White House Overflows With Toddlers, Workers : Parenting: A new generation is in power, and it’s the same one that delayed having children until they were in their 30s. The result is people with big jobs, small kids and lots of pressure.

WASHINGTON —  Prudence the potty doll and her toddler owner attended a Clinton Administration meeting on health care last summer. It was a weekend and Mom--the White House political director--couldn’t find a sitter.

A new generation has risen to power, and it’s the same one that delayed having children until they were in their 30s. The result is people with big jobs, small kids and lots of pressure.

Seventy-hour, six-day weeks are not unusual. That can jump to 80-plus when projects like health care reform reach critical mass or foreign policy crises require round-the-clock monitoring.

Back at home, the counter-pressures range from Little League practice to dinner menus, from “Where’s my lunch money?” to “How come you never drive me to school anymore?” There’s also the uneasy fear that babyhood and other phases are vanishing into the whirlwind of a consuming, possibly consummate moment in a parent’s career.

“It’s always in your mind, when can you get home, how many more meetings, what’s the right balance,” said Environmental Protection Agency administrator Carol Browner, whose son is 5.

President Clinton, 47, with a 13-year-old daughter of his own, tried to reassure his Cabinet last winter at a Camp David retreat. “I never want it said that your service in this Administration was a reason to deny your family the time it takes to raise them,” he said, according to Housing Secretary Henry Cisneros.

But good intentions are no match for enormous demands. Some Clinton aides rarely see their children awake. Some work until 1 a.m. after putting baby to bed.

The intersection of late parenthood and heavy job responsibility is common among upper-income, dual-career couples. Births by women in their 30s, most of them professionals, have risen nearly 40% since 1976.

Delayed child-bearing is especially hard to deal with for families who have moved here for work, said Ken Kusterer, an economic sociologist at American University. “There are no extended families,” he said, “none of the traditional things that humanize this.”

In other words, no grandparents to pick up the slack.

Transportation Secretary Federico Pena, 46, had few acquaintances when he arrived here from Denver. Then his infant daughter was hospitalized with a lung infection at the same time he needed to go on a sales trip for the Clinton economic plan.

Pena’s wife was staying at the hospital and there was no one to take care of their older daughter. Despite regulations forbidding child visitors, his wife finally persuaded the hospital to let Pena bring her over.

“It was tense,” Pena recalled. “Normally I would not leave town when I had a sick child in the hospital. But this was an important event for the country.”

Usually the trade-offs are less wrenching, as when Browner, 37, had to miss her son’s school play because of a trip to Canada. His response: “Can you give me the President’s phone number so I can call him up and ask him if you can stay home?” Browner caught the play later on videotape.

Cisneros took nearly a week off when son John Paul, 6, underwent heart surgery in Philadelphia. When he travels, he almost always returns the same day so he can get an hour or two with his son in the evening. “I try my very best,” he said. “I hate being away overnight.”

Among White House aides, it’s common to bolt home for dinner or bedtime and then resume work later at home or office. But some jobs, tied closely to daily events, are less flexible.

White House communications director Mark Gearan, 37, is in by 7 a.m. and home around 9 p.m. His daughter Madeleine, 18 months, is usually asleep at both times. “I see her,” he said. “I just don’t get to hold her.” They are awake together on Sunday, which he reserves for home, and part of Saturday, when he keeps shorter office hours.

His wife, Mary, former vice president of a Washington lobbying group, has adjusted. “She keeps saying we’re on an adventure,” Gearan said. “You need that mental state to persevere.”

Most of these workaholic schedules are made possible by spouses who have quit high-powered jobs, cut back their hours or pursued home-based vocations.

U.S. Trade Representative Mickey Kantor’s wife switched from network correspondent to free-lance producer to accommodate their 10-year-old daughter and his frenetic pace. The wives of deputy domestic policy adviser Bruce Reed and White House staff secretary John Podesta have put law careers on hold.

Laura Tyson, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, has an 11-year-old son and a screenwriter husband who works at home. White House political director Joan Baggett also has a home-based husband who writes screenplays. Her daughter just turned 2 and she’s expecting another child in December.

Baggett, 41, must be at work for a 7:30 a.m. conference call. “They say, ‘Joan, what’s the political situation?’ I say, ‘I don’t know, they didn’t talk about it on ‘101 Dalmations,’ ” she joked.

Baggett leaves the White House 12 hours later to make it home for a family dinner and often falls asleep before her daughter. “I want to have quality time,” she said, “but I’m just so tired.”

As Baggett’s potty-doll experience testifies, weekend baby-sitters can be hard to find. Many a child has played, slept or worse through a White House meeting.

Reed, 33, said his daughter Julia, 6 months, is “a good sport” about meetings. “She’s met the President and the vice president and Socks and the First Lady. She’s had lunch in the mess three times,” he said proudly. “She’s got lots of friends here.”

Older children are harder to please at the office, and less accepting of their suddenly diminished roles in their parents’ lives.

Podesta, 44, routinely puts in six-day, 90-hour weeks monitoring the paper flow to Clinton’s desk. He’s trying against all odds to keep coaching his 10-year-old’s Little League team. His 13-year-old, he said, uses guilt “as a sword against me. If I get mad at her, she said it’s the result of me not spending enough time with her.”

Elaine Kamarck’s children, ages 16, 11 and 8, are less direct but send similar messages. They yearn for her gourmet Italian cooking. Sometimes they whine a little more, or decide they’re sick “when you suspect that they’re not,” said Kamarck, 43, a principal aide in Vice President Al Gore’s reinventing government project.

But there are up sides to Mom’s voracious job. When the 11-year-old went to the office with Kamarck over Labor Day weekend, the advance man for the David Letterman show was rehearsing Gore for his televised demonstration--complete with mask and hammer--of a silly federal regulation on ashtray standards.

“He got to watch Gore practice breaking the ash tray,” Kamarck said of her son. “It was fun. Everybody was laughing. The vice president would turn to my son and say, ‘See what important business we do here?’ ”