The years before everything else
There is a moment almost every parent knows. A child takes their first unsteady steps or speaks their first word, and something shifts. We feel, without quite understanding why, that we have witnessed something important. What no one in that room may fully grasp is that this child’s brain has been developing since before they were born, faster than it ever will again, forming the very architecture of who they will become. The capacity for language. For memory. For love, for learning, for resilience. It is all being built now, in these early years, long before the child will ever sit in a classroom or learn to write their name.
This is not poetry. It is science. And it is the most important thing we are not talking about.
Walk into any barangay daycare center and you will find the same quiet miracle unfolding: small chairs, walls papered with alphabet charts and tiny handprints. You will find child development workers who arrive before the children do and leave after the last one is picked up. Most earn less than minimum wage. They return each morning anyway because they understand something the rest of the country has been slow to see: what happens here matters. What happens here lasts.
For a long time, the country didn’t fully understand what was at stake. Early childhood was almost an afterthought, something left to families to manage on their own with whatever they had. Centers scraped by on whatever local governments could spare. Workers received honoraria so small the word itself felt like a kindness. National debates about education focused on curriculum overhauls and college readiness, on the years that are visible. The earliest years, the ones that shape everything, remained in the margins.
We are living with the cost of that neglect. The child struggling to read in Grade 3 was often the toddler who heard too few words, received too little nourishment, who experienced too little play. The link is not abstract. It is biological, traceable, and preventable. And every year we fail to act, more children fall into the same gap.
In 2025, something finally shifted.
Through the work of the Second Congressional Commission on Education (Edcom 2), Republic Act No. 12199, or the Early Childhood Care and Development System Act, was signed into law. The legislation strengthens how the country supports children from conception through age 8, recognizing these years not as a prelude to education but as its foundation. Alongside the law, budget allocations for early childhood programs increased, signaling a change in how the government understands public investment: money spent wisely on young children returns many times over, through reduced remediation costs, higher lifetime productivity, and stronger communities. Decades of research from around the world confirm this. The Philippines is finally acting on it.
Just as vital is the renewed commitment to professionalizing child development workers. They are individuals who arrive each day to care for children who are not their own. They stay because they believe in the work. But belief alone cannot sustain a system. Providing child development workers with fair compensation, career pathways, and real opportunities for growth is not generosity. It is a necessity. Research has shown again and again that caregiver quality shapes child outcomes. When we invest in those who nurture our youngest, we invest in the children themselves.
Yet a law passed and a budget increased are only first steps.
The work of 2026 must turn intention into reality. Funding must reach barangay-level centers, not stall in national agencies. Disparities across local government units’ income classifications must be confronted because a child born in a fifth-class municipality deserves no less than one born in a first-class city. Health and education services must learn to move as one so that families experience seamless care. And quality must match coverage; a center without trained staff, proper materials, or adequate support serves presence, not promise.
These young children do not vote, organize, or speak at hearings. They simply grow, day by day, irreversibly, into the citizens who will one day lead this country. What we choose to do for them now in these critical years is what we choose for our shared future.
In 2025, the Philippines chose to pay attention. In 2026, the task is to follow through.
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Gayl Porter-Laurel is the Edcom 2 chief technical and policy officer and champion of early childhood development reform.
