There's an e-mail making the rounds with a job description attached. If you apply, be warned: you will be burdened with "challenging" tasks "in an often chaotic environment" with "variable hours, which will include evenings and weekends and frequent 24-hour shifts on call." You must be "willing to be hated, at least temporarily." Oh, and you'd better love kids, because that's who you'll be working with all day. The job, of course, is "parent"—but it might as well be "pediatrician," which requires a lot of the same skills and then some. That's why lately I've been feeling sorry for pediatrics residents. They're often too busy wiping the noses and taking the temperatures of other people's kids to do likewise for their own.
Training to be a pediatrician—or any other kind of doctor—isn't much fun. The hours are awful. The pay, in some programs, works out per hour to little more than minimum wage. Granted, things could be worse: residents are called "residents" because until the 1950s or so, they lived at the hospital. Their lives now are closer to normal, but a big problem remains: the residency begins around age 26, overlapping exactly with the prime years for bearing and raising children. "We're asking people to do this training right at the time they would normally be starting families," says Ted Sectish, codirector of the combined pediatrics residency at Children's Hospital Boston and Boston Medical Center. "There is an intense commitment to them being well trained—but there also has to be a commitment to them having a life."
Sectish's solution is a part-time pediatrics residency. Children's isn't the only hospital in the country that offers the option—about 25 percent of programs nationwide do—but, with much of medicine still ruled by a masochistic, show-no-weakness mentality, it's one of a precious few where residents choose that track. Take Susan Clinton Martin, who realized during her first year at Children's that her new job left her no time to raise two kids under age 4. "I was leaving before they woke up and coming home after they went to bed, and I was on call every fourth night," she says. "I went into pediatrics because I love children, but I wasn't able to give my own children the time they deserved." Instead of quitting, she went part-time. Now in her final year, she tells the directors she is "their happiest resident."
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