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 kids. 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 grandkids. Many of them were also being paid.

In Singapore, according to a 2019 report by researchers from the Singapore Children’s Society and KK Women’s and Children’s Hospital, grandparents are the primary caregivers for at least 50 percent of children by the time they reach 18 months and a third of children who are 3 years old. This arrangement is born of a deeply entrenched culture of filial piety and intergenerational support, in which older adults care for young children and those children are expected to grow up to care for parents and grandparents as they age. It is also an arrangement that tends to be supported, in part, by an exchange of money.

Many adult children in Singapore routinely pay their parents a monthly allowance. That stipend is not always a child-care-specific paycheck; it can help cover bills, groceries, and other needs. But the allowance does recognize a fact of family life that tends to go unacknowledged in the United States: that the contributions of older people are essential labor that deserves to be remunerated. As Irene Hee, a Singaporean grandmother of three—whose daughter pays her a stipend and covers some of her expenses—told me of her caregivi