who is asked to endure
em ingram
Some people take gap years. Others go to grad school. Most of us just start looking for a job.
A surprise to no one: looking for a job sucks, especially right now.
Inflation.
Crashing job markets.
Phoney postings on Indeed.
I finally find a listing just to be met with a series of invasive questions and check boxes.
I craft a response. Upload my resume.
All that and the void that is A.I. application readers simply dumps my response into the trash.
I never hear back.
Plan B:
Accept the first non-livable-wage job my professor casually recommends in conversation.
So there I was —in Park Slope — spending my post-grad summer as a glorified camp counselor surrounded by a gaggle of small children.
Don’t get me wrong. I loved my new job: Outdoor educator and lead teacher. I chose it for a reason; I had been feeling crushed by the sense of eroding democracy. I needed a break from the sense that everything was falling apart. Or rather than a break, I needed a reconnection with youth and innocence. Children's innocence is beautiful to me, and in moments with them, it allows for the frame of perspective to be drawn to a specific point. To leave the rest of the world at the door, or in this case, the park entrance.
Moving from the worlds of academia and journalism to childcare I thought that kids and play would be my escape from ‘the real world.’ For 8 hours a day, I would get to unplug from the grips of headlines and controversies. Be one with nature and youth. Yadayada.
But oh how I was wrong. The reminders just kept coming:
The Park slope setting = trade wife dynamics + insane wealth disparity + skewed worldviews.
Gender role perceptions → difference in treatment amongst teachers → story of a really bad day. (I will explain this below).
There’s a lot of things that sucked about the job:
The pay
The parents
Being outside in the heat all day
Wiping dirty butts
Hauling 50 lbs of belongings up and down hills in the sun.
No job security since they weren’t rehiring new teachers for the fall semester
MLM-type business scheme that funneled resources into their other preschooling programs.
But an unexpected difficulty in this job was maintaining the use of our gentle parenting type responses.
According to gentle-parenting 101 kids don’t have ‘problems’ they ‘face challenges.’ They’re not ‘misbehaving’ they’re ’struggling for impulse control.’ Under gentle parenting, discussing the perpetuation of harm is linguistically softened to allow the child more room for development or growth.
This style of teaching or parenting makes sense for a reason — kids are generally innocent to the dynamics at play in adult situations; they’re just starting to figure life out and communicating wants and needs is really hard at any age.
The age of beating and screaming at your kids is over, for rightful reasons. But in its replacement is a framework often quietly dependent on adults — often feminized ones — to absorb unfettered patience, unpaid emotional labor, and bodily risk.
Let me tell you about my worst day on the job.
It was T-11 days till the program was over — a Thursday with a group of majority returning kids. Should be fine right? Well no.
This week we were joined by the kid who was working through a lot of things — mainly using his body instead of words and getting physical with teachers or other students. He was working on maintain healthy communication and play style with friends, as he would tend dominate the dynamic, and command others to play his way or receiving cruel punishment. Because of this, he often chose to play independently or with teachers who followed instructions.
On this particular day he was getting along fairly well with two slightly younger, more impressionable friends who were responsive to his directions on play. As I began washing hands for lunch, I told the three of them it was time to wrap up. The boy said he wanted to stay on the stump and eat there. I explained — as we do every day — that we eat together on the mat for safety, and that the stump would still be there afterward. He refused, turned to the other two, and said to me, “I’m going to hit you if you don’t let me sit on the stump.” Mind you, he’s four.
Oh hell no, I thought. I told him it is not okay to threaten my body and that there would be consequences.
I put down the soap, walked toward the mat where my co-teacher was with the rest of the class, and reached for my phone. “You have to take over,” I said. “They just hit me. I’m calling our boss.” As I dialed, the three of them ran at me again, hitting me from all sides. I was pushing them off with one hand, trying to hear the phone with the other, shouting for them to stop. I pushed one child away and he fell back onto the mat, stunned. The other two kept coming, laughing, like it was a game.
