Idaho Statesman 3-20-05, A-1
By Joseph B. Verrengia
The Associated Press

LOS ANGELESJake Zeiss bolts from his west LA bungalow before 8:00 a.m., red hair damp and shirttail flapping.

After seven hours of back-to-back meetings, he volleys for an hour with this tennis pro. Still perspiring, he slides back into his Mercedes and does paperwork on a lap desk while his chauffeur burrows through the nation's worst rush hour traffic.

Jamke Zeiss is 9 years old. His paperwork is multiplication tables.

He gropes for a pencil that has dropped down the dark, sticky crevasse of the back seat. And he's tempted by a new yo-yo. It's the kind that beeps and lights up.

"Jakey, is that a good use of your time?" hollers his morther, Kim.

Kim Zeiss has transformed her SUV into a rolling WalMart, with cases of snacks and drinks and sports equipment piled so high she can't use the rearview mirror.

"Fortunately, the kids don't get carsick," Kim quips. "If that happened, we'd be sunk."

The Zeiss family might be insanely busy. But they are not alone.

Scientists at UCLA have spent the past four years observing 32 Los Angeles families in a study of how working America somehow gets it done. Day after day.

The UCLA Center on Everyday lives of Families is one of six long-term projects sponsored by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation examining the intersection between family life and work.

At UCLA, a team of 21 researchers has completed the $3.6 million data-collection phase. A second phase will be devoted to analysis and, researchers hope, influencing federal policy on family issues.

Already, trends are emerging, and they appear to be related to the biggest change in family dynamics since Kim and Gary Zeiss were kids themselves: Mothers working outside the home.

It's a poorly understood seismic shift in both the nation's economy and daily life. For some families in the study, it allows them to own a bigger house and take nicer vacations. For many more families, two paychecks are necessary to put food on the table.

It means parents and children live virtually apart at least five days a week, reuniting for a few hours at night.

When they are together, today's families tend to stay in motion with lessons, classes and games. Or they go shopping.

Researchers contend this chase appears to erode families from within, like a rusting minivan dropping parts as it clatters down the highway.

What's falling by the wayside?

Playtime. Conversation. Courtesy. Intimacy.

And guess who is driving the minivan now? Researchers say parents effectively have relinquished the steering wheel to their children. That's because most family decisions and purchases are geared toward the kids' activities.

Whether these highly programmed kids will grow up to become competent and compassionate adults is an open question for many of scientists.

"We've scheduled and outsourced a lot of our relationships," says the study's director, Elinor Ochs, a linguistic anthropologist. "There isn't much room for the flow of life, those little moments when things happen spontaneously."

The study's requirements were straightforward: Find households with two parents who work outside the home, pay a mortgage and have two or three school-aged children. The families also reflect L.A.'s ethnic stew and diverse neighborhoods.

Each family was observed over a week's time. Researchers would stick with the families from the morning's first pot of coffee to bed-time. They followed a simple rule: Knock first.

The UCLA study isn't ranking families from best to worst. Instead, scientists are asking how families are coping.

For Ochs, the most worrisome trend is how indifferently people treat each other, especially when they reunite at day's end. In her view, the chilly exchanges repeated in so many of the study's households suggests something has gone awry.

"Returning home at the end of the day is one of the most delicate and vulnerable moments in life," Ochs said. "Everywhere in the world, in all societies, there is some kind of greeting.

"But here, the kids aren't greeting the parents and the parents are allowing it to go on," Ochs said.

The Zeiss family, however, is positively tribal with hugs and shouts.

After a 40-minute drive to the ice rink, Take drags his hockey equipment into a musky locker room.

Kim and 20 other mothers strip their sons down to their Spiderman undies and strap on pads the size of sofa cushions.

"When they turn 10, they dress themselves and moms can't come in," she says. "None of us want to see that day. What else am I going to do Ñ sleep?"

Kim's remark raises a second trend emerging from the UCLA dataÑ how few people have any unstructured time.

In just one of the 32 families did the father make a habit of taking an evening stroll with his son and daughter.

Kim and Gary Zeiss are keeping their children busy by design. They believe it's a key to being a successful adult in a culture that rewards multitaskers.

With all the scheduling, family life begins to resemble running a small business. That means requisitioning supplies, which invariably leads to a third hallmark of the study: clutter.

Archaeologist Jeanne E. Arnold planned to treat each house in the study like a dig site, cataloging and mapping family belongings as artifacts. But there was too much stuff. Instead, her staff took photographs. Thousands of them.

The world has never seen consumption on this scale, Arnold says. "And every week we see more stuff arriving. People can't stop."

Researchers say schedules and clutter butt heads to create the fourth family trend: flux.

Using computers, scientists mapped the location of each family member throughout the home every 10 minutes. Ochs says families gathered in the same room just 16 percent of the time.

"People just don't come together very frequently in our society," Ochs said. "They might say they want community, but they don't seek it."

The Zeiss family congregates for dinner, but not until Gary and Madison return from fencing practice at 10:20 p.m. Jake drops his spoon and starts rubbing his eyes. Time for pajamas. It's 10:56 p.m.

Gary and Kim smile across the table. It's their first time alone since the alarm clock buzzed 17 hours ago. Kim stares at a spoonful of cold sweet potatoes, then eats it with a shrug and stretches back in her chair.

"My feet are up," she announces to the ceiling. "We'll do it all again tomorrow."

Seven hours from now.