sand’s high regard for Hann.
“Forty years of being a man working with infants is a huge accomplishment. Don has challenged how we all work with children.”
According to Sand, Hann’s life and work integrate the heart and the intellect and displays great love and bravery. “You have to be brave to shake up the policing of gender the way he has,” she said. “Don has been a pioneer. Now, more men are getting it about the need to nurture children, but he was an early champion. Although he loves all the kids, he has a special delight in little girls who are firebrands! I have a deep appreciation for the meaning of his life and work.”
Looking back at his career, Hann is contented.
“I am happy with the life I’ve had,” he said. “I have had a rewarding life as what I call a ‘gay male mother’ to the kids, and I have served as a public face for gay childcare workers. I have been so fortunate.”