I ran out of the play area, still on the phone. Behind me, my co-teacher continued washing hands instead of activating our emergency protocol. The boy grabbed a branch and started swinging it at me. I yelled — stop, this isn’t funny, do not hurt me — but nothing slowed them. They chased me across the path and into an open field before finally stopping. My boss heard the entire thing on the phone and my co-teacher never intervened.
I’ve never seen kids turn ‘Lord of the Flies’ so fast in my life — nor have I ever been violated by children like that before. It was a miniature rehearsal of power where charisma overrides rules, group allegiance overrides harm, and the system freezes rather than confronts it.
Gentle frameworks like this one flourish in places like Park Slope — liberal, wealthy, insulated — because they assume backup systems are always available. Another adult will step in. A director will arrive. A parent can leave work early. A body will absorb the risk in the meantime. Even when I clearly articulated boundaries and consequences, the harm still landed on me. The structures of responsibility and care funneled the burden toward the body already tasked with absorbing it. Me.
Once they stopped chasing me, I sat down in the grass and started sobbing. I was utterly shaken up by what happened. My boss arrived and took the instigator away to talk to him and call mom to go home. I went home too.
I felt really devastated after this event. These were kids that genuinely liked me too, and it was seemingly a bad mix of personalities and energy that day which led to their attack. I felt boxed into a role that made me the sole vulnerable figure in our class dynamic, tasked to absorb this situation.
To make matters more uncomfortable, the parents of all three kids felt so guilty that they forced the kids to apologize to me after, which I didn’t even really want or need. As a teaching practice, we never demand apology because that leads to insincerity. The kids are literally too young to even articulate solid apologies, and they don’t really understand why they acted out in the first place. So it just put me (and the kids) into a further uncomfortable situation that literally does nothing but make the parents feel slightly better about themselves.
A parentally self-congradulatory learning moment.
Just let the incident teach on its own, and let us move on. I wish.
But the incident itself wasn’t really what stayed with me. Of course, it was slightly traumatizing in and of itself. A sudden switch was flipped, and I was shown just how weak I can be as a teacher — and how strong children can be when they join forces. Having to reconcile with this just being a common thing that child caregivers experience sucks enough. But on top of that, was more more real grievance, with the gender roles that had taken a hold of the teaching dynamic with my co-teacher over our 8 weeks together.
We are both nonbinary teachers, but present on opposite sides of the gender expression. Because of this, the children assume I’m a woman, and my co-teacher is a man. Our own presentations probably nudged that perception more than it being an inherent association by such young children. My co-teacher intentionally emphasized a more traditionally masculine style—athletic, butch, T-boy, —while I haven’t made much of an effort to mask the way I naturally appear, beyond occasional clothing or haircut choices. Over time, I’ve largely accepted that I present as maybe a queer woman rather than an ideally androgynous figure. I don’t see this as a “failure” on either of us, but it quietly reinforced the gendered roles the children assumed in our classroom.
Girls would take more to me. I got called mama during imaginative play. Boys would ask my co-teacher to assist with the potty more than me. Call them dada during play. I’m getting she/her’ed they’re getting he/him’ed. Basic stuff like that. Stuff we can handle. We would both do our best to come across gender neutrally, brush off gendered remarks, and even somewhat explain to the kids that we are just teachers, and not gendered. Ideally, we both wanted to just be teachers, right?
But, this is a class of majority four and five year olds. That is the age when following gender norms and expectations becomes a very real part of socialization and play for them. They are at the age where they start observing and falling in line with gender roles, so they kind of saw through, or overlooked, our neutrality and made assumptions based on the context of what they were experiencing with us individually. We didn’t mind that, just corrected lightly where easy.
I should also clarify that I’ve long come to terms with gender roles being imposed on me as a fem nonbinary person. I don’t expect adults, let alone children, to operate outside the gender norms they know when interacting with me, and I don’t approach my pronouns as a tool to ‘correct’ anyone. In school, I didn’t feel the need to make a conspicuous effort to explain this — I was present as a teacher first. The surprise, then, wasn’t in the children recognizing gender differences or assuming our gender identities; it was in how these perceptions quietly shaped authority and labor distribution amongst us, regardless of our intentions.
