Yesterday my nine-year-old daughter and her buddy were hanging out in the backyard. They were draped over the swing set like a bunch of old clothes, not swinging, or sliding down the slide, or doing much of anything.

I suggested that they play basketball, or get out the slip-and-slide, and they both looked at me as if I were insane.

“Mommy, we’re playing a game,” my daughter said with indignation in her voice.

“Oh, sorry,” I said, realizing that their lack of motion did not mean they were bored or in need of ideas to do stuff from me.

For them, it was their last lazy Sunday before the school year started and they were savoring every moment.

I was a bit jealous of them both as I walked back into the house to finish my 18th load of laundry. I was looking at the Sunday hours ticking away and I realized I’d have only a few minutes to really relax the day before my jam-packed work week began.

I know school can be work for kids, but school is not work..and that’s a good thing.

Kids need to savor these carefree days because before they know it they’ll be punching a clock and those lazy days not swinging on swings will be forever gone.

I’m not feeling sorry for myself, it’s just the reality.

I force myself to think of this now before I start ratcheting up the pressure on my son and daughter to work until they drop in order to get great grades to make it in this world. That’s what sometimes happens to me during the school year. I get all stressed out that they’re not doing enough and put a fire under them to bust their little butts.

Well, that’s not a good thing, and deep down I know it. Someone mentioned to me last week that from age 7 to 17 it’s a “race to the SATs” for kids and nothing else matters.

That statement depressed me and it helped shake up my perceptions a bit.

If kids race to the SATs that means they’re also racing to the assembly line of work, and while I believe a little hard work is a great idea for all kids, racing through youth is idiotic.

Time for us all to get a bit of a reality check and let kids be kids. Come on, as yellow buses start making the rounds across the country, take a second to remember what it was like when you got on the school bus. Wouldn’t you want a few seconds of that time back?

I’m always going on about how I can do 100 things at once…research a story, cook dinner, do homework with the kids.

Well, it turns out I suck at everything. At least that’s the findings of a new Stanford University study.

High-tech jugglers are everywhere – keeping up several e-mail and instant message conversations at once, text messaging while watching television and jumping from one website to another while plowing through homework assignments.

But after putting about 100 students through a series of three tests, the researchers realized those heavy media multitaskers are paying a big mental price.

“They’re suckers for irrelevancy,” said communication Professor Clifford Nass, one of the researchers whose findings are published in the Aug. 24 edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “Everything distracts them.”

OK, I could have told you that. I’m doing everything, so everything distracts me. DUH!

But does that really mean my brain really can’t handle it all?

Possibly.

The researchers split their subjects into two groups: those who regularly do a lot of media multitasking and those who don’t.

In one experiment, the groups were shown sets of two red rectangles alone or surrounded by two, four or six blue rectangles. Each configuration was flashed twice, and the participants had to determine whether the two red rectangles in the second frame were in a different position than in the first frame.

They were told to ignore the blue rectangles, and the low multitaskers had no problem doing that. But the high multitaskers were constantly distracted by the irrelevant blue images. Their performance was horrible.

Because the high multitaskers showed they couldn’t ignore things, the researchers figured they were better at storing and organizing information. Maybe they had better memories.

The second test proved that theory wrong. After being shown sequences of alphabetical letters, the high multitaskers did a lousy job at remembering when a letter was making a repeat appearance.

“The low multitaskers did great,” said Eyal Ophir, another researcher on the study. “The high multitaskers were doing worse and worse the further they went along because they kept seeing more letters and had difficulty keeping them sorted in their brains.”

Not everyone agrees with their findings. A reader named Peter sent me the study and made it clear he wasn’t on board with their conclusions:

As an IT person, I take great exception to Professor Nass’s findings. I call it, one trick ponies testing one trick ponies, testing conducted on college students. What about people in industry working multi-jobs and expected to multi-task.

What do you all think? Can we really multitask or is it all just an illusion? Did my story on Ted Kennedy and my chicken curry dinner really suck last night?

Ted Kennedy wasn’t kidding when he was fighting for a better life for workers.

Here’s a sampling of his passion during a fight to raise the minimum wages after ten years of no increase:

After five days of debate on the Senate floor, Kennedy was losing his cool. How could senators still be debating a paltry $2 increase in the minimum wage, after a decade that saw an economic boon for corporations and the richest Americans, and little for the working stiffs:

“We have not had the United States Senate go on record and say to working families in this country that they aught to get a raise. $240 billion in tax breaks for corporations, $36 billion in tax breaks for small businesses, increasing productivity, 42 percent over last ten years, but do you think there’s any increase in the minimum wage, no.”

