Given the mobility of American families (making a nearby grandparent a luxury) and the absence of public day-care options, a significant number of children (and not only those born into the 1 percent) are raised — at least for a few years — by paid helpers.

When I had my first child, I fell in with a group of nannies at a park near where I lived in Santa Monica. It was less terrifying than the mothers’ group I attended. The nannies congregated on the playground late afternoons, a better time for my writing schedule, dictated in those days by my son’s naps. I sat with the English speakers, who were mostly Filipinas: women whose children were grown and in graduate school, women whose babies were being raised by yayas across the Pacific and women who had not yet married. The leader of the group was a 52-year-old mother of five who made eight times what her husband earned as an executive back in Manila. (And of the group, she didn’t even hold the highest-paying job. She worked for two college professors.) She grew up with servants. Her father was a judge. She was president of her neighborhood organization and a member of five social clubs. Here, she worked as a live-in nanny. She called herself the C.E.O. of Filipinas in Santa Monica.

One of her protégés was a woman in her 30s from Mindanao, who was educated as a doctor before she came to the United States with her sister. She intended to study for the tests she needed to pass to become a doctor here. She heard of a job taking care of a newborn, and though she had never been in charge of a baby before (she was the youngest in her family), she accepted the position, thinking she would do it for a year or two. A few months later, already working, she learned that her mother died across the Pacific. But she and her sister had come on visitor visas. They couldn’t leave the United States and return. They stayed and spent money they saved from their jobs to buy black clothes, which she laundered every night during the months of their mourning. She told the baby boy she took care of about her mother.

We don’t like to mix love with money. We want love to come as a gift that offers as much pleasure and reward to the giver as to ourselves. No one receiving love wishes to break it down to its component parts, of good sense and feasibility, much less to consider that payment may be necessary to inspire the whole project.

Even more than we want good love for ourselves, we want it for our children, those vulnerable satellites of our hearts that we send, unsteady, into the world. Lewis Hyde, in his study of gift-exchange societies, tells us that in those economies, the gift needs to go “around a corner.” There must be a middle person or the gift becomes a trade. So the person handing over the money cannot be purchasing love for herself. This is an alchemy that works for working parents. You can pay a person who almost certainly will not love you but, with any luck, may love your child.

A husband and wife I knew during those early years had a nanny who became certified as an R.N. Their son, a toddler, was attached to her. She had asked for an increase that would amount to doubling her salary. She could earn that as a nurse, she said, but she would stay because she loved him.

The husband used clichés: “held up” and “highway robbery.”

The wife said she would pay anything. Her son loved the nanny. But they gave their nanny two weeks’ notice.