It's easy to be cynical about politics.

For one thing, there's the corrosive influence of big money in choosing who governs us. The Citizens United decision opened the floodgates for limitless political spending, which has exploded in recent federal elections.

We see candidates spending the majority of their time fundraising and assume they are beholden to those interests once elected. Republican presidential hopeful Donald Trump openly talks about attempting to buy influence through donating to politicians on both sides of the aisle throughout his career.

It's not surprising that a recent Pew survey found that elected officials are seen as less honest and more selfish than ordinary Americans.

Money aside, many voters see little difference between the candidates, or dislike all of them.

Politicians are seen flip-flopping their positions, some within 24 hours. The most recent Republican debate featured plenty of name-calling and shouting. There have been screams, shouts and violence against protesters, even those silently watching, at Trump rallies.

How many parents would tolerate our children behaving this way?

Given all of the above, it's not surprising that many parents limit their kids' exposure to politics. When our children hear us complain about how crooked politicians are, or how corrupt the system is, they absorb the idea that it's better to be disengaged from the political system.

It's not. It's better for our democracy to have informed and engaged citizens.

We just have to find a different point of entry.

The airwaves are dominated by a handful of high-profile races, but there's democracy unfolding in the details. Census data shows there are more than 500,000 elected officials in America. Local races -- from school boards to statehouses to city councils -- impact our daily lives. Go meet some local candidates and find one whose values reflect your own -- someone whose ambitions are guided by principles and a genuine desire to serve.

Teach your kids -- and maybe remind yourself -- that being a public servant can still be a noble endeavor.

As parents, our civic duty goes beyond showing up at the ballot box every few years. It includes raising a generation of citizens who believe they can have a voice and effect change.

In an election year filled with hateful rhetoric that could have completely alienated my children, they are instead excited about watching their aunt, my sister, run for district judge in Houston. They are learning how democracy works -- warts and all.

We've watched her work 12- to 14-hour days, without breaks, for months -- demonstrating the amount of sheer determination and drive it takes to sustain a campaign. We've seen her building coalitions, reaching out to many different groups, getting endorsements and yes, even raising money. My kids have seen that convincing others to support you takes believing in yourself first.

They are learning what it means to donate your time or money to a candidate you believe in, and how much effort it takes to get just one citizen registered to vote. They have learned that there are people who don't vote because they can't get time off of work on Election Day, or lack transportation, or simply don't know where or how to do so.

Experiencing a local race from the inside took me back to my freshman year of college, when I was finally old enough to cast a ballot. It was a presidential election year, and I had the enthusiasm of a freshly minted voter.

Years of bitter partisan gridlock since then had nearly put that fire out.

But this year, on Super Tuesday, it was reignited by the spark of other citizens.

There was the man who had been eligible to vote for more than 30 years, casting his ballot for the first time. There were pictures of young Air Force ROTC cadets who were just old enough to vote. My brother-in-law posted pictures of a Vietnam veteran and his daughter at the polls, with the caption: "He wants you to know that you have no excuse for not getting out to vote. Many have sacrificed for the right to vote."

There were the people who lined up around buildings and waited for hours for a chance to have their voices heard.

My mother told me that she had to pull over while driving home after voting for her daughter. Overcome by emotion, she broke down and cried.

In the ugliest election cycle of my adult life, there have been times when I've felt more discouraged about the political process than I could ever imagine. But remarkably, I've also felt incredibly hopeful and proud.

We infect our children with our attitude toward the political process. And if we want better leaders, we stand to benefit from encouraging our brightest and best to want to solve our nation's challenges. The more hopeful and involved our children see us, the better future we are building for our country.

It's one way to eventually get the government we deserve.

Teenagers have kept parts of their lives secret from the prying eyes of adults for generations. A degree of privacy is necessary to develop one's own identity, and to learn to solve problems independently on the path to becoming an adult.

But the hidden aspects of today's teen culture are vastly different from those in the pre-social media era. The secret spaces of this generation are contained behind a screen to which teens are nearly continuously connected.

Most parents know that technology has dramatically changed how teens communicate; they have become much more aware of the legal and social dangers of sexting, and the emotional harm of cyberbullying. But they may not realize the impact of the most significant change this era has enabled: the easy accessibility and near-constant presence of pornography. And they remain largely unaware of how it has changed the way teens interact, the way they view themselves and their sexuality, says author Nancy Jo Sales.

In "American Girls: Social Media and the Secret Lives of Teenagers," Sales details a new frontier of sexism and harassment that has become the reality for girls today. Even though girls aren't the primary consumers of online porn, their social interactions are guided by a hypersexualized porn-saturated culture, she argues. Sales interviewed more than 200 girls in six cities for this book. She presents teen girls' struggles and anxieties in their own words -- words that parents need to hear.

The confluence between the tech, porn and social media industries delivers graphic, violent and degrading images regularly to children's screens, even before they begin to seek it out. Clicking on a benign topic or a "trending" hashtag on Instagram or Twitter will commonly bring up pornographic images -- and the content is vastly different and more violent than what might have been seen in a magazine passed around a playground decades earlier.

Girls who raise their voices against it are dismissed as prudes who "have no chill."

