This will be the first presidential election that my 12 year old daughter has really paid attention to. She sort of remembers the 2012 election, but she was only in third grade. By the time this November rolls around, she will be in junior high.

The one thing that she keeps asking me is “Are all elections like this?” She’s watched some of the GOP debates, and some of the Democrat debates. Let me say, it’s not exactly helping my parenting skills or pushing the concept of maturing as you get older when grown adults, all of them older than her parents, are yelling and mocking each other on national television.

I have been as honest as possible with her, and said no, this is the most contentious election in the modern era, as well as the first one to be played out by all the candidates in social media. “Contentious” is such a nice, sterilized way of trying to explain “grownups behaving badly.”

Fortunately, she and her friends are not clashing over politics yet, so she doesn’t have to deal with what many adults are confronting – the loss of real-life relationships over politics.

Opinion writer Peter Wehner wrote an op-ed in the New York Times, discussing the fallout of friendships in this tense political season. His focus was on the GOP side, and the divide over Trump, but this is equally applicable to the divide between Hillary and Bernie supporters (and as I live in a deep blue state, I see that divide played out on my Facebook feed just as much as the GOP divide).