The aim of the article is to explore norms about care and masculinity in early childhood education and care settings in Indonesia and Sweden. Building on long-term ethnographic fieldwork, it is shown how care in the two nations was produced as ambivalent for men, causing a risk of being accused of working with children for the wrong reasons. Two different strategies were employed by the men to handle this: to avoid caring practices and to renegotiate care, making it part of hegemonic masculinity. In the study, ethnographic methodology building on long-term relations, situated knowledge and trust, was key to gain the two different perspectives. The methodology produced nuanced understandings of how care and masculinity came to be enacted in different social and religious contexts. The extended field work enabled trustful relations to develop, which in turn facilitated shared learning about gendered bodies, fear and shame in relation to care