Care Programs Turning Attention to School-Age Children : Families: Consulting services and employers are broadening the help they offer, no longer focusing only on preschoolers and the elderly.

Natalie Hay was desperate. She and her husband both worked full time, and her two teen-age children refused to do homework in the afternoons after school.

“It was a real problem,” said Hay, who works with Society National Bank in Columbus, Ohio. “Their report cards said they were always missing their assignments. I’d tried everything, including grounding them.”

Finally, Hay called a counseling service that suggested drawing up a contract allowing the teens to determine homework hours and the punishment if they weren’t kept. The last two report cards showed the two haven’t missed any homework.

The service, run by the Boston consulting group Work-Family Directions, is one of many new programs responding to a growing cry for help from working parents with school-age children.

When many companies started recognizing in the 1980s that employees needed help balancing work and family if they were to be productive, most attention was given to preschool and elder care.

Now, although much remains to be done in those areas, a new wave of dependent care programs is beginning to help some parents cope with children’s vacations, as well as the time before and after school.

“As society has aged, the bulge in the work force that seven or eight years ago was screaming for preschool care now needs school-age care,” said Jonathan Carson, president of the Educational Publishing Group. “It’s a real problem for parents, trying to fill a huge amount of time.”

The growing number of working women, of single-parent families and the increasing concerns about safety and education have pushed many parents to the edge, said Betty Southwick of Work-Family Directions.

About 57 million women now work outside the home. Some 40% have at least one child, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. And while 18 million working parents have children under age 5, 28 million have children of school age.

“Parents are concerned about the preschool years, but they are obsessed with the next 10 years,” said Ted Childs, director of work force diversity programs at International Business Machines Corp.

Recognizing the changes in their employees’ lives, companies are starting to sign up for counseling and referral services that help. Some of the most progressive firms are sponsoring or helping to set up summer camps, vacation activities and before- and after-school programs.

Work-Family Directions, set up two years ago, averages 300 calls a week from parents needing practical advice from guidance counselors, principals, teachers, college admissions personnel and others in education.

The Educational Publishing Group puts out a newsletter eight times a year discussing trends in education as well as resolving work and family conflicts. It’s aimed at parents with school-age children.

The publication, first issued in 1990, is free to employees of the 70 subscribing companies, including Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. and Dow Chemical Co. The companies pay $5 to $9 annually per subscription.

“We noticed that work and family programs primarily focused on preschool and elder care,” Carson said. “We try to plug the gap for parents of school-age children.”

John Hancock Financial Services in Boston is among the pioneers in addressing the concerns of parents of older children.

In 1990, the company started a program to help employees and their families after surveys showed workers were having a tough time handling after-school hours and vacations, said Kathy Hazzard, director of work-family programs.

Under Kids-to-Go, parents can bring children of ages 6 through 14 to the office during vacations in February, April and the last week of June and on Columbus Day. From there, a staff takes not more than 50 children on trips to local museums, the beach, roller skating or elsewhere. The day trips cost $20 and are so popular that there was a waiting list for the most recent one.

Employees have told Hazzard they would be hard pressed to leave Hancock because of its school-age program as well as its on-site child care center for 200 preschoolers.

Another company with programs specifically for older children is AT&T;, which has invested $2.4 million in 117 such projects in 80 communities, said Deborah Stahl, director of the company’s Family Care Development Fund. Many of those are in their first year of operation.

Not all companies have been willing or able to commit the time and resources to such programs.

Others have addressed the issue through the American Business Collaboration for Quality Dependent Care, companies that pool resources to address issues related to work and family conflicts.

More than one-third of the initiatives sponsored nationwide by the collaboration, which is now in its second year, are related to school-age children.

One is an after-school program at an elementary school in downtown New York. There, about 270 kindergarten through sixth-grade children can choose from a range of activities between 3 and 6:30 p.m.

The cost for care at Manhattan Youth Recreation and Resources is less than many after-school programs, but still relatively steep at $1,750 per year for five days a week of care. Manhattan Youth offers $80,000 in scholarship money.

But many parents with school-age children can’t afford such programs and corporations do little to subsidize them, said Michelle Seligson, director of the School-Age Child Care Project at Wellesley College.

Only one-third of the programs receive some sort of government or private support, research by Seligson’s group and others has found. She said that leaves “a huge number of the children of the working poor out on the streets during vacations and after school.”

“You’re looking at programs that are largely still middle class,” she said.

In all, she said, about 3 million children are enrolled in some sort of after-school program.