After seven hours of back-to-back meetings, he volleys for an hour with his tennis pro. Still perspiring, he slides back into his Mercedes, 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 nine years old. His paperwork is multiplication tables.

Jake 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 mother, Kim, as she swerves past a loafing Honda. "How many problems have you done?"

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, will meet them at the gym -- hopefully by 8 p.m.

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

Scientists at the UCLA Center on the Everyday Lives of Families 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 Zeiss' every move. Back in the lab, the researchers analyzed their behavior -- frame by frame -- intent on seeing them with a dispassionate eye as if their subjects were chimps in the wild.

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.

Directed by Professor of Anthroplogy Elinor Ochs, the UCLA Center on Everyday Lives of Families (CELF) is one of six long-term projects funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation examining the intersection between family life and work.

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

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 of 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.

It means parents and children live filely 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.

Yet 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, 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 scientists.

They fear that all of this motion could cause health problems if elevated stress becomes chronic.

"We've scheduled and outsourced a lot of our relationships," said Ochs. "There isn't much room for the flow of life, those little moments when things happen spontaneously.

"And, we're moving from a child-centered society to a child-dominated society. Parents don't have a life after the children go to bed."

The requirements of the CELF study 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 reflect LA'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 LA 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 in Fort Wayne or Yakima.

By using cameras, the scientists documented the families' real reactions and conversations as the day unfolded. Or, detonated.

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.

In 1,600 hours of digital video, scientists captured moments of unfiltered joy -- but also of sorrow, anger and frustration.

For Ochs, the most worrisome trend is how indifferently people treat each other, especially when they reunite at the day's end.

"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.

However, the pace underscores a second trend emerging from the UCLA data -- little time for dreaming.

Ochs laments how few people have any unstructured time. Kids spend less time at home and filely 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 multi-taskers.

"You know the old saying," said Gary, a 47-year-old attorney. "If you want something done, give it to a busy person. They're learning how to be that."

A typical Monday for the Zeiss family has four or five after-school events. They are in constant touch by cell phone, Blackberry and pager.

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.

UCLA 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.

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.

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.

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 said 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. Kim spoons chili from the crock pot and serves bowls of salad and mashed sweet potato. The television is off.

Conversation ping-pongs. Upcoming birthday parties. Jury duty.

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.

The table is covered with the day's remains. Cheese shreds. A hockey schedule. Yo-yo parts.

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.

This article is an edited version of an Associated Press feature that appeared in more than 200 newspapers worldwide.

Used with permission of The Associated Press. Copyright 2005. All rights reserved.