What Children Learn From Yayas
A Human+ Essay by MaidProvider.ph
In many Filipino homes, childhood unfolds under the quiet, steady presence of a woman who is neither mother nor relative, but something else entirely — a caretaker who wakes before dawn, who moves through a family’s private spaces, who knows the rhythms of a child’s moods better than anyone else in the household. She is called a yaya, a word so ordinary in the Philippines that its emotional complexity is often overlooked.
Parents speak often about the lessons they want to impart to their children. But the truth — one whispered in kitchens, in playrooms, in late-night living rooms — is that children absorb just as much, sometimes more, from the women who spend the long hours beside them.
The things children learn from yayas rarely appear in parenting books. Yet they shape the earliest architecture of a child’s inner life.
The First Language of Comfort
Children do not remember their first fevers, or the nights they cried until dawn. But their bodies remember the person who lifted them, the arms that held them until the shaking stopped. A child’s earliest sense of safety is not built through logic but through touch — through the consistency of one adult who shows up every time.
Often, that person is a yaya.
The cadence of her footsteps, the way she tucks a blanket, the tone she uses when a tantrum begins — these become a child’s first lessons in emotional regulation. Long before the child understands words, they understand presence. They understand stability.
Years later, many parents are startled to hear their child soothe a sibling in the same gentle tone the yaya once used with them.
The Routine That Becomes a Lifelong Rhythm
In Filipino households, routines are rarely designed by children and only partly maintained by parents. It is the yaya who enforces nap schedules, orchestrates morning rituals, and performs the invisible choreography that keeps a household from falling into chaos.
Children learn discipline not through lectures, but through repetition.
The yaya who quietly returns toys to their shelves, who announces bath time at the same hour each day, who guides a child through the slow work of buttoning a shirt — she is not merely completing tasks. She is imprinting order.
Later in adulthood, these daily rituals often reappear in unexpected ways: the instinct to make the bed, the comfort found in morning routines, the ability to regulate oneself during stressful events. It is domestic work, but it is also emotional architecture.
The Social Universe Children Observe Up Close
If sociologists wish to understand how Filipino children learn respect, class awareness, or empathy, they need only observe how adults speak to household workers.
Children watch everything:
How parents give instructions.
How helpers respond.
How disagreements are handled.
How gratitude — or the absence of it — is expressed.
In these moments, children learn their earliest truths about power.
A family that treats yayas with dignity teaches a child that respect is not transactional. A family that snaps at them teaches something else.
Yayas do not just shape the child. The child’s environment shapes the meaning of the yaya’s role.
The Quiet Moral Education
There is a kind of wisdom that lives in the everyday habits of a yaya — a practical intelligence shaped by years of caring for other people’s children.
Children absorb:
a sense of empathy
the art of patience
the rhythm of kindness
the instinct to help
the humility of service
These are not lessons delivered like lectures. They are learned by proximity — through watching someone fold clothes neatly, wait out a tantrum without anger, or share stories about their families back home.
In a society that often undervalues domestic work, yayas teach children something unintentionally radical: that care is not a lesser form of labor.
Love Beyond Obligation
Perhaps the most profound lesson children learn from yayas is that love can exist outside bloodlines. A yaya is often the first person a child forms a bond with by choice — a bond born from daily rituals, from trust, from small acts of care.
This early experience shapes how children understand relationships:
that affection can be earned, not only inherited
that people can nurture without being related
that love can come from kindness, not obligation
For many adults raised in Filipino households, there is a yaya who exists in memory as a prelude to later relationships — a person who introduced them to the vocabulary of care.
The Relationship We Still Don’t Talk About Enough
In a culture that depends so heavily on household workers, the yaya-child relationship remains strangely unexamined. It is intimate, unstructured, emotionally charged, and socially unequal — one of the few relationships where a worker becomes central to a child’s emotional world, yet often remains peripheral in discussions about family.
But the lessons children learn from yayas last long after the child has outgrown the hand they once held onto while crossing the street.
A child’s earliest memories are built beside them.
A child’s earliest sense of self is shaped in part by them.
A child’s earliest understanding of the world passes through their care.
They are not just present in childhood.
They are woven into it.
A Human+ Perspective
At MaidProvider.ph, the Human+ philosophy is rooted in acknowledging exactly this: that domestic workers do not merely complete tasks — they help raise the next generation. Their influence is emotional, cultural, developmental.
To value them is to value the childhoods they help shape.
Human+. Built for dignity, care, and community.
MaidProvider.ph — The Philippine Maid Brand.