Trend watch: Mannies

LONDON, England (CNN) -- What's the hottest human accessory these days? Forget a toyboy or an English au pair, the latest must-have is a Manny: a male nanny.

Madonna has hired a Manny to take care of her adopted baby, David Banda. After a long search, she realized there were no suitable female candidates and settled on a man.

But it's not just a celebrity quirk. The trend for women to have children on their own or for men to have children later in life when they may not be as physically able to play in the sandpit is behind the demand for male nannies.

Author Holly Peterson has written about the trend in her novel "The Manny."

"While the number of male nannies is still very small, there are growing signs of acceptance. At Cambridge-based Cultural Care Au Pair, for instance, men represented eight percent of roughly 7,000 total applicants in 2006, up from four percent in 2001," she says.

Rachel Booth, a working mother in New York, told me that it's not just small children who are being looked after by Mannies. The lack of male role models in schools and the fact that many fathers are absent or work long hours has increased the market for male companions or role models for teenage children.

"They're often college guys who are really into sport. They'll meet up with the child a couple of days a week after school, hang out, kick the football, talk about guy things and offer advice," she says.

Role models in the form of male teachers also seem to be thin on the ground. In the U.S., the National Education Association says the number of male schoolteachers is at a 40-year low, while in the UK one out of every five boys under the age of 11 are not being taught by a man, and one in 12 never has been. In 1,750 primary schools -- one out of every 10 in England -- there are no men teaching at all.

The Observer magazine reported last week on the scarcity of male teachers and said the government plans to encourage more male graduates into schools, as a better gender balance in the staff room can lead to more well rounded students: "Not only does it mean that children are starved of male role models, but new evidence suggests that many boys work harder and behave better when it is a man towering above them at the whiteboard."

But male teachers being more vulnerable to complaints of sexual assault have driven men away from the profession, as have stagnant salaries and the misconception that teaching is a "girly" profession.

But as Madonna's former nanny, Melissa Duma, wrote an explosive book about her one-time employer (suppressed by the singer through legal action) it may be that trust, not gender, is the most important attribute in a child-minder. E-mail to a friend