He brought similar zeal to all the worker issues he championed, everything from family leave to worker safety.

His labor agenda was a patchwork of initiatives that weren’t popular with many conservatives in Congress and he was often derided as a bleeding heart commie for his efforts, but he kept the drumbeat going even when he was battling brain cancer this past year:

*Promoting paid sick days for workers. Over half of American workers do not have paid sick days. Senator Kennedy’s Healthy Families Act will guarantee working Americans seven paid sick days to care for their own and their families’ medical needs. Providing paid sick days will build strong families, protect our children, and safeguard our public health.

*Protecting Workers’ Right to Organize. In today’s insecure economy, when too many working families are struggling just to make ends meet, it is more important than ever that workers have a voice at work. Senator Kennedy’s Employee Free Choice Act helps workers get their fair share of our nation’s economic growth by supporting the basic right of workers to choose their own representative. It puts real teeth in the law by strengthening the penalties for discrimination against workers who favor a union. And it will allow employees to choose a union when a majority of them sign an authorization designating a union as their bargaining representative.

*Strengthening Retirement Security. Workers deserve to retire in dignity, not in poverty. Senator Kennedy’s priorities include expanding retirement security for all American workers and finding ways to prevent corporations from using the bankruptcy courts to dump workers’ pensions while awarding big bonuses to executives. He will also continue the fight to protect Social Security.

*Strengthening Worker Safety. Too many American workers still face hazardous conditions at work. Senator Kennedy wants to make all workplaces safer by passing the Protecting America’s Workers Act to cover more workers, give families a role in safety investigations, strengthen protections for whistleblowers, and increase penalties for repeated safety violators. He will build on the MINER Act to make additional advances in mine safety legislation. Kennedy also plans to exercise close oversight over MSHA and OSHA to ensure that they vigorously enforce our safety laws and issue needed safety standards.

Here’s a labor view from one of my favorite labor experts Gary Chaison, professor of industrial relations at Clark University:

Ted Kennedy was one of the strongest advocates of workers and organized labor ever in the Congress, carrying on and even exceeding the reputation and work of his brothers Jack and Bobby. His major influence came because of his seniority and notoriety, and he was able to cross over party lines, forming for example, a joint effort with Orin Hatch on health care for many years.

Kennedy major influence was felt in health care policy…he kept the issue alive after many years of unfriendly national administrations, and he was the one always emphasizing the large number of people left out of the system…those not covered. It’s ironic that he was too ill to see the most energetic push ever for health care reform.

Kennedy was also a major force behind the increase in the minimum wage, believing again that the government’s role re labor should be to lift workers out of poverty and into the middle class, with greater job and income security.

Kennedy was a huge presence in Congress and he used his presence, influence and outstanding staff to press for issues of concern for working families, particularly those on the fringes of the economy and society who had low paying and insecure jobs.

So with his dealth, the unions and workers in general lose a friend and advocate.

Much of what he wanted would surely be a boon for workers. It’s unclear who will step into Kennedy’s big labor shoes and help make some of these initiatives a reality.

I’m not giving Kennedy a pass for the many mistakes he made in his life. He was a heavy drinker, and he saw his reputation destroyed after the Chappaquiddick scandal where he drove his car off a bridge, leaving a young aide Mary Jo Kopechne dead.

While I don’t remember the incident when it happened, his decision to leave the accident scene always sullied my opinion of the guy. But maybe he tried to redeem himself with his mission to help working Americans.

No matter what his motivation, we should all spend a few seconds today mourning a flawed man who tried to do somethings right.

I’ve been called a lot of things by readers during my 20-year plus career, but I’ve never been called a dum dum…until this week that is.

I actually rarely hear adults use this term but one reader of my MSNBC.com column this week thought it was quite appropriate. The column was about sexual harassment at work and how it’s more about power than sex.

Female managers are 137 percent more likely to experience sexual harassment than their rank-and-file counterparts, according to a recently released study.

So basically, these guys aren’t really trying to get in bed with most women at work, they want to keep them in their place. At least that’s what this study found.

Even Heather McLaughlin, a sociologist at the University of Minnesota and the primary investigator on the study, was surprised by the findings.

“It’s sort of a paradox,” she says. “You would expect that having that status and power over other employees would protect you from that behavior.”

