SINGAPORE: One foreign domestic worker, speaking to Asian Boss media on the streets of Singapore, shared her story that sounds more like a family feud than a job termination.
“My employer sent me back to the agency without me knowing. I don’t know what’s wrong because they never tell me,” she said. “But I have a feeling… I know the mother got jealous because her baby grew closer to me than to her,” she added.
The helper’s only “crime” was being the one who fed, bathed, soothed, and played with her employer’s baby the whole day, every day, while the child’s own mother only attended to her baby for a short while at night.
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“That’s very normal if you’re always with her kid daily and the mother only has time with her baby at night,” she explained. “You should know what the baby will feel, right?” she further made her case with a question.
“It shows the helper has a good heart, and kids love her…”
In Singapore, it’s not unusual for domestic helpers to spend more waking hours with their employer’s children than the parents themselves. Naturally, kids bond with whoever wipes their tears and sings them to sleep.
Many see this as a blessing. One commenter on TikTok, who is both a mother and a helper’s employer, wrote: “It shows the helper has a good heart, and kids love her.”
But for others, not so much. One even retorted with a rhetorical question: “Is it? Until when you go out, and you see the kid sticks to the maid.”
This emotional tug-of-war isn’t rare. Helpers in the comments described being abruptly dismissed after their employer’s children became too attached to them.
One said her employer bluntly told her: “Our relationship is between work and money, nothing else.”
Another shared that her employer resigned from her job just to “take back” her twins from the helper, only to complain later that the new helper was lazy.
“Go to your mami…”
One TikToker summed it up bluntly: “This is classic worldwide… Can’t have your cake and eat it too. Gotta choose.”
The pattern is universal: When parents outsource caregiving but don’t invest the same emotional time required, the child’s heart often drifts toward the one who’s there the most.
Some employers embrace this. One helper recalled how her employer’s family’s youngest son called her “mami,” and her employer, instead of getting upset, actually encouraged it:
“I even overheard my employer telling her son to go to his mami,” the helper said. Others, however, treat such emotional attachment as a breach of contract.
“This is what happens when you outsource your parenting duties…”
Reddit commenters didn’t mince their words either.
“This is what happens when you outsource your parenting duties to the helper and then have to deal with the fallout later.”
Another drew a corporate comparison: “So FDW was sent back because the mother was jealous – What’s wrong with that? Is this not a legitimate reason to send the FDW back? In fact, employers don’t even have to give a real reason to send a helper back. It’s like layoffs — they say ‘restructuring’ but it’s really just cost-cutting.”
“Don’t blame the maids…”
At the heart of this matter, this isn’t just about jealousy. It’s about a collision between professional caregiving and parental pride.
Parents hire helpers to free up their time, but sometimes forget that time is precisely what builds closeness. When a baby cries for their helper instead of their mother, it’s not betrayal — it’s emotional attachment science.
As one commenter bluntly wrote: “In this modern society, don’t blame the maids. Can you even take care of your own children in the first place?”
Love doesn’t clock in and clock out. And in the quiet moments between bottle feeds and bedtime stories, a child’s loyalty is formed, with or without an employer’s or a mother’s blessings.
In other news, another maid also got fired for showing too much love. But this time, it wasn’t about jealousy over a baby. It was over a man.
She then asked, “Have I committed a crime to get married?”
You can read her full story in a twist that sounds like a modern-day Cinderella tale with immigration red tape and a surprise termination letter, as she was abruptly fired and told to pack up and leave the country over here: Maid says, ‘I got terminated and was asked to leave Singapore immediately because I want to get married to a Singaporean’
