Kim Zeiss, organizes the family schedule on her Palm Pilot with the help of her husband, Gary, as their son, Jake, 9, watches while they wait for their daughter, Madison, 10, at the Los Angeles International Fencing Center in West Los Angeles, Calif.
Sociology: The intimate moments that once bonded parents and children are disappearing amid job demands and nonstop activities, as shown in a video project by researchers and a firsthand account by the Associated Press

  LOS ANGELES — Jake Zeiss bolts from his west L.A. bungalow before 8 a.m., red hair damp and shirttail flapping.
  Later, after seven hours of back-to-back meetings, he volleys for an hour with his tennis pro. Still perspiring, he slides back into his vehicle, gobbles a nutrition bar and does paperwork on a lap desk while his chauffeur burrows through the nation's worst rush-hour traffic.
  Jake Zeiss is 9 years old. His paperwork is multiplication tables.
  The Zeiss family is late for hockey practice. After that, it's fencing lessons for Madison, Jake's 10-year-old sister. Their father, Gary, a 47-year-old attorney, will meet them at the gym — hopefully by 8 p.m.
  Jake and Madison's mom, Kim Zeiss, has transformed her vehicle into a rolling Wal-Mart, with cases of snacks and drinks buried beneath backpacks and sports equipment.
  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.
  For a week, scientists using digital video cameras recorded the Zeisses' every move. Back in the lab, the researchers analyzed their behavior — frame by frame — intent on seeing them with a dispassionate eye.
  Archaeologists sifted through the family's belongings, down to the stray sock behind the dryer and the cans of tuna in the pantry.
  Psychologists required everyone but the family dog Ozzie to spit into test tubes several times a day. The vials were frozen and shipped to a Pennsylvania lab where technicians measured the rise and fall of stress hormones in saliva.
  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.

Working moms
  Already, trends are emerging from their observations, 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, drive better cars and take nicer vacations.
  For many more families in the study, two paychecks are necessary to put food on the table.
  Researchers say now there are three jobs in the American family — two careers plus parenting — and only two people to accomplish them.
  In short, home life is beginning to imitate the downsized American office.
  It means parents and children live virtually apart at least five days a week. They reunite for a few hours at night, sleep and separate again the next morning. In this study, at least one parent was likely to be up and gone before the children awoke.
  When they are together, today's families tend to stay in motion with lessons, classes and games. Or, they go shopping.
  UCLA researchers say that, for the most part, husbands in their study haven't cut back on their work. Some, like Gary Zeiss, work from home occasionally. Others help out with chores a little more.
  Mothers in the UCLA study still bear the key household and child-rearing responsibilities, even while working full time.
  Researchers contend this appears to erode families from within. 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 scientists.
  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 32 families were paid $1,000 each to participate. Most responded to ads in neighborhood newspapers.
  The families reflect L.A.'s ethnic stew: Anglo, black, Hispanic, Vietnamese, Indian and others. Two families had same-sex parents. They lived all over greater Los Angeles, from the ranch house subdivisions of the San Fernando Valley to the gang-plagued streets of Compton.
  Some facts of L.A. life, like traffic, could not be avoided. Yet the scientists believe they structured the study so it examined the interior factors of everyday life that are just as true elsewhere.
  By using cameras, the scientists documented the families' real reactions and conversations as the day unfolded.
  Each family was observed over a week's time. Researchers would stick with the families from the morning's first pot of coffee to bedtime. They followed a simple rule: Knock first.
  Their method invites comparisons to the landmark 1973 PBS series that documented the lives of the Loud family, from dance recitals to a gay son to the parents' divorce.
  But this is Ph.D.-style reality TV. It's not a portrait of a single family.
  In 1,600 hours of digital video, scientists captured moments of unfiltered joy — but also of sorrow, anger and frustration.
  The UCLA study isn't ranking families from best to worst. Instead, scientists are asking how families are coping.
  In a word, barely.
  For the study's director, Elinor Ochs, a linguistic anthropologist, the most worrisome trend is how indifferently people treat each other, especially when they reunite at the day's end.
  With a mouse click, she summons footage from the project's vast archive. Some of it is hard to watch.
• A man walks into the bedroom after work as his wife folds laundry. There is no kiss, or even a hello. Instead, they resume their breakfast argument virtually in midsentence about who left food on the counter to spoil. (He did.)
• An executive mother wears a pained smile as her daughter refuses to meet her gaze. Finally, the embarrassed nanny prompts the girl to speak while buttoning the girl's pajamas.
• A big bear of a man squeezes into his cramped home office where his son is playing a computer game with two pals. He rubs his son's head, but the boy doesn't blink. As the father shuffles out, the son gestures toward the computer and mutters, "I thought you were going to fix this."
  Ochs says other human cultures — even other species like wolves — greet each other in elaborate ways that reinforce social bonds.
  In her view, the chilly exchanges repeated in so many of the study's households suggest 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. "They are tiptoeing around their children."
  The Zeiss family, however, is positively tribal with hugs and shouts. Their packed schedule just means they reunite in the car or parking lots.
  Madison catches up on her homework as she and brother Jake travel to Jake's hockey practice. "Fortunately, the kids don't get car sick," their mom quips as she drives the minivan.
  After a 40-minute drive to the ice rink, Madison races to the snack bar while Jake drags his hockey equipment into a musky locker room.
  He plays for the Junior Kings, an all-star team affiliated with the city's NHL franchise. Elbow to elbow, Kim and 20 other mothers strip their sons down to their Spiderman undies and strap on pads the size of sofa cushions. After double-knotting Jake's skate laces, she slaps his helmet and he waddles out toward the ice.
  "When they turn 10, they dress themselves and moms can't come in," she says, squatting on a duffel bag to catch her breath. "None of us want to see that day. What else am I going to do — sleep?"

