Cynthia Tipton was having dinner with her family at Bandana's in the St. Louis area when she saw the look on her son's face. She knew what was coming.

Her 14-year-old daughter, Sophie, had been kidding around with her little brother, Noland. He got embarrassed by her mild teasing. He started screaming and crying. Loudly.

Noland, 10, has high-functioning autism.

His meltdown caught Tipton by surprise. She walked over to his chair, knelt down next to him, began rubbing his back and whispering in his ear: "You're being kind of loud. It's OK, buddy. Sophie was just teasing. Let's calm down. Let's be a little quieter. You're safe."

The screaming continued for a few minutes.

She felt self-conscious and could tell her father, who was dining with them, was embarrassed, too.

Then, it was like a switch flipped and her son calmed down. When the waitress walked over, her father was convinced another diner had complained and they were going to be banned from the restaurant.

That had happened once, when Noland was 4, and there had been a few times when Tipton had taken her son screaming and crying from a restaurant.

The waitress did, indeed, bring a message from another customer.

Another family had paid for their dinner. On the receipt, the strangers wrote, "Hi! We couldn't help but notice what a great mother you are and what a beautiful family you have. God bless."

Tipton, who recently opened an indoor gym for children on the autism spectrum and their families, was speechless. The family had already left, so she had no way to respond to such a gracious act of kindness.

"Being a parent is tough," she said. "Being an autism parent is really tough."

Strangers have no way of knowing that her child is not just being a brat. He has to work much harder than other children his age to control his emotions.

She came home Thursday night and posted the receipt and a note of thanks to the anonymous family on Facebook, hoping they may eventually see it. She wishes she could thank them.

"I am overwhelmed and humbled by your thoughtfulness," she wrote. "It was so unexpected, and yet it made such a huge difference to our family," Tipton said.

In an age when parents are often harshly judged by others, these strangers acted out of empathy.

Unlike the angry internet mobs quick to attack a child's mistakes, or to judge a parent for a family's tragedy, the interaction with those who have been in similar situations comes from a place of understanding.

Tipton, who gets teary-eyed talking about the diner's note, has been overwhelmed by people's reaction to her post.

"Just seeing how much it's uplifted other people ... it makes you feel good," she said. "Ultimately, I really, really hope that the family who did this for us sees this."

As the story spread of what happened in the restaurant, it prompted a heated debate among commenters about when a parent should take a child out of a restaurant. Parents of children on the spectrum tried to explain how some children respond differently to stimuli when upset. Tipton was clearly trying to calm her son.

Others made an argument that the other diners' experience should not have been negatively impacted, even if for a few minutes, by the outburst.

But the vast majority who responded to Tipton personally noted how much kinder the world would be if more people handled life the way the other family did.

Her father commented on Tipton's post: "The family that bought our dinner must have been angels from God. Regular people could not have looked at us with such compassion."

In fact, regular people can, and more of us should.

Once every four years, I wish my children would watch more television.

Normally, I'm fretting about them consuming damaging media messages. But during the summer Olympics, I want them to internalize every inspiring message.

You can do something that has never been done before. Look at Usain Bolt and Michael Phelps shattering records and claiming a spot among those called The Greatest.

You can fly higher than people have ever seen. Watch Simone Biles win five medals and pull off a signature tumbling pass that no one else in the world -- male or female -- can do.

You can wreck stereotypes. See Ibtihaj Muhammad, an American Muslim woman in hijab, win a bronze medal in fencing. And there's Dalilah Muhammad, an American Muslim woman in shorts, winning a gold medal in 400 meter hurdles for our country -- the first woman to do so.

You can carry the weight of history and still swim faster. Watch Simone Manuel dominate. As an African-American, she would have been forcibly shut out of public pools decades ago; today, she can win a gold medal in swimming.

You have opportunities you might not have known existed. Look at Ashleigh Johnson making those saves for our gold medal-winning water polo team.

Your hurts can propel you higher. Read Sarah Elizabeth Robles' tweet before she won an Olympic medal for weightlifting: "Things that used to get me bullied are the things that made me become an Olympian. Consider that when some jerk tries to tear you down."

Take heart in the diversity and camaraderie of the Final Five gold-medal gymnastic team.

It's not just the heroic feats of athleticism that I want my kids to notice. There are the stories on and off the field that reveal the human spirit.

Nikki Hamblin and Abbey D'Agostino fell in the middle of the 5000-meter qualifier. They took turns helping each other up. They sacrificed their chance to win to help a hurt competitor. Neither won a medal, but they earned the Olympic's Fair Play award for their sportsmanship.

In another moment of connection, two competitors took an innocent selfie. Hong Un-jong, a gymnast from North Korea, mugged for the camera with Lee Eun-ju, a gymnast from South Korea, and it captured a story of friendship that transcends borders.

