Seven-year-old Ethan Hunter, aspiring astronaut or movie star, has been labelled ‘gifted’ by his young mother, despite the fact that everyone he has come into contact with is of the opinion that he is an insufferable brat.

A McDonalds worker, who wishes to remain anonymous, has told of how Mrs Hunter explained away the fact her son laid a turd in the playground area of the restaurant. “She told me he has a very active bowels,” said the worker, after he’d finished cleaning and disinfecting the slide, where one child accidently put her hand in the poo and slid down it, crying.

The problem is not constrained to Ethan’s treatment of service workers, either. Reports have emerged stating that the child’s own grandparents intensely dislike the boy, who they say, “Cannot be tolerated or reasoned with.”

“I asked him once to choose which cookie he wanted. He snatched the whole jar from me, climbed the roof of the garage and ate them all from there. Afterward, he dropped the jar onto the driveway. It’s in pieces now. We’ve had that jar since the year we were married,” said Ethan’s maternal grandmother said. “I’ve told my spud of a daughter but she insists he’s just hyperactive.”

Her husband said: “I’m not normally violent towards children, nor family members for that matter, but I’ve often thought about how wonderful it would be to give him a spanking. But now that’s considered abuse, so…we do what we can and dream of what we can’t.”

Mrs Hunter and her ‘special little boy’ have not been invited to any children’s parties since Ethan’s first year in preschool.