In a post shared on Mumsnet last Thursday, the boy’s mom, who goes by the username HellMc, explained that her 10-year-old son has pulled silly faces during pictures since he was a toddler, and despite the parents hoping he would grow out of it if they didn’t “make a fuss of it”, he didn’t and now they don’t have a single picture where he’s not doing a silly face.

Recently, the woman and her sister took their kids to a national heritage site and decided to take a group photo in front of the ruins, for the kid’s grandma to hang on the wall, but the boy kept pulling silly faces and his aunt was having none of it.

The post read: “Sister then said to [my son] ’either stop pulling faces or stand over there out of the photo.’ it came as a shock as everyone was laughing at him initially and then she suddenly got mad. I told her I thought she was being a bit harsh and she said ‘sorry but I’ve been trying to take a nice photo of them all day for mum and he’s ruined every one so far.”

The woman asked her son to act normal for once but he didn’t, so when her sister had enough, she told him to get out of the shot and took a picture of all the other children, leaving him out.

She then told her sister: “Mum would want all the kids together so she [her sister] said actually, mum told me to take the pic without your [son] if he insisted on pulling a face, she was annoyed with the last lot of photos I took her because he’d ruined them all.”

Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), shows that 8.9 percent of children between 3 and 17 years of age, approximately 5.5 million, are affected by behavior problems. More than 5 in 10 children, 53.5 percent, with behavior disorders received treatment.

The same study shows that, for children with behavior problems, more than 1 in 3 also had anxiety, 36.6 percent, and about 1 in 5 also had depression, 20.3 percent.

Among the 832 comments in the thread, most sided with the aunt, saying the boy’s behavior is not acceptable.

On user said: “Why do you think it’s OK for him to keep doing this and everyone else should just laugh? The whole ‘it’s just how he/she/I act’ drives me up the wall!”

A second wrote: “Sorry -[YouAareBeingUnreasonable] he was warned about the consequences and he carried on, so your sister did what she’d told him she would.”

A third commented: “She’s quite right. He’s more than old enough to be able to behave for a few seconds for a photo. Your sister gave him the chance to be in the photo. He chose to act up. I’d have done the same.”

A fourth wrote: “Your son sounds incredibly irritating and I can’t believe he’s been doing it for this long before someone has given him the option - smile normally or don’t be in the photo. You (and your son) are being unreasonable. It’s not unreasonable of them to want a nice photo without silly faces on their wall.”

And a fifth wrote: “The kid needs telling that it’s not appropriate, it’s not funny and he’s ruining people’s pictures. He can learn to behave for 5 seconds or he’s going to find himself excluded from far more than a single photograph. His attention seeking will start getting his whole class into trouble, which will impact his friends.”

Newsweek was not able to verify the details of the case.