Fast-Track Childhoods : Busy Doctors Share the Job of Parenting

Drs. Laura Fox and John Hofbauer share a busy Beverly Hills ophthalmology practice. They arrive at their office about 8:30 a.m., or at the hospital by 7 a.m. on surgery days.

That leaves little morning time for their children, Alexander, 3 and Claire, 7, who are cared for by a live-in nanny five days a week, and by a second nanny on Saturdays and Mondays when the main caretaker is off.

The couple try to get home each night by 7, in time for Hofbauer to put the children to bed. He reads them a story and tucks them in, his wife says, because at night she’s “just too tired for the struggle. People talk about quality time, but some nights both John and I are so tired that the time we spend (with the children) doesn’t have much quality.”

Despite their busy schedules, Fox and Hofbauer have tried to structure their lives to avoid the pitfalls sometimes associated with fast-track parenting.

They devote every minute they’re at home to the children. “The full-time nanny also cooks,” Fox says, “and the part-time nanny does the grocery shopping.” There are other helpers to do the cleaning that the nannies can’t manage.

Do the children suffer from their parents’ absence? “I don’t feel we’re that absent,” Fox says. “We really make it our business to come home at night. We don’t go out socially at all during the week.” Besides, she says, “we are a strong presence in our children’s lives. They definitely know who their parents are.”

And she’s there for them when it counts, Fox says. Claire will soon enter second grade at a private Westside school, for example, and Fox explains: “I go out of my way to be at all the school events. I can’t hang out and be a room mother, and I feel kind of bad about that. But I make it to all the assemblies where Claire performs, and to everything else in which she’s involved. We go to all the open houses without fail.”

“The other thing we do in this family is take vacations together. At least twice a year we go away together and have some fun times,” Fox says.

“The thing about fast-track parents in a fast-track household,” she explains, “is that most of the burden and guilt falls on the woman. The man is doing what is expected of him, what generations of fathers have done before him. He is going out to work every day, and he has loads of role models. I don’t think he’s torn in the same way that somebody like me is torn. We women have no role models.”

Her daughter seems no more or less happy or spoiled than children in her peer group whose mothers do not work at all. “The kids my daughter plays with mostly have mothers who don’t work, and they have nannies too,” Fox says, “So they are all spoiled to a certain degree. I can’t say my daughter is great about picking up her own clothes or making her own bed. But I’m not sure of the significance of that.”

More important, her daughter is growing up to know that she too will be expected to “have something to do in life, a way to support herself.”