It's 3 p.m. Do you know where your children are? Every weekday afternoon, Claire Celsi faces that question as she thinks about her two teenagers, ages 13 and 14. With no after-school program available for them, she must keep tabs on their whereabouts and activities from her office.

"It's a huge balancing act," says Ms. Celsi, a publicist in Des Moines, Iowa. "I make them call me from our home phone, so I know they're home."

Millions of working parents share similar concerns as they watch the clock and hope that their after-school arrangements are in place. For their employers, these distractions can take a huge toll on productivity, according to a new study by Catalyst and the Women's Studies Research Center at Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass.

"The good news is that many parents have good support and good programs in place to help them," says Laura Sabattini, a researcher at Catalyst. "But many have concerns about what's going on [after school]. Calling children or even just being worried can lead to distraction at work."

Despite progress, many communities still face a serious shortage of affordable, high-quality after-school programs. More than 14 million students between kindergarten and 12th grade take care of themselves after school, says Jodi Grant, executive director of the Afterschool Alliance in Washington, D.C. That includes 40,000 kindergartners and almost 4 million middle school students in grades 6 to 8.

More than a third of the US labor force consists of parents of minor children. Almost three-fourths of those children are between 5 and 18 years old. Two- thirds of these parents are employed full-time. The gap between the time school lets out at 2 p.m. or 3 p.m. and the time most full-time employed parents get home at 6 p.m. or 7 p.m. adds up to 15 to 25 hours a week.

Researchers call this challenge Parental Concern over After School Time, or PCAST. It affects workers from the factory floor to the executive suite, mothers and fathers alike.

"They may be called at work or have to leave work for any disruption of their after-school care arrangements," the Catalyst report explains. "Just worrying about [that] possibility may affect productivity – and thus the employer's bottom line." In one study, more than half the women and almost a third of the men said that work/family stress affected their ability to concentrate on the job.

Parental concern is greater when children are older – from grades 6 through 12 – because this age group is more likely to be unsupervised. "Researchers find that teenagers don't like to go to after-school programs," says Ms. Sabattini.

Supervised programs for teens often do not even exist, says Celsi, a single parent. Those that do exist, she finds, often serve at-risk children. "At some point my kids became aware of that and wouldn't go. They were perceived as at-risk kids, poor kids."

The challenge, she says, is to find something acceptable to the child and affordable for parents.

Many programs are funded through a combination of federal, state, local, foundation, and private monies. Some cost parents between $1,000 and $2,000 a year, Ms. Grant says. Yet federal support is eroding. "If we were funded at the level President Bush signed into law [in the No Child Left Behind Act], we'd be at $2.5 billion a year," she says. "Federal funding has been frozen since 2002. Twice there's been an across-the-board cut. Our high was $1 billion. Now it's down to $981 million." Nearly three-quarters of those polled in November want Congress to increase after-school funding, according to the Afterschool Alliance.

Grant finds widespread misunderstandings about what after-school care includes. "Far too many people still think it's just child care. It gives kids all sorts of opportunities. It includes homework help, tutoring, hands-on learning, physical fitness, internships, and apprenticeships."

In Andover, N.J., Claudia Avgerinopoulus knows the advantages. Her children, ages 8 and 10, attend an after-school program at their school, run by the YMCA. Her husband picks them up at 6 p.m., when it ends.

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