"You must sign up for daycare at this address," says one friend, with urgency. "If you do not sign up now," he hints, darkly, "bad things may happen...." This is a friend for whom high-stakes drama is a constant. His own children are at the local middle school , and his descriptions of this well-regarded school resemble something from HBO's "Oz." "The bathrooms are so horrid," he says, "that the children actually hold in their waste all day long." He allows us to infer what might be found in the bathrooms: corpses, bloody syringes. Then: "Imagine trying to learn with so much discomfort! Every day!" You can't ask this friend about the possibility of hiring a nanny. "I just think it's good to have peer monitoring among the care providers, and you can't get that if there's just one nanny...." His ellipsis speaks volumes; I can't help but recall the novel "The Perfect Nanny,...