(ABC News) -- No, these are not Steph Curry’s baby photos.
In fact, Jessica Benton, of Quincy, Illinois, didn’t even know who the NBA champ was until people started noticing her son’s resemblance to him on Instagram.
“I mean, he kind of looks like my baby. If they made a baby doll of him, that’s my baby,” Benton, 39, told ABC News of what was going through her mind the first time she googled Curry’s name.
Her adorable 10-month-old son, Landon, whom the Internet has now dubbed “Stuff Curry,” has nearly 40,000 Instagram followers who can’t believe his pint-sized likeness to the Warriors all-star.
But Landon’s newfound fame didn’t originate from a good place.
“Somebody came across his post and re-posted one of his pictures on Facebook,” Benton explained. “They took his picture without me knowing and said, ‘Give little man a nickname.’ Someone said, ‘Stuff Curry,’ and by the time I noticed it, it had been shared like 50,000 times and there were comments out the wazoo with like 20,000 shares on Twitter. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t want my child’s photo out there like that.”
A vast amount of the comments were damaging, bullying Landon for his size, calling him fat and obese.
“He’s not obese, he’s fine,” Benton said. “He’s breastfed, and I make his pureed baby foods. There’s no junk food going on here. A 10-month-old can’t even eat junk food. He’s just a chunky baby. I think he looks chunkier because he’s short.”
A blogger herself and well-versed in how to deal with damaging comments online, she turned to her social media community.
“Should I run with this and make it positive, or should I stick my head in the sand?” she questioned. “I decided to keep on doing what I was doing. In all of those negative comments there were those people who fell in love with him and just said, ‘Oh my God, I just want to squish him.’”
Benton decided to embrace her son’s popularity by putting a positive spin on his bullying, since that was one topic she’s tragically already had to deal with in her family. She says her 20-year-old son committed suicide while she was pregnant with little Landon.
“I have a son who’s not here with me,” she said. “When you have a child who has passed from suicide you think of all the things you could have done differently. I go back to when he told me in 11th grade that kids at school were saying mean things about him. I gave him the mom pep talk to ignore them. You never know the one or two comments that could’ve changed something.”
Most importantly, Benton hopes people realize, “You never know how your comments can affect someone else, no matter what the comments are. Go back to what your mom used to teach you when you were young: If you have nothing nice to say, don’t say anything at all.”
Fortunately for baby Landon, his mom is his biggest cheerleader, and she’s even turned into a bit of a Steph Curry fan, as well.
“We kind of have to be,” she said of the Warriors baller. “He’s been great, I read up a little bit. He’s the underdog, and he’s shorter than everyone else. The similarities between him and my son are so strange.”
And as for Landon’s birthday in July, it will, of course, be Warriors-themed.
