Save the Children, which supports Atlanta, makes a distinction between child labour and "child work", which can give children income, skills and self-confidence without damaging their schooling.
The boy's mother, guided via earset by a therapist watching through a two-way mirror, helped her child work through and resolve his feelings.
But as it is for most contemporary home cooks, my kitchen is no island: there are phone calls, television sets, text messages, interruptions to pick up a child, work matters to settle.
But there is a distinction between child work, where children work alongside their parents a few hours a week after school to supplement the family income, and child labour, where children are taken out of school to work and their family depends on what they earn.
Though alcohol has robbed him of wife, child, work, self-respect and nearly his life, he still regards the phalanx of liquor bottles in the airport bar (the new designer vodkas "preening like pageant contestants in push-up bras") as neglected, betrayed old friends.
But after a while, I suspect, most mothers with jobs are no longer surprised that it is hard to combine things that are often at cross-purposes (sick child, work deadline), no longer particularly indignant at the realization that something usually has to give.
It was because child, work and pension tax credits rose that 2 million children and 2 million pensioners escaped poverty – and because they were cost-effective: the biggest increases in social spending from 1999 were not on tax credits but on the NHS (up £65bn), followed by pensions (up £35bn).
A high court judge reviewed an appeal contesting as too lenient the resultant ban on child work for three years, but solicitors for the GMC and Prof Southall had said striking-off would be "disproportionate and draconian" and could demoralise professionals in the child protection field.
The regimen, called constraint-induced movement therapy, involves putting the child's good arm into a cast for three weeks and having the child work with a therapist, one on one, six hours a day six days a week to practice movements using the bad arm.
To determine the child work status in India. .
