The responsibilities we give our children can help them discover talents and abilities they may not otherwise discover.

Ariel Ruff was the go-to child when anything broke in the house -- not because she was the likely culprit, but the most likely to fix it. Ruff's father was a doctor who died when she was 3. Her mother is a professor at Southern Illinois University-Edwardsville, and legally blind. Ruff, now 26, would fix the dishwasher or washing machine when they malfunctioned.

"I grew up getting satisfaction from watching things work ... something that you've put together," she said. A bright and motivated student, she graduated high school early and started college, expecting to become a nurse. Into her second year, she decided she wanted to pursue her passion.

"I've always wanted to be a plumber since I was little," she said. When Ruff told her mother she wanted to leave nursing school, her mother encouraged her to make a plan and pursue the career she wanted.

Ruff has innate mechanical ability and loves water. She researched her options and enrolled in a trade school, which would count toward the required four-year apprenticeship required to become a journeyman.

"Plumbing is a puzzle," Ruff explained. You have to know codes and legalities. It takes intelligence and mechanical ability. "I have respect for that," she said. She graduated summa cum laude from Ranken Technical College and is a senior apprentice with Roto-Rooter.

Roto-Rooter recently named her one of its top national plumbers based on sales volume, number of jobs and performance ratings. She is one of 11 female plumbers in the company, which employs 2,000 plumbers nationwide.

"The fact that she's also young, petite and female means that she defies three stereotypes about the plumbing trade to exemplify what is possible," said Paul Abrams, Roto-Rooter corporate director of public relations. The company noted that there is a shortage of plumbers in the growing and lucrative field. They have been using Ruff in a recruiting video to reach women who may not consider it a viable career path.

Women face significant challenges, such as harassment and sexism, in the trade professions. They represent less than 1 percent of the country's 573,000 pipelayers, plumbers, pipefitters and steamfitters, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The median salary is near $50,000 annually.

Ariel says she typically hears some kind of comment about her gender at every new job she goes to, but when customers say something, her male co-workers stand up for her.

"It makes me want to be a better plumber," she said. She gets a lot of repeat customers, which suggests she's changed a few minds.

"I've had to face adversity," she said. Some customers will say right away that they are skeptical she can do the work. "I appreciate every single person who gives me a chance to prove assumptions about women in the trades wrong," she said.

Do people ever notice that she works around water and shares a name with a Disney princess mermaid? "I get that all the time." � "Customers will call their daughters down to meet me," she said. Ruff introduces herself to her customers' young daughters and asks if they've seen her movies. "It's loosely based on the story of my life," she tells them.

She still has to finish her apprenticeship, and plans to take the test to get her journeyman's license later this year.

She's also a single mom of a 7-year-old daughter, who tells her friends that her mom can fix anything broken in their homes. A few months ago, her school invited students to dress as their future job. Her daughter wore her mom's Roto-Rooter uniform and safety goggles. She was still wearing them when Ruff picked her up.

"How was your day?" Ruff asked.

"I had a job in Granite City," her daughter replied, still in character. "Let me tell you about it."

Ruff's nontraditional profession may encourage other women to pursue such fields. It's already shown her daughter that anything is possible.

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.