When it came to reinforcement, discipline, and guidance this is where the subliminal gender roles became even more problematic. Even within a progressive classroom, traditional gender scripts shaped who absorbed the hard labor of care—scripts rooted in expectations about women and men, and in this case, read through our bodies and self-perceptions of gender performance rather than our idyllic intentions. As the lead teacher, I was responsible for reinforcing class structure, which, combined with how we each presented and behaved, positioned me into a more traditionally feminized “responsible” role, while my co-teacher’s presentation allowed them to occupy a more playful, less burdened space. It felt like the dynamic that people are all too familiar with. Like is Mom or Dad more likely to say yes to candy before dinner?
It sucked feeling confined to that feminized role — even though the kids liked me and I was just as playful and engaged as my co-teacher, the dynamics of our classroom still split along gendered lines. My care labor ended up being coded as “responsible” or “authoritative” in ways that mapped onto a feminine ideal, while my co-teacher’s playfulness was seen as neutral or even positive, even when it came at the expense of classroom management. It wasn’t that the kids overtly judged us; rather, the structures of expectation quietly slotted me into a role where my authority carried the weight of enforcement, patience, and emotional labor, while their “fun” masculinity allowed them freedom from that burden, and the option to engage at will. That subtle division made my job harder, especially in that moment of vulnerability when I needed support.
There was also a moment during our first week of class that became a relevant part of this later introspection into our teaching dynamic. It was my co-teachers turn for their lunch break and I witnessed them grab a joint tube and lighter out of their backpack, which was appalling to me. Weed is chill and all. But in the middle of our outdoor childcare shifts? With the lives and well-being of nearly a dozen small children under our care in an expansive public park?? Yeah no… That moment clarified what would later become undeniable: seriousness, responsibility, and consequence were not being distributed evenly between us.
In the aftermath of the whole Lord of the Flies situation, my co-teacher and I had a mediated conversation with our boss about what had happened and how I could be better supported moving forward. I was honest: they hadn’t been attentive, not just in that moment, but generally, and I needed them to act as a serious reinforcer when things escalated — not another playmate. They were apologetic and receptive in theory, but nothing materially changed over the final two weeks. What did change was my clarity about the gendered role I had been inhabiting, and whether it could ever offer even temporary relief from oppressive structures.
If even in a supposedly progressive, queer-aware, nature-based classroom I was still slotted into a feminized position of endurance, what exactly was I escaping?
I took this job believing queer care work in a progressive outdoor education environment might exist outside the grind of class violence — that fascism was something loud, ideological, and external, something I could momentarily look away from. What became clear instead was that this gentleness was subsidized by precarity: low wages, unclear authority, and the quiet expectation that someone would absorb harm without complaint. I wasn’t escaping anything. I had just changed costumes.
This experience revealed just how deeply fascist logic is embedded, even in a supposedly progressive, queer-aware classroom. The moment of violence wasn’t really the problem itself; the dynamics that followed showed where authority actually landed. Responsibility fell on me—the feminized body already tasked with care, patience, and emotional regulation—while my co-teacher stayed playful, detached, and largely unburdened by consequence.
This was a moment where the familiar hierarchy quietly asserted itself.
I finally realized that childcare is not the space to ‘escape fascism,’ and oh how naive I was to ever assume that. Childcare harbors facism and patriarchy in unique ways, and persists through roles that felt naturally progressive and already decided.
After the program ended, I brought these reflections to my psychoanalyst friends who also work in childcare. They pointed me toward Dorothy Dinnerstein’s The Mermaid and the Minotaur. While I haven’t read the whole book, what I’ve gathered is that my observations actually map onto feminist theory. I felt reassured!!
Dinnerstein identifies the asymmetry of men and women’s roles with children, that being the ‘monopoly’ women have over childcare, as the source for universal psychological and social malaise. She offers a pretty practical solution: let men take up an equal role in childcare. Though now we can see clearly that should be extended to individuals regardless of gender orientation.
What stayed with me was how easily this arrangement settled into place even within a space that understood itself as progressive. Care work continued to demand endurance from one person while offering discretion to another. That structure is pervasive, and my recognition of it has since followed me out of the park and into everything else.