There’s probably not an adult on this planet who can’t think of a time when they witnessed a child do something “unacceptable” in public. It may have been a child using their “outside voice” in a quiet movie theater or a baby crying in a nice restaurant instead of sleeping through the special occasion like its parents hoped it would. We’ve all been there.

It’s the nature of children to act in ways that most adults wouldn’t, and autistic children struggle even more with learning social nuances. The real thing that makes or breaks these socially problematic situations is how adults react. Do they scowl, glare, and mutter under their breath? Or do they try to help?

Broadway actor Kelvin Moon Loh is one of the latter kind of person. In September 2015, he was in the middle of a matinee performance of “The King and I” at New York City’s Lincoln center when something out of the ordinary happened.

During a scene in which one of the characters is repeatedly whipped, a frightened autistic child in the audience began to cry out, upset by the performance. The boy’s mother tried to quiet him, but other theater patrons were only making matters worse by openly confronting the mother, condemning her for bringing her son to the theater if he couldn’t keep quiet.

“His voice pierced the theater,” Kelvin later wrote in an open letter about the incident. “The audience started to rally against the mother and her child to be removed. I heard murmurs of ‘why would you bring a child like that to the theater?’ This is wrong. Plainly wrong.”

Read the heartwarming story here.