Patel is an executive producer/director, the creator of “ ConnectEffect ” and a Builders movement partner.
Doesn’t it feel like summer break just began? Yet here we are again. Fall’s arrival means kids have settled into a new school year with new teachers, new clothes and a new “attitude” for parents and kids alike, to start on the right foot.
Yet it’s hard for any of us to find footing in an increasingly polarized and isolated world. The entire nation is grappling with a rising tide of mental health concerns — including the continually increasing alienation and loneliness in children — and parents are struggling to foster real human connection for their kids in the real world. The battle to minimize screen time is certainly one approach. But in a world that is based on screens, apps and social media, is it a battle that realistically can be won?
If we want to reduce screens’ negative impact on our children’s mental health, what we need is a “hard reset” of their relationships with their devices by ensuring they are deeply aware of the difference between the real world and the screen world.
I’ve spent the last eight years focused on showing people the difference between these worlds, helping bring them back together, in person, to bridge divides and foster authentic human connection, conversation and community. Like the people I work with, parents can help their children understand the difference between the two worlds through a two-part plan: first, by hard-resetting their misguided relationships with their screen and, second, by intentionally connecting them to others in real life.
Remember when the end of “The Wizard of Oz” revealed that the wizard was just a man behind a curtain? To break a child’s toxic relationship with their screen, parents need to pull back another curtain to show their kids exactly how all media works, from social media and news companies to search engines and apps. Almost everything kids see on their screens is an edit, and behind almost every edit is a similar intention: more likes, followers and users that can be monetized. Through the attention extraction model, most everything that appears on our screen is designed to maximize our attention for profit, feeding us more content, regardless of the impact it may have on us individually and as a society. If, as a family, you haven’t yet watched the documentary “The Social Dilemma,” the start of the year is a perfect time.
Helping kids realize that the structure of social media is not made with their well-being in mind — in fact, it has a very different motive — can help them recognize that they are not alone in their feelings and reactions to the screen. According to Pew Research, 31 percent of teens say social media makes them feel like their friends are leaving them out and 23 percent say what they see on social media makes them feel worse about their own life. Talking with their peers less about what is on their screen, but rather how their screen makes them feel, is a point of connection they may not realize.
Having spent nearly a decade connecting people, it is clear that one of the secrets to connection in the real world is the introduction. In other words, how people are introduced to one another often sets up the way they will see one another. Based on the primary-recency effect, when people first connect through the two-dimensional edits in the screen world, they make assumptions that lean into pre-conceived notions of how the “other” should be. In a country growing increasingly polarized and dehumanized by social media echo chambers and a profound lack of human connection, this reality impacts our children, who have less real world experiences under their belts.
The beginning of a school year offers a timely opportunity to allow children the space to paint a more complete picture of their new classmates before screens intervene. A simple initialism, EPIC, can provide parents with four techniques for making sure interactions are maximized for connection and trust.
- Equalization: What are the meaningful overlaps of life experiences that your child and those around them share? Have them seek similarities, rather than differences, with the kids they are about to meet. If they change what they are looking for, it will change what they see.
- Personalization: In a world of infinite edits of information that make it hard to find common ground, encourage your child to personalize what they think based on their own life experiences, rather than regurgitate information they absorbed from their screen.
- Investigation: When people meet for the first time, they often feel anxious about what they are going to say. Suggest your child focus on trying to learn and understand the other person rather than worrying about their responses.This empathy will be felt by the other person, and is a powerful driver of trust and connection.
- Collaboration: Many young adults feel overwhelmed by the burden of social interactions, fearing if it goes wrong it’s all their fault. Social interactions are less worrisome when people remember both sides are equal participants in a collaboration and it’s not all on them.
If we use this time at the start of every year to teach children the realities of the screens they use and how to intentionally foster deeper, real world introductions, they will create a future for themselves and others empowered and enriched by social connections, not fearful of them.
A deep look at how "All in the Family" remains a striking mirror of American politics, class tensions, and cultural manipulation—proving its relevance decades later.
All in This American Family
There are a few shows that have aged as eerily well as All in the Family.
It’s not just that it’s still funny and has the feel not of a sit-com, but of unpretentious, working-class theatre. It’s that, decades later, it remains one of the clearest windows into the American psyche. Archie Bunker’s living room has been, as it were, a small stage on which the country has been working through the same contradictions, anxieties, and unresolved traumas that still shape our politics today. The manipulation of the working class, the pitting of neighbor against neighbor, the scapegoating of the vulnerable, the quiet cruelties baked into everyday life—all of it is still here with us. We like to reassure ourselves that we’ve progressed since the early 1970s, but watching the show now forces an unsettling recognition: The structural forces that shaped Archie’s world have barely budged. The same tactics of distraction and division deployed by elites back then are still deployed now, except more efficiently, more sleekly.
Archie himself is the perfect vessel for this continuity. He is bigoted, blustery, reactive, but he is also wounded, anxious, and constantly misled by forces above and beyond him. Norman Lear created Archie not as a monster to be hated (Lear’s genius was to make Archie lovable despite his loathsome stands), but as a man trapped by the political economy of his era: A union worker who feels his country slipping away, yet cannot see the hands that are actually moving it. His anger leaks sideways, onto immigrants, women, “hippies,” and anyone with less power than he has. The real villains—the wealthy, the connected, the manufacturers of grievance—remain safely and comfortably offscreen. That’s part of the show’s key insight: It reveals how elites thrive by making sure working people turn their frustrations against each other rather than upward.
Edith, often dismissed as naive or scatterbrained, functions as the show’s quiet moral center. Her compassion exposes the emotional void in Archie’s worldview and, in doing so, highlights the costs of the divisions that powerful interests cultivate. Meanwhile, Mike the “Meathead” represents a generation trying to break free from those divisions but often trapped in its own loud self-righteousness. Their clashes are not just family arguments but collisions between competing visions of America’s future. And those visions, tellingly, have yet to resolve themselves.
The political context of the show only sharpens its relevance. Premiering in 1971, All in the Family emerged during the Nixon years, when the “Silent Majority” strategy was weaponizing racial resentment, cultural panic, and working-class anxiety to cement power. Archie was a fictional embodiment of the very demographic Nixon sought to mobilize and manipulate. The show exposed, often bluntly, how economic insecurity was being rerouted into cultural hostility. Watching the show today, it’s impossible to miss how closely that logic mirrors the present, from right-wing media ecosystems to politicians who openly rely on stoking grievances rather than addressing root causes.
What makes the show unsettling today is that its satire feels less like a relic and more like a mirror. The demagogic impulses it spotlighted have simply found new platforms. The working-class anger it dramatized has been harvested by political operatives who, like their 1970s predecessors, depend on division to maintain power. The very cultural debates that fueled Archie’s tirades — about immigration, gender roles, race, and national identity—are still being used as tools to distract from wealth concentration and political manipulation.
If anything, the divisions are sharper now because the mechanisms of manipulation are more sophisticated, for much has been learned by The Machine. The same emotional raw material Lear mined for comedy is now algorithmically optimized for outrage. The same social fractures that played out around Archie’s kitchen table now play out on a scale he couldn’t have imagined. But the underlying dynamics haven’t changed at all.
That is why All in the Family feels so contemporary. The country Lear dissected never healed or meaningfully evolved: It simply changed wardrobe. The tensions, prejudices, and insecurities remain, not because individuals failed to grow but because the economic and political forces that thrive on division have only become more entrenched. Until we confront the political economy that kept Archie and Michael locked in an endless loop of circular bickering, the show will remain painfully relevant for another fifty years.
Ahmed Bouzid is the co-founder of The True Representation Movement.