Most inspiring were the 10 athletes competing on the Refugee Olympic Team. They had fled Syria, Ethiopia, South Sudan and the Congo, and survived conditions most of us can't even fathom. They left wars and persecution, looking for safe havens in a world largely indifferent -- or even hostile -- to their plight. The world turned its back on Yusra Mardini, a Syrian teenager who crossed from Turkey into Greece in an overloaded inflatable boat. When its motor failed and the boat took on water, she and her sister jumped into the sea and swam for three hours while pushing the boat, saving the lives of the other passengers.

The refugee athletes may not have won medals, but they won our hearts.

These stories are the anti-venom for a poisonous election season.

I wanted my children to learn from the lowlights, too. You can be a world-class athlete and still turn yourself into a national embarrassment. Medals don't look good on liars.

But I prefer to focus on my personal heroes from these Games: the 40-somethings, the moms, the marginalized. They showed us over and over again that you can compete with athletes half your age.

How can you not be in awe of Oksana Chusovitina, who has competed at every Summer Olympics since Barcelona in 1992? A seven-time Olympian who, at 41, became the oldest gymnast in Olympic history, competed alongside athletes her son's age.

I cheered for Kerri Walsh Jennings, still winning medals in beach volleyball at 38.

And there was Kristin Armstrong, a day before she turned 43, becoming the first American woman to win an individual event in three consecutive summer Olympics. She is the oldest woman cyclist to ever win gold.

"People have asked me, over and over, 'Why? Why am I back?'" she said in an interview with NBC Sports. "And it's because I can."

Like nearly everyone else in the world, I'm never going to be an Olympian. But we can share that spirit.

Because we can.

A new documentary, "Screenagers," makes a convincing argument that the hardest thing about modern parenting is finding a healthy balance of technology use.

I asked filmmaker and physician Dr. Delaney Ruston to explain this after I watched her film.

Today's parents worry about many of the same things our parents worried about -- drug and alcohol use, risky sexual behavior and mental health. The intensity of problems that can arise from these issues can be devastating, said Ruston. But so can the struggle over kids' tech use.

Ruston's concerns throughout the documentary about raising children in this digital age will feel relatable to parents of tweens and teens.

"I was afraid I was being too strict or not strict enough," she said in an interview, referring to the rules she was trying to enforce around tech use with her children, now 14 and 17 years old. "I didn't know so many other people were dealing with these rules issues."

Unlike other alarmist books and shows that have come out about kids and technology use, there are reassuring parts to this eye-opening documentary.

Ruston learned from brain researchers that the reward center of the brain is more active during the early teen years. That helps explain why it can be so hard for adolescents to tear themselves away from their devices. Those devices are extra stimulating and rewarding to their developing brains.

The human brain learns through consequences, she said. Children won't learn to regulate their behavior left to their own devices, so to speak. In fact, putting rules in place without enforcing consequences or having stronger boundaries is setting up some impulsive children for failure. But given the right guidance, kids can learn better self-control over time.

In the film, Ruston highlighted some of the dangers of too much screen time, as well.

An experiment on mice showed long-term effects on their brains after exposure to a period of intense media stimulation. We don't know if the same lingering damage happens to human brains, but the study should give parents pause.

She interviewed scientists and researchers who show how video game addiction is as powerful as substance abuse addiction. Others demonstrated that our brain is not designed to multitask. And ironically, the worse we do on tasks while doing multiple things at once, the better we think we are performing.

But not all the research was gloomy. Social scientist Sherry Turkle said there's research to suggest you can restore empathy in children with a five-day break from technology.

The documentary also reveals some hypocrisy at play: Parents want to impose limits and boundaries on tech use, but they bristle at the notion of applying some limits on themselves. We tend to minimize our own usage and its impact on others, such as spouses and children.

The three-and-a-half year process of making the film changed Ruston's approach to how she manages technology with her own family.

"I started out overly controlling," she said. Her energy around her kids' screen time had a distinctly negative vibe to it. That automatically makes kids defensive about it. She has since made an effort to start by focusing on the positives, as well.

Other changes Ruston has implemented: She made the morning school commute tech-free. She installed an app on her phone that auto-replies when she's driving, so she's not tempted to text and drive. She's worked on reducing the time she spends on her computer at night. She and her husband created more outdoor activities to keep their children and their friends busy. Her family has started a weekly "tech talk Tuesday" where they discuss the ways technology is affecting them, and she starts the discussion in a positive tone. She added an app on her daughter's phone called OurPact that enables her to turn off all the apps on her daughter's phone remotely, if needed.

So, how can more people watch the "Screenagers" documentary? It's not available online, because Ruston was convinced that it needed to be part of a public discussion. Small groups, like civic or religious organizations or schools, can rent the film. She suggests that interested parents ask a school's PTA to screen it. There have been nearly 600 screenings in the four months since it was released.

It's a worthwhile way to spend some quality screen time with your children.