Turns out it doesn’t, and McLaughlin’s conclusion is that “because of gender norms, people are still not accepting women in power positions.”

As expected, I got a mixed reaction to the column, but this email from Keith stood out:

You have got to be kidding. Most of the companies that have women in high positions move forward much more slowly than if a man was in the position because ALL women make decisions based on emotions not logic. They are not harassed because the man feels threatened dumb dumb.

OK, I laughed a little when I read the “dumb dumb” part. But then I thought, is there something to what he said. That we make decisions based on emotion not logic.

If this was true, that would probably mean women are indeed dum dums.

I was actually having a similar conversation with my cousin in Athens over the weekend. She works for a global firm and has found as a manager many women take things too personally and often let their emotions run rampant. She said she spent a lot of her time helping women realize that business decisions were not personal and to take the emotion out of work.

Obviously, Greece has a longer way to go than the United States when it comes to women empowerment, but I have heard similar things from women in business right here in the good old USA.

Anyway, Keith sort of lost the argument when he then wrote:

The women are only moved up because white males are now the minority in corporations. Where the hell have you been?

Sorry Keith, where have you been? Women still make up the minority in the executive suite.

But are women to blame for this?

Maybe we are still all a bunch of dum dums. What’s your take?

The Department of Labor is doing something the government agency should have done long ago — hire more people.

In May, the new Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis told everyone she was going to do it, and now it turns out she actually is.

There’s a story in the Wall Street Journal today that says she’s put the “help wanted’ sign up and is on track to hire 670 new investigators.

These men and women are going to go out there and enforce the nation’s labor laws — everything from enforcing wage and hour to child labor laws. The new workers are sorely needed because the agency was neglected under the Bush administration and workers there were over-taxed by the insane workload.

Solis is making big promises and hopefully she’ll follow through and make changes in her department, which has come under fire by the General Accounting Office for screwing up, even giving workers bogus information about their rights.

From the WSJ:

“The previous administration was not prone to fight on the side of worker protection and we’re going in that direction to level the playing field,” Ms. Solis said.

Business groups are wary that the playing field will tilt too far, at a time when many businesses are still fighting their way out of economic hard times.

“Employers, especially smaller ones, are really looking for help in terms of understanding the requirements and making sure they’re doing things right,” said Marc Freedman, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s executive director of labor law policy. Instead, the department’s “rhetoric” on workplace safety “seems to be heavy-handed enforcement and generation of more regulations,” he said.

I understand why Freedman has concerns, but after barely no enforcement for years it will be a welcome change for workers.

I know Michael Vick’s crime of running a dog-fighting ring was disgusting. You can hate the guy, but banning him from the work world helps no one.

I spent the past few days reading angry comment about the Philadelphia Eagles signing Vick after I blogged about the decision on Huffington Post Friday in piece called “Would You Want Michael Vick as a Coworker?”.

My main point was the double standard in this country when it comes to ex cons.

If you’re Michael Nobody who robbed the grocery store and spent time in jail for it, you’ll have a hell of a time finding a job when you get out.

If you’re Michael Vick who bankrolled an illegal dog-fighting ring, you’ll end up with a plum job and millions of dollars in our pocket.

I’m not saying the Philadelphia Eagles should not have signed Vick for a two-year deal. Why not? He says he learned his lesson and wants to make amends. I love dogs just as much as the next guy, but in the scheme of crimes NFL players commit this one was pretty tame.If you’re famous then typically you get a pass, but if you are just an average Joe good luck landing a job if you have a record.

Many of the readers just brushed aside my point and focused on how much they despise Vick.

Keeping over 50 dogs to torture and fight to the death, drowning them in buckets, hanging them from trees, electrocuting them with jumper cables, feeding them family pets for five years is “PRETTY TAME”? Compared to Auschwitz, that’s not tame! Robbie, you’re right. His crime IS similar to child molesting, in that his victims are particularly helpless and innocent, and that his crimes are particularly depraved.

Almost everyone seems to want Vick banned from the sport forever. But to what end?

Each year, 650,000 people are set free from prison, and as of 2001, the most recent data available, there were nearly 6 million ex cons out in our society. All these individuals are not going to disappear into the ether. Don’t we have to be a little more open to having them as employees, co workers, and NFL stars?

What’s the alternative? If our penal system allows people to pay their dues and get back into the free world, how will the process really work if ex cons are met with slammed doors. Clearly it’s not working since about 50 percent of those who are incarcerated end up back in the slammer. Hello, we’ve got a serious problem with prison overcrowding in this country and little is being done to deal with it.