No time-outs
  Kim's remark raises a second trend emerging from the UCLA data — little time for dreaming.
  Ochs laments how few people have any unstructured time. In just one of the 32 families did the father — a freelance film animator — make a habit of taking an evening stroll with his son and daughter. Hand in hand, they dodged vacant lots and broken glass in Culver City while chasing fireflies and making up stories.
  Similar Sloan-funded studies launched in Italy and Sweden hint that families in those countries stay home more. The American kids spend less time at home and virtually no time in the yard. Play time tends to be organized and supervised by adults.
  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.
  A typical Monday for the Zeiss family has four or five after-school events. They are in constant touch by cellphone, Blackberry and pager.
  It's very different from how they were raised in Miami in the 1970s. Gary wasn't allowed to play football; his parents feared for his safety, but he remembers feeling unchallenged.
  Now he is reviving his interest in fencing, which he shares with Madison, who's ranked No. 5 nationally in her age group. Academically, she's near the top of her middle school, too.
  "The kids are doing well," he says. "They are getting good grades. They're not obese. At the end of the day, this is good for them."
  Kim's mother was divorced, and Kim spent afternoons alone watching TV and doing homework. Some days she would ride her bicycle 15 miles to the beach.
  She pauses, bothered by the memory. Nothing bad ever happened, but it could have.
  Now 43, she worked as a television producer at MTV and ESPN until Jake was 2. Recently she became an administrator at Madison's school.

Drowning in trappings
  With all the scheduling and management, family life begins to resemble running a small business. That means requisitioning materials and supplies, which invariably leads to a third hallmark of the study: clutter.
  Archaeologist Jeanne 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.
  For Arnold, who is accustomed to examining bits of bone and pottery, modern households are overwhelming. How much stuff do people own? So much that only two families have room to park their cars in the garage.
  By Arnold's rough estimate, the typical American family owns more than most Egyptian pharaohs, who were buried with their treasures for the journey to the afterworld.
  Little of today's clutter would be mistaken for King Tut's gold. It's piles of leftovers — clothing draped over old computers that are balancing on boxes of forgotten toys resting on top of old furniture.
  The world has never seen consumption on this scale, Arnold says. "And every week we see more stuff arriving. People can't stop."

Face time
  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. Originally, they planned to conduct this electronic roll call every 20 or 30 minutes. But they found themselves chasing their subjects from room to room as they orbited one another, hardly pausing.
  Ochs says families gathered in the same room just 16 percent of the time. In five homes, the entire family was never in the same room while scientists were observing. Not once.
  For parents, togetherness is even tougher to come by. In only six families did the parents spend more than 10 percent of their waking hours in the same room without a child present.
  "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 late.
  Gary and Madison don't return from fencing practice until 10:20 p.m. For the past hour, Jake has been practicing his drums for Tuesday's music lesson.
  Kim spoons chili from the crock pot and serves salad and mashed sweet potato. The television is off.
  Conversation ping-pongs. Upcoming birthday parties. Jury duty. Jake's favorite rock group, Linkin Park, is signing CDs at Barnes & Noble on Friday. Can he leave school early? Madison has a vocabulary test in the morning.
  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.