Fast-Track Childhoods

They live by the numbers: two careers with a combined six-figure income, at least one child in a top-ranked private school, one nanny, a house in a socially acceptable ZIP code.

They pace their frantic lives by the clock: leave home early, come home late, carve out “quality time” for their children.

The payoff for these “fast-track” parents is achievement--commonly measured in earnings that provide for the house, the cars, the nanny, the school tuition and the endless array of lessons and things that keep the household up to speed .

But what does this mean for their children?

That’s what experts are asking as they watch the country’s best schools fill with offspring of these super-achieving parents who want nothing but the best for their kids.

The good news, experts say, is that many of these children will mature to become independent thinkers and leaders of their generation. According to the few studies available, there is nothing intrinsically wrong with having affluent, hard-working parents--even if those parents leave the nitty-gritty of child-rearing to schools and domestic help.

The bad news is that some of these children are falling off the track before they even get on. Some show the same symptoms of malaise as children of the very poor: lack of self-esteem, initiative and imagination, inability to relate, depression and, in extreme cases, thoughts of suicide.

Headmasters at local private schools say children of these hard-working, high-achievers live like little aristocrats, like the super-rich kids of an earlier age: their parents unavailable, their lives run by servants, their schedules planned with little time for contemplation or free play.

Says Dr. David Elkind, professor of child development at Tufts University and author of “The Hurried Child”: “This whole (lifestyle) is new to the middle class. In the last 15 years, a new set of family issues has emerged, and a new way of relating between parents and children” as more mothers and fathers achieve success in careers. (In 1980, there were only 370,000 two-career households with incomes of $75,000 or more. In 1987, there were nearly 3.3 million.)

Time itself is a major issue, Elkind explains. Parents worry that they don’t spend enough of it with their children. Some try to compensate by scheduling too many activities for their children’s free hours, sometimes with unfortunate results. And many parents haven’t the foggiest idea of how to make best use of the time they do spend with their kids, he says. Because there are few precedents for these families to follow, he says, fast-track parents have no role models to emulate.

Andree Aelion Brooks, author of “Children of Fast-Track Parents” defines “fast track” as a “1980s, high driving, get-rich-quick attitude” where achievement is the only thing that matters in a child or an adult.

A fast-track parent, Brooks says, typically works much more than 40 hours a week, considers possessions one mark of success and puts as much pressure on his child as on himself to achieve “great things.”

“ ‘I was first in my class, I was chairman of the board, I made a six-figure income before I was 30’ ” are the kind of achievements she cites as meaningful to fast-trackers.

“When they became parents, it wasn’t a question of whether their children were sweet, kind and affectionate but, rather, whether they could read before they were 2, could spout Shakespeare by 5, that sort of thing. Life was a numbers game.”

Brooks says fast-track parents can transmit their highly competitive attitudes to their youngsters, with some “terrible repercussions” in children not up to the challenge. For example, nursery school teachers now report that 3- and 4 year-olds come to school with trembling hands or facial tremors from too much pressure at home. No matter how much they achieve, Brooks’ research shows, some children will never feel able to measure up to their parents’ accomplishments.

Headmasters at private schools say they share Brooks’ concerns, although most say the bulk of their own students are well-adjusted types who exhibit few of the fast-track ills she describes. But there are some unexpected blips on the screen of normalcy.

Some students show up for kindergarten expecting to be dressed and served; they have been so pampered by over-indulgent maids or nannies that they have not learned to fend for themselves, says Moreen Fielden, former director of the lower school at La Jolla Country Day School and now headmistress of the Gillispie School in that city.

“We tell parents it is important for the caretaker to be patient and allow the child to try to do things on his own,” Fielden says. “It’s sometimes easier for a nanny to pick up the toys a child has scattered, but it is more beneficial for the child to do it himself.”

Dr. Sirgay Sanger, director of Manhattan’s Early Care Center of New York and author of “The Woman Who Works, the Parent Who Cares,” notes that care-givers who fulfill a child’s every whim can rob the child’s sense of usefulness and make him genuinely helpless.

Other experts add that children who are coddled by servants, who have no useful family chores to perform and whose parents are absent for long periods of time, may find no reason to exist. They may feel that if they disappeared tomorrow they would never be missed.

Brooks says that self-esteem can be at risk in children whose parents are frequently away from home, no matter how worthwhile the reason. “If your parents are always very busy, you don’t feel worth much because they always have more important things to do than be with you. Absence may be interpreted as disinterest.”

Many children aren’t even allowed to be children, says Joyce Grief, director of development for the Chandler School, a private elementary and junior-high school with 426 students in Pasadena. “They’re so programmed with lessons after school that they have no free time just to play and be kids. There has to be an emotional toll,” she says.

Tim Mauldin, psychologist and director of Chandler’s learning center, agrees. “Put five regular kids around 10 pebbles and they’ll invent a game,” he says. “Put these over-programmed children in the same spot and they will not notice the pebbles. They will complain that there’s nothing to do. They don’t use their imaginations because they’ve never had to before.”

The “over-programmed syndrome” is common today, says Leslie Larsen, director of the Crossroads Upper School (Grades 9 through 12) in Santa Monica. “Many kids have no time for lateralization or reflection, for just sitting in a garden and contemplating a blade of grass. High-achieving parents often fear that kind of time for their children,” because they think it leads to trouble, which is not necessarily true, he says. “As successful adults, we tend to forget how important those idle moments of reflection and meditation were for us when we were kids.” Mauldin sometimes meets parents “whose expectations are totally inappropriate. The child who comes into kindergarten or first grade already a good reader, for example, has achieved that goal at serious expense,” he says.