I know, many people see Vick as a dog Hitler but it’s time to stop the vitriol and think of the greater good. Experts have long maintained that a job is what helps keep people out of prison and helps them become contributing members to society. A high recidivism rate helps no one.

Here’s my question — If you think Vick should be banned from the NFL then what should he do? And what about others like him?

There’s nothing more frustrating for a journalist than not getting a straight answer to a question, especially when the question is asked of a bureaucrat that is paid to answer the public’s questions.

And this problem is even worse when it involves people’s lives.

My COBRA column, the first in a two-part series on the healthcare coverage for the jobless, ran this week. It was supposed to answer questions about a relatively new COBRA discount put in place by the Obama administration. The subsidy has been riddled with misinformation and many unemployed individuals didn’t even know they were eligible for it.

Officially known as the Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act, COBRA allows workers to remain on health insurance plans offered by their former employers by paying 100 percent of the cost, plus 2 percent in administrative fees. But for many, COBRA insurance is too expensive, costing thousands of dollars annually.

A new law called the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, (ARRA) signed by President Obama on Feb. 17, was supposed to change all that by offering a 65 percent discount.

I was hoping to inform readers about the discount, but I think it opened up more questions than it answered.

Since it ran on Tuesday I’ve been flooded with questions from readers.

Some wrote me about the spousal coverage exemption. Basically, if you can get health insurance through your spouse you won’t be eligible for the COBRA subsidy, even though you are eligible for regular COBRA.

One reader named Hal complained that his wife’s health coverage is just too costly for them to afford so they need get the subsidized COBRA instead. He even contacted the Department of Labor to try and appeal his case.

A labor department officials told him to “not even bother appealing my case. He was very callous and I resented his attitude toward the ARRA and anyone needing assistance.” He was also told by a COBRA administrator to “lie on the form where it asked you if you are eligible for any other health care.”

Hal sounds like a nice guy trying to play by the rules. He refuses to lie but he just doesn’t get the sense behind who and who is not eligible.

There is no sense behind this, and the worse part is even the government “experts” don’t know what’s going on.

An IRS official told me workers who had their hours reduced and lost their health insurance, were not eligible for the COBRA subsidy because they were not “involuntarily terminated.” I got this answer after a few days of back and fourth.

Then, after my column comes out a nice woman named Karen sent me an email telling me she indeed had her hours cut but was able to get the COBRA discount.

In March of this year, my fulltime job was cut back to 20 hours per week. As I had surgery for uterine cancer in 2007, I was most worried about losing my healthcare benefits and having a pre-existing condition. Fortunately, the Americans Recovery and Reinvestment Act had just been enacted, and I was told by my employer that, instead of paying the usual 100% of my monthly premium under COBRA, I would now only have to pay an additional 10% over the usual 25% of the portion my employer pays for my monthly premium. What a relief! I actually had a fighting chance to make it financially while working on a part-time basis.

She was worried, based on my story, that they may pull the plug on her discount and she’d have to retroactively pay back the money she had saved. This would be a hardship because she couldn’t afford COBRA without the subsidy and would be in trouble if they wanted the money back.

So, I put my COBRA sheriff’s hat on and headed back into the bureaucratic gun fight.

Yesterday morning, I sent an email to the IRS guy who initially told me only those who were terminated qualified for the subsidy. I haven’t heard back yet.

Maybe I should get Will Smith on this.

UPDATE: Still no answer on my COBRA questions from the IRS. They’re looking for the right person, maybe a lawyer, who can clear things up. Based on my experience, I feel sorry for unemployed people who are desperate for health coverage trying to find out how this all works.

I get pretty emotional during debates. This morning I was on a Michigan radio show called Barnaby & Friends and I know I got a little fired up when I was talking about how Paula Abdul’s lack of a good raise showed the acceptance of pay inequity for women in this country.

Unfortunately, if you get too fired up, too angry, too pissed off, you lose every chance of having a civil conversation. When you treat people with respect they will listen to you. And forget about workplace productivity…nothing gets done.

In many cases of workplace bullying, whether it’s a manager or a rank-and-file employee, the people around such a person shut down, and will look for the next opportunity to get as far away as possible.

Many of you write me about the loss of civility in the workplace, and I’m all about doing something about it.

But what type of example are we setting for our future workers and leaders, aka our kids, if we can’t even be civil during town hall meetings going on now all over the country?

