A few years ago, I became good friends with a pretty typical North American Sikh family. You know them. A husband and wife, a couple of kids and the husband's widowed mother brought over from Punjab. A nice family, nothing unusual.

I was friendly with the wife, a woman of my generation who had run a small in-home daycare for quite a few years. Her husband was a hard-working businessman, sort of successful, but not getting rich. The kids, a girl and her younger brother, were in high...