"I was constantly crazed with worry — I had to be at that bus," said Harrison, who has a bachelor's degree in accounting.

Her husband, Stephen, a real estate developer, saw their kids, now ages 7 and 11, off to school each morning, but Harrison still was anxious about work assignments or traffic jams that might delay her trip home. And even though she was working only four days a week, she had no flexibility in her work hours.

So, after too many years of stressing herself out, the manager switched jobs in 2002 with one purpose in mind: to find a job closer to home and to make sure she could leave work when she had to. And she succeeded in both — and still gets all her work done.

"I was even willing to take a pay cut, but I didn't have to," Harrison said.

"It's not that I don't have any stress now, but it's not anything like it used to be. I needed to make a life change. This type of stress should be identified. I work very hard, and it's important to understand what many of us parents go through."

Harrison's request for recognition of her dilemma has been answered.

Thanks to researchers at Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass., this particular type of agony that parents suffer from now is called Parental After-School Stress (PASS). The title was coined in 2002 by Rosalind Barnett, executive director of the university's Community, Families & Work program, and by Karen C. Gareis, program director.

The idea for their research, paid for by a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, came "from talking to parents about what kinds of family issues were affecting their work," according to Gareis, who has a doctorate in social psychology and focuses on work/family issues.

"A large group of parents have school-age kids, and there's a fundamental mismatch between hours of the school day and the hours that most parents work," she said. "There often are 20 to 25 hours each week after their kids' school day ends that these parents have to cover before they get home."

No wonder they're stressed out.

But to find out the extent of the problem, the researchers studied 243 employees of J.P. Morgan Chase's working parents networking group. The study links parental stress and missed days at work.

Among the findings: Only 9.6 percent of the parents reported they were not concerned about their children after school. Parents with a high degree of PASS miss as many as five or more unplanned days of work a year, compared with their low-stress counterparts who miss three.

Additionally, the study concludes that parents who are worried about their children's afterschool arrangements have significantly more job disruptions and lower psychological well-being.

These high-stress moms and dads report that they often have to turn down overtime and miss meetings and deadlines.

And, the more inflexible their working hours, the higher their level of stress.

"Stress is dangerous," Gareis said. "Not only does it affect your productivity at work but it also affects your mental and physical health."

So does this mean companies shouldn't hire parents with afterschool stress?

"Not at all," Gareis said. "First of all, more than one-third of the labor force had a child under 18 at home as of 2001, so as a practical matter it would be difficult to avoid hiring parents of minors.

"And, secondly, many of the things that employers can do at very low or no cost to make the workplace more hospitable for working parents — such as schedule flexibility, telecommuting and trained managers — also benefit nonparents.