Raising Children As A Physician

There is a version of this story that gets told at grand rounds and in hospital newsletters — the physician who manages it all, who shows up for their patients and their children with equal grace, who has somehow solved the equation that breaks most people. That story is not this one. This one is about what happens in the car on the way home from school pickup. The things that don't make it into performance reviews or Instagram captions. The specific, compound guilt of being someone who saves lives for a living and still sometimes can't be present for the small ones happening at home.

MedStory Studio asked five physician-parents across five specialties to answer three questions honestly: the moment they knew their career was affecting their children, what their kids actually think they do all day, and whether they could take their own advice about balance. What came back were not polished answers. They were real ones.

Part One: The Moment They Knew

When the Career Comes Home

Every physician-parent carries a specific memory — a single moment when the abstraction of "work-life balance" collapsed into something concrete and unavoidable. Not a statistic about burnout or a journal article on physician wellbeing. A moment. A child's face. A phone call that couldn't be taken.

For Tish Singer, MD, a diagnostic radiologist, that moment arrived during her intern year of internal medicine, when her son broke his clavicle jumping off the top of a shed. She was on a night float rotation, being paged constantly, managing it all on FaceTime from the hospital — present enough to see her son in pain, too committed to her patients to leave.

"I was on a night float rotation and while being paged constantly, I was also on FaceTime with my husband and son while they were in the emergency room — painfully realizing that I could not take care of my own son because I was taking care of other patients."

— Tish Singer, MD, Diagnostic Radiology

Omar Khokhar, MD, a gastroenterologist, arrived at his moment differently — not through a single dramatic event, but through the accumulated weight of call shifts and sleep deprivation. After 24 to 48 hours on call, he snapped at one of his children in a way that was disproportionate, and immediately knew it. What struck him wasn't just the outburst — it was the recognition that in that state of chronic exhaustion and heightened anxiety, even repairing the moment afterward was difficult.

Sejal Desai, MD, DABOM, an obesity medicine specialist and single mother, found her turning point during the pandemic — a period that stripped away whatever buffer had been holding everything in equilibrium. Working long hours with COVID patients while managing virtual school, household responsibilities, and a demanding insurance-based practice, she realized she was going through the motions. Not truly present. With her daughter approaching college, the cost of the status quo suddenly became undeniable.

"I realized I was simply going through the motions and not truly present for my kids. In 2021, I left my employed job to start my own virtual obesity medicine practice — the hardest and best decision I've ever made."

— Sejal Desai, MD, DABOM, Obesity Medicine

George P. Naum III, DO, a family practice physician, was pulled back not by a crisis but by his wife's honesty. Lost in twelve-hour days at the office and the hospital, he came home each night wanting only to decompress — not recognizing that the distance accumulating between him and his children was already real. His wife saw it before he did, and had the courage to say so.

"Her courage in confronting me about needing help with our kids allowed me to prevent the distance that was obviously occurring between myself and them. As a result, I have strong relationships with them and I am a big part of their lives."

— George P. Naum III, DO, Family Practice

Cherilyn Davis, MD, a pediatrician whose son is still an infant, is in the earliest chapter of this reckoning — and perhaps the most alert to it because of that. She notices him noticing her. He sees when she reaches for her phone. He senses when her face changes as she reads a patient message. She has become deliberately intentional about when and how she works in his presence, trying to protect the thread of connection even as her practice demands availability around the clock.

Part Two: What Their Children Think They Do

The Story Kids Tell Themselves

Children construct their own understanding of what their parents do all day — and those understandings, it turns out, are often both simpler and more revealing than the physicians expect. Across five answers to this question, a pattern emerged: kids tend to see the mission clearly while missing the machinery entirely.

Desai's children understand she helps people with food, weight, and healthy habits. That's accurate. What they don't see is the labs, the treatment plans, the business overhead, the patient worry that follows her home. She finds comfort in that simplicity — that in her children's eyes, she is simply someone who helps people get healthier.

"I'm glad their view is simple. To them, I'm just helping people get healthier, and that's exactly how I want them to see it."

— Sejal Desai, MD, DABOM, Obesity Medicine

Naum's children have always known he takes care of people and that it takes significant time. What they haven't fully grasped — and perhaps couldn't — is the ancillary burden that modern medicine has added on top of patient care: the documentation, the administrative compliance, the hours that aren't clinical but are still required.

Singer's younger children know she is a doctor, but she's not sure they have a clear picture of what that means in practice. Khokhar's answer is the most plainspoken of all: his kids know he "works." Being on call, he says, is the real variable — the 4 a.m. phone calls that produce the sleep deprivation that produces the crankiness that his children experience directly, even if they can't name its source.

Davis's answer stands apart simply because of her son's age — he is an infant, and has no concept of her professional life at all. But she has already thought about what she wants him to understand someday: that she goes into homes to see families and help keep children like him healthy. The mission, stated plainly, for when he's old enough to hear it.

Part Three: The Advice They Give — and Whether They Take It

The Physician Who Doesn't Follow Their Own Prescription

The third question was perhaps the most revealing — and the most uncomfortable. Every physician, in some form, counsels their patients about balance, prioritization, and self-care. The question was whether they could honestly say they follow that counsel themselves. The answers were candid in ways that clinical contexts rarely permit.

Singer is the most direct: absolutely not. She does not know many physicians who have genuine work-life balance. When she is at work, she is all in — and sometimes that means ignoring her personal life entirely. Medical training, she observes, teaches compartmentalization as a survival skill. It is effective. It is also a kind of loss.

"Medical training really does teach you to compartmentalize hard things. When I'm at work, I'm all in and sometimes need to ignore things in my personal life to take care of other people."

— Tish Singer, MD, Diagnostic Radiology

Desai gives herself more credit — and more grace. She knows she doesn't always follow her own advice, but she has learned something that has changed the way she holds the question: taking care of yourself is not selfish. It is what makes it possible to show up for everyone else. She is a work in progress, she says, and she means it without apology.

Khokhar's answer came from an unexpected direction — not from his own training, but from a patient, during COVID. The advice was simple: whatever you want to do, do it now. Don't wait. He is trying to follow it.

"During COVID, I got the best advice — 'Doc, whatever you want to do, do it now. Don't wait.' I'm trying to follow it."

— Omar Khokhar, MD, Gastroenterology

Naum's answer carries the weight of someone who has lived long enough to see what accumulates. The advice he gives his patients — always take time for yourself and your family — is the advice he has come to understand not as a platitude but as a medical truth. It is the loss of that time, the absence of it, that becomes the regret. And unlike most clinical outcomes, there is no intervention for time already gone.

Davis closes the question with the same framework she applies to parenting: grace. She gives it to herself. She asks her patients to give it to themselves. The imperfect moments are not failures to be erased — they are moments to be repaired, and the repair itself carries meaning. The connection doesn't require perfection. It requires showing up after.

What these five physicians share is not a solution. None of them have solved the equation, and none of them claim to. What they share is the willingness to say so out loud — to name the specific costs of the life they have chosen, and to keep showing up anyway. For their patients. For their children. For themselves, when they can manage it. The stories that rarely make it out of the car ride home from school pickup are, it turns out, some of the most important ones medicine has to tell.