This is a serious issue folks, health care. So many hard-working Americans are worried about their future coverage in the face of escalating premiums, deductibles and copays. And still millions more are worried about what happens when their unemployed. (Check out my first in a two-part series on COBRA on MSNBC.com.)

I don’t care about the debate that there’s some sort of conspiracy behind the raucous behavior. If we can’t discuss the issues like grown ups we’re all doomed.

People want to pass laws for workplace bullying. Maybe we should start outside offices, factories and plants first.

Over the kitchen table last night my daughter and I pondered the future of our American Idol watching.

She’s nine years old and loves the show. And I must admit, I enjoy it as well. It’s been a family ritual in some ways to watch the trials and tribulations of the contestants.

But it looks like we may have to find something else.

Many of you have probably heard about the dispute between one of the show’s hosts, Paula Abdul. She wants to be paid more money because her salary is a drop in the bucket compared to what the guys on the show are making. Even though her salary demands won’t even put her on par with the other male hosts, the producers of the show reportedly still won’t give her what she wants.

It seems like a clear case of pay inequity and who ends up with the short stick — the woman. Surprise, surprise.

This example of a major gender pay disparity is not hidden behind the doors of some corporation. This is playing itself out in the public, everything from TV to Twitter. We all know what’s going on, but alas there has been little outrage.

Except for a moving piece by National Public Radio’s Michel Martin yesterday that made me feel ashamed of myself for not being more outraged at the situation.

What exactly do any of those three men do that merits their receiving three to 10 times the pay Abdul does? Anybody? Anybody?

Can I just tell you ladies and gentlemen … this is what pay equity is about. It’s about women getting paid the same as men for doing the same work, a gap that’s been so well-documented that it hardly bears arguing anymore. A December 2008 study by the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank, estimated that women in all occupations, in all parts of the country and at all education levels experience this gap. It amounts to hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost wages over the course of a 40-year career.

It’s an ongoing disparity that will never change if we do nothing when we know it’s happening, right?

Martin asks one question that I asked my daughter and I’ll ask of all of you — moms, daughters, dads, brothers, uncles, aunts, etc.:

I can see why you might say, “I ain’t marching for her.” But maybe somebody should be. Maybe all those teen and ‘tween girls who are so busy texting and calling in and generating millions in profits to that show should ask themselves this:

If Paula Abdul can’t get paid the same money for doing the same work as Randy and Simon and Ryan … can I?

My daughter’s response: “Mommy, this is too hard.” And she added, with tears in her eyes, “oh please.”

Even our kids have to realize that doing the right thing won’t be easy.

In the future, humans will be implanted with brain chips and employers will be able to summon their workers from dinner, or even sleep.

Via brainwaves, managers will be able to get you to complete that project you left half done when you went on vacation. Or get their questions answered no matter where you are or what you’re doing.

Seriously! They’ve already got monkeys doing this.

This from a National Geographic program:

This monkey is moving this robotic arm purely by thinking about it.

He has a hi-tech brain chip, smaller than a quarter, fitted in his head that enables him to animate the arm using the power of thought.

This monkey is not being paid even though his brain is on the clock. And in the future, you won’t be paid either.

How do I know this? Because folks, you’re already not being paid for the work you do beyond your 9to5 thanks to technology.

In this economy, many employees find themselves doing whatever the hell they can to keep their jobs. Even though the overall statistics on hours worked has declined recently, we know the real story. You’re working more.

You’re supposed to be home enjoying your family after you put in your hard day’s work, or you’re supposed to be on furlough, but you’re still answering emails, text messages, and answering your stupid iPhone.

Why? Because you’re worried you might lose your job.

Well folks, this is illegal. Slavery in United States was outlawed long ago.

Despite this, some employers are trying to get every ounce of blood out of you.

Thank goodness, some workers are fighting back.

There’s a great story today in the “B” section of the Wall Street Journal that I wish was on the front page. It’s about employees who are taking their employers to court over this very issue.

Two recent lawsuits raise a question that many employees and employers have deliberated: Should hourly workers be paid for time spent responding to work calls or emails while off the clock?

The federal suits highlight the legal issues sparked by the proliferation of personal technology as well as the blurring of work and free time.

Employers must think they have a leg to stand on or they wouldn’t be fighting these suits, and that’s a scary thing.

This type of behavior would probably cause riots in places like France, but in America we whisper about it in office corridors, or bitch to our friends over a beer after work.

But blurring the line between work and free time can only happen if we all allow it to.

Tell them you’re not a monkey no matter how technologically advanced our society gets!