Culture

People Are Trolling This Woman Who Asked For Help Editing Her Stepson Out Of A Family Photo

After the stepmother asked if "anyone could remove the centre kid?", people rightfully removed her instead.

by Michelle Rennex  15 October 2020
Stepmother photoshop out stepson

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Having a blended family and step-relative of some kind is pretty common these days.

Whether it’s a stepparent, stepchild or a half sibling, blended families are becoming more and more common.

In Australia, the number of reported blended families is still relatively small at 3.7 percent, according to the 2016 census. However, in America, the Pew Research Centre reports that more than four in ten American adults have “at least one step-relative in their family”.

So with such a high number of blended families across the US, it’s pretty gross to see a woman literally request to have her stepson “removed” from her family portraits so that she can have a photo with “her” boys.

In a now-deleted post to the ‘Photoshop Fairy Connection’ Facebook group, Natalie Arriete posed the question: “Can anyone remove the centre kid?”

Sharing a screenshot to prove she had the original photographer’s permission to have the image edited, Natalie explained that she wanted “one with just my boys” and offered $10 to whoever could do the task.

When the request was posted in the Facebook group it was met with over 800 sad, angry and shocked reactions before someone actually fulfilled Natalie’s request and edited the image, which she promptly made her new profile photo.

The whole very depressing saga was captured and shared to Twitter by Wade Cross, a father who stumbled upon the post in the Photoshop group. Explaining that the request struck a nerve because he was missing his own son, Cross wrote that “this kid could live with me and be in every photo I’ll take for the rest of my life”.

Unsurprisingly, the Twitter post quickly went viral with people sharing their disgust in the stepmother’s request. Along with critiquing how heartbreaking this would’ve been for the half-sibling who was removed from the family portrait, some questioned how the mother must treat her stepson in real life if she doesn’t consider him “family” enough to be in her profile photo.

The whole thing is really quite sad to see and a heartbreaking insight into how a lot of stepparent’s actually feel towards their non-biological children — a common trope seen in cinema with the “evil stepmother” character.

But as Natalie’s Photoshop request continued to spread online, people begun to share their similar experiences of feeling ostracised in their own family as a result of a stepparent, proving that it’s not just a tale we see on screen.

And as people became more emotionally invested in these stories of rejection, they begun to troll the mother to the point where she has since made all her social media profiles private or deleted them completely.

But before Natalie had the chance to do so, some decided to give the stepmother a few more variations of her family portrait. Finding different ways to edit out the real issue in the photo, people offered up some arguably better images for the family that removed Natalie completely.

While the edits for this mother give us a little giggle, it’s unfortunate that this type of editing request is actually far too common.

Just last year, another American woman was slammed and called an “evil stepmother” on Reddit when she was caught asking people on Facebook if they could “remove the kid to the right” of her photos, which was, of course, her stepson.

After she faced backlash, the woman added a disclaimer to her post to explain that while she does love her stepson, she just wanted “some without him in them.”