Sales describes scenes in which boys hold up their phones, playing porn, during a girl's class presentation if the teacher is sitting in the back of the room.

Is anyone going to responsibly argue that this is OK? she asks.

There is a stark difference between being "sex positive" and wanting your child exposed to violent and degrading sexual images. Sales cites research that suggests that when boys have their first sexual experience by watching pornographic videos on a screen, it becomes much easier for them to think of women as objects to pleasure them. Sex is reduced to a woman's performance. She cites additional research that shows exposure to porn is related to male sexual aggression toward women.

And many kids' first sexual experiences happen over social media now.

"There is a generation of kids who are self-generating porn, and yet it's become so normalized so quickly that people are trying to dismiss it," says Sales. Young teens she interviewed describe how boys try to blackmail them into sending nude pictures of themselves.

In fact, some of the world's most popular social media sites began as a way to evaluate whether girls and women were "hot or not." That idea was the basis for Facemash, the precursor to Facebook, and the founders of YouTube have said they originally set out to create a hotness-evaluating video site.

A lot of men in Silicon Valley have become filthy rich and powerful off of teenage girls, Sales argues, yet they have taken no responsibility for the ways in which this hypersexualized culture has negatively impacted girls' lives.

She recalled a conversation she had with a friend, a father of a 17-year-old boy, in which she shared her surprise at how much porn teenage boys were consuming (according to studies she'd been reading). The father said he doubted his son watched very much.

The father approached her weeks later, after looking through his son's browser history. He'd discovered that not only was his son watching hard-core porn, he was looking at it right when he woke up in the morning, as soon as he got home from school and again before he went to bed.

The father was alarmed and troubled by both the content and the frequency, she said.

"Kids don't say at the dinner table, 'I saw a great porn video today,'" she said.

The takeaway for parents is twofold: First, parents need to talk with their children about porn, and not just about how to avoid it. There has to be a discussion about the ways it is influencing culture, teen interactions and self-image.

Secondly, we need to demand better protections for kids by the tech industry that profits from children's use of their products. Sales points out that in 2013, Britian's four largest Internet service providers agreed to institute "family-friendly filters" that automatically block pornographic websites unless households chose to unblock them.

Her book raises a fundamentally critical question: Why should porn profiteers and Silicon Valley flourish at the expense of a generation of American girls?

It's time to answer that question.

Jake Hoffner was 10 years old the first time he went to Camp Encourage in Kansas City, Missouri, more than 200 miles away from his home near St. Louis.

His mother, Tracey Gibson, was scared he would hate it. Jake had never even had a play date before. He had never been part of a team. He had never made a friend.

Jake has Asperger's syndrome, a condition on the autism spectrum. Camp Encourage is a three-night, four-day camp for children on the spectrum.

"I wanted him to experience camp," Tracey said. "I wanted to see if he could make friends."

Around this time of year, many parents start planning the summer for their children. The most desired camps and activities fill up fast, so the race begins in the winter or early spring. For the parents of kids with special needs, making summer plans can be even more of a challenge.

But thanks to an increasing number of specialized camps, summer can be a chance for these kids to fit in with a group in a way they can't the rest of the year.

During the school year, children with special needs -- whether social, physical or emotional -- are often "mainstreamed" into classrooms with typically functioning kids. The same thing happens in the summer: Many camps find ways to accommodate children with special needs and integrate them with other campers. But there is a growing demand for camps that cater to very specific populations.

Beyond camps for children with physical disabilities, developmental delays or learning disabilities, there are camps for burn victims, bereavement camps for those who are grieving, and camps for children with serious or chronic illnesses such as cancer or asthma.

For some of these kids, these specialized summer experiences help them grow in ways that neurotypical children may take for granted.

Jake, now 15, will be attending Camp Encourage for the sixth summer this year. He wrote a letter about how much those days mean to him.

"Camp Encourage is a very important part in my life. This is because every time I come, I know I'll meet old friends. And come back with new ones."

When his mother read this line aloud, she started crying.

"I'm sorry," she said. "I don't usually hear him talk this way."

Kelly Lee, executive director at Camp Encourage, says the camp, which costs $1,200 for a four-day session, offers scholarships to several of the students who attend. For families who may also be paying for therapies during the school year, additional expenses can put these opportunities out of reach.

"Every year we have a waiting list," Lee said. "Our focus is on meeting needs -- knowing how important tiny details can be to this population, and tailoring to those needs."

The benefits that attract parents to these kinds of camps include a specially trained staff, which has experience dealing with the population they will be serving; the opportunity to get additional services, enrichment or therapy in a camp setting; and the chance for the child to be surrounded by peers who share some of the same challenges.

Some of the kids deal with stares or questions during the school year, like burn victims who have to explain the scars that cover their bodies. Others don't get invited to birthday parties, or face bullying at school.

Jake captured that in his letter, when he wrote that the camp "lets in the kids that either have trouble making friends or the kids who don't realize how cool they are." Meanwhile, "the kids who may have bullied them, tormented them or just ignored them are left out."

His mother said the drive to Kansas City each summer is worth it for those few days.

"He lights up," she said.