“There are normal developmental paths for children at any given age and stage,” Mauldin says. Reading should come about when the child tells an adult he is ready by pointing to words and trying to figure them out himself. But parents who pressure themselves to over-achieve sometimes “hothouse” their children, with the result that the child may read quite early “but other essential, underlying skills will be out of balance,” Mauldin says.

Parents who both work at high-powered jobs, he says, often “don’t have a very good handle of what is normal for children because neither of them see enough children to make valid comparisons.”

Barbara Wagner, head of the Marlborough School in Los Angeles since last year, and of Graland Country Day School in Denver, Colo., before that, doesn’t believe in generalizations about fast-track parents--or any other kind of parents. “Raising children is much more complicated than that,” she says. However, she has observed that many super-successful parents are “more involved with the product than the process.”

“It is important to strike a reasonable balance between the process of studying or playing music or volleyball and the end product, which is winning the trophy or getting a top grade.”

Not enough parents reward the willingness to learn and to try, she says. “Achieving makes us all feel good at some level, but there should be the ability to enjoy an experience just for the pleasure of the experience itself, rather than just for the end result.”

What children need, says Lawrence Majovski, a child psychologist in Pasadena, is for their parents to “sit down with them and thoughtfully listen, without their minds being made up in advance.” His young patients say they “would like to be able to offer a point of view totally divergent from what their parents expect or want to hear” and have their parents at least consider and discuss it. “But their parents are in a hurry all the time, and if you’re in a hurry you can’t really listen.”

That is where some troubles begin, Majovski adds, especially in children ages 5 to 10. Parents who listen may detect patterns and problems as they develop, and will start to understand the unique personality of the child. “Little children are quite open. Most don’t lie or contrive at that age,” Majovski says, “and you can really tell when they’re hurting or need help.”

Thomas Hudnut, headmaster of the 90-year-old Harvard School in Studio City, agrees. Damage is done long before children get to high school. “Kids who go haywire at 17 are generally those who were having problems at 8. It’s the buildup, over time, of patterns of self-sufficiency on the child’s part and neglect on the parents’ part,” he says.

“Quality time begins with the parents sitting down and talking with their children.” There is no substitute for that, Hudnut says.

Indeed, he says, “a celebrated study some years ago indicated the only common denominator among National Merit Award semifinalists was that they all came from families that always sat down to dinner together. The fact that they were all together, talking, learning to ask questions and interact, not watching television or going out for fast food” seemed to have a big impact.”

In Chatsworth, at the Sierra Canyon School, co-director Mick Horowitz has noticed that a certain amount of stress rubs off on children of high-powered parents, who inevitably are stressed themselves. The school tries to defuse the situation by “doing things in a non-competitive way, by nurturing and and trying to build self-esteem.”

“But some parents just don’t get it,” Horowitz says. They keep the competitive attitude going in their kids.

“Some get extremely upset that a child got a B on a test, and they’ll call and argue that he should have received an A . Suddenly everybody becomes a lawyer. The parents are lawyers, the kids are lawyers. I find myself, an educator, having to lobby my position to prove to the parents I’m right.”

This kind of parent, Horowitz says, believes his child can do no wrong. He sees the child as an extension of himself, rather than as an individual.

Fast-track parents can be excellent parents, most experts say, if they understand the pieces of the puzzle of a child’s development and help those pieces fit together as the child grows.

If a child is over-pampered, over-entertained, feels unnecessary in his own home, has no time to contemplate the connection between himself and the universe around him, has the wrong kind of interaction with parents and servants, or sees his parents constantly striving for possessions and status of which they already seem to have enough, then the pieces will fall apart. The child will ask himself questions that he cannot answer to his own satisfaction. His self-esteem will fail.

Says Nat Reynolds, head of the Westlake School in Los Angeles: “Parents cannot inoculate their children against those questions which inevitably arise in adolescence: Why are my parents spending 18 hours a day at the office? For another BMW? For another house? What is the meaning of it all? Sooner or later you have to ask those questions or get a lobotomy.”

Some children, it seems, can’t find the right answers.

Says the Crossroad School’s Larsen: “Educators are extremely concerned about self-esteem, especially with the rise in adolescent suicide rates, for which we need to find the cause.”

(Suicide is now the second-leading cause of death, after traffic accidents, for people ages 15 to 24. Since 1968, suicide among teen-agers has doubled; 10% of adolescent boys and 20% of adolescent girls have attempted it.)

“Kids may know what is expected of them, may know how to behave and that they should be good scholars--but they don’t know the meaning of it for their own lives. Nothing connects,” Larsen says.

If a child gets tennis lessons before he has a chance to decide he’d choose tennis on his own, “then he doesn’t have ownership of it. He hasn’t bought into it the way he would if he’d had time to reflect, investigate and decide that indeed, he did want to learn to play.”

Life has evolved in such a way, says Larsen, that there are often no real tasks that kids engage in that seem absolutely necessary. “What educators and parents have to do is make the tasks of intellectual and emotional life more real and meaningful, so that the child knows that if he were not alive, something would be absent from the universe.” The Harvard school’s Hudnut concurs: “Success, without anything holding it up, is a pretty empty goal. Separated from a value system that sees an individual in relation to the cosmos, it is meaningless. Kids who see their parents willing to sacrifice everything in order to succeed are sure to ask ‘is that all there is?’ ”

Elkind believes so-called “fast-track parents” really can do it all, once they recognize “they have a limited but critical role” in their children’s lives. That role, he says, is to “instill a certain set of values, attitudes, beliefs and behavior standards” which will make the children feel secure.