“Why don’t you pick on someone your own size?” takes on a whole new meaning now.
Obviously, bullying is a very, very serious problem, and the advent of the interwebz has definitely not helped matters. I mean, the fact that we had to create a whole new classification of bullying, “cyberbullying,” speaks to how pervasive this issue actually is.
But, when you think of the typical bullying victim, you typically think of middle or high schoolers, right? Do you expect someone like this to get bullied?
So many, MANY things are wrong with this.
Let me break down the situation for you. According to a recent article from Today.com, this little 10-month-old nugget, Landon Benton, is an Instagram sensation because of, well, the fact that he’s friggin’ ADORABLE. (Case in point: this kid legit has over 52,000 followers…like, what? HE’S 10 MONTHS OLD.) Ugh.
Anyway, this kid is unbelievably cute. So cute, in fact, that it caused an “adult” man (and I put “adult” in quotation marks because his maturity level is highly questionable) to take to social media to fat-shame the kid out of pure envy. There’s no other possible explanation for why a grown man would do something like this TO. A. CHILD.
How did it he do it? By crowdsourcing from his equally unintelligent friends such nasty monikers as “fat-ass” and “diababies.” The most popular one, “Stuff Curry,” capitalized on the child’s uncanny resemblance to the Golden State Warriors’ point guard, Steph Curry.
Now, sit with this for a second. A grown man FAT-SHAMED A TODDLER.
It’s not hard to imagine how much these names initially hurt Landon’s mother, Jessica Benton, when she first found out about them. But, rather than let them get to her, she decided to strike back with love and positivity. As she told Today.com:
“I said we were going to own the name. We’re going to take control of it. So I started hashtagging all of his pictures on every social network so when people did look up the name, they’d get the hashtag and would see something positive, not that same picture that’s been shared over and over.”
And that’s where these absolutely killer photos came from:
Yup.
Nailed. It. Can I get one of those shirts?
But I want to know: what would YOU have done in this situation, if this had been your child? Have you had to deal with cyberbullying with your kids? If you did, how did you handle it?
