I'm not one to sneer at the anxious efforts of upper income parents to achieve parenting perfection. My eyes do not roll when I hear about highly-paid infant sleep consultants, baby Kumon, or the hyper-competitive preschool acceptance race. Honest. My view is we all do the best we can with what we have. If we admire the low-income single mom who spends four hours each day on the bus to take her kids to a better school, then we should at least understand that for the driven two-career professional couple, time is in short supply, but money is not, and that they will use what they have to their children's best advantage as they see it.

Still and all, sometimes the contrasts are downright painful. I subscribe to a useful service offered by the New York Times. The service tracks stories that involve children, and sends me a daily e-mail listing them. Today's e-mail brought me two stories, one from the real news part of the paper, and the other from the ever-expanding lifestyle zone.

Story one was about the persistent continued failure of the New Jersey child welfare system to protect and care for the abused and neglected children it is responsible for. In a report on the deaths of three such children, New Jersey's state child advocate Kevin M. Ryan noted that when child welfare employees involved in the three cases were interviewed, each "believed that there was nothing they would have done differently."

Story two was about the transformation of nannies hired by hard-working and apparently very well-off professional families into family managers paid as much as $75,000 a year for duties that include child care, but go much further -- overseeing home renovations, helping with family businesses, planning vacations, paying bills.

Clearly, these two stories were not meant to be read together. It was just the automatic sorting and searching of the news tracker that brought them into my inbox cheek by jowl. But there is something to think about in their collision: What child welfare caseworker makes $75,000 a year? Is it more demanding to run a highly-scheduled well-off family's household than to oversee the well-being of dozens of children in dozens of different living situations of various levels of chaos? How long would a nanny last who left one of her charges in harms' way, observed that harm had indeed occurred, and then concluded that she would do exactly the same thing next time?