Your Family: A House Divided

Why you may be the worst kind of parent your children could have -- and what you can do about it

Tom Reisinger couldn't believe what he was seeing. Here lay his 17-year-old son in intensive care with his face bloodied and swollen; his body was hooked up to a web of tubes and monitors. The nurses offered Tom a pillow, a blanket, and a nearby sofa. Don't worry about all the beeping monitors, they said. We'll take care of them.

Tom didn't know whether to be scared or furious. Or both. John had told his mother that he was going to visit family friends for a quiet weekend. But the accident happened two hours north of where he'd claimed to be headed. Obviously, he'd lied. Again.

Lately, Tom's relationship with his only child had hardened into a series of tests, each more difficult to take than the last. Not that there was any reward for passing. John had been bounced out of school not once but twice, and he'd stopped playing soccer -- even though his talent had earned him a spot on the state's prestigious Olympic development team. Then came the marijuana problem. A family therapist concluded that John was angry at his father -- angry that Tom had missed soccer games, birthdays, and Christmas and family dinners, all in the name of building a business.

Tom didn't understand. From that day in 1987 when he had started his transportation company, he was never in business just for himself. Sure, he'd missed more family events than he would have liked, but he did so only because he wanted to build a better family life than he'd ever had -- one with improved schools, nicer vacations, more choices. "Growing up, our family didn't have a lot of material things," he recalls. "I wanted my son to have whatever he needed to express himself."

Now, as the doctor delivered his grim report, Tom felt a shudder twitch through him. His son had suffered "massive internal injuries," as the doctor put it. His description then turned a bit less delicate. John's insides, the doctor said, had been tossed around and rearranged "like a milk shake." The next 24 hours would be critical.

It was a wonder his son had survived at all. After running a stop sign, the Honda Prelude in which John had been riding was flattened by an 18-wheel, 40-ton semitrailer truck. Later, as Tom stood speechless before the car's twisted remains, the man at the junkyard offered some solace. "Lucky there was no passenger in there," he said. "Never would have made it." "But there was," Tom whispered.

As the days and weeks passed, Tom awakened to an irony almost too painful to acknowledge. "I'd built my business using the same kind of truck that nearly killed my son," the 44-year-old says hesitantly. In Tom's mind the accident took on a scary symbolism all its own: it represented the ultimate head-on collision between the ever-escalating demands of his business and the needs of his family. Echoing in his mind was his son's frequent accusation: "You care more about the business than you do about your own family."

And standing there beside that hospital bed on a sweltering June night last year, Tom Reisinger came to a disturbing conclusion: his business was killing his family.

Striking a balance between work and family is never easy. But entrepreneurs seem especially ill-suited to the task. Why? Because some of the very traits that company builders need to flourish in their work -- a distinct single-mindedness, for example, or an unnatural affection for chaotic situations -- are bound to wreak havoc at home.

To be sure, the Reisingers' tale provides a stark example of the toll such a tug-of-war can take on a family. But their struggle, with its ugly episodes and tragic turns, is no different from that of any family in which the neediest offspring of all just happens to be a company.

There's never a clear line between responsibilities at home and those at work. But in an entrepreneurial endeavor, the two are perpetually intertwined, with family funds and even family members often involved in the business from the start. In truth, family members are involved whether they want to be or not. If one parent runs a retailing outfit, for example, holiday togetherness loses out to keeping up with customer demand. "The rationale quickly becomes that whatever serves the business serves the family," observes W. Gibb Dyer Jr., a professor at the Marriott School of Management at Brigham Young University who has studied entrepreneurial work and family issues.

That rationale, as common as it is, is also addictive: as such, it does damage but is often hard to see -- until it's too late.

"My first priority was always to put a roof over my family, and that meant attending to the needs of the business first," says William Borne, founder of Analytical Nursing Management Corp. (ANMC), in Baton Rouge, La. In just seven years he built a successful $12-million business but alienated his wife and two children. Just as ANMC was hitting its stride, Kim Borne packed her belongings and left with the children. Why did she do it? "The business sucked up all Bill's energy, leaving nothing for his family," she says bluntly.

Entrepreneurs aren't the only ones who work hard, but they do communicate a sense of independence as well as the power to set their own agenda. So when that first dance recital is missed -- followed by the second and then the third -- the implicit message is that the entrepreneurial parent has made a clear choice, and the family is not a top priority. After all, goes the reasoning, there's no higher-up to blame. "The boss is the corporate monster the entrepreneur doesn't have," says Max Carey, owner of fast-growing Corporate Resource Development, a marketing consulting firm in Atlanta. In the end, though, corporate monster or not, the message to the kids is clear. "I always felt like I came second in line behind the business," says Elise Carey, Max's daughter. Because of their intense emotional involvement with their companies, entrepreneurs often tap the same finite supply of inner resources for their businesses that they need for their families. Conversely, entrepreneurs are also required to build up certain emotional reserves, such as appearing in control at all times, that they mistakenly apply at home.