Something was off at preschool pickup. I had been living in Singapore for a month, and every day, I was the only mother waiting outside the school for her children. Instead, the parking lot was filled with silver-haired grandparents who had arrived promptly to retrieve children and ferry them home or to extracurricular activities. These grandparents, I eventually learned, weren’t doing this merely out of love for their grandchildren. Many of them were also being paid.
