The photo was taken by a man who saw the mother and her baby in Colorado Airport, US.
Molly Lensing was captured sitting in an airport seat on her phone.
Her daughter, then two month old Anastasia, was lying on a blanket on the floor in front of her mum.
The man who took the photo shared it online, where it quickly went viral.
Molly was shamed for her parenting skills, with one post reading: “Albert Einstein said, ‘I fear the day that technology will take on our humanity … the world will be populated by a generation of idiots.’”
But Molly has hit back at the criticism, instead sharing her very different side of the story.
The Illinois mum-of-three said she felt her privacy was violated when the image was shared.
Molly told TODAY: “We had the unfortunate luck of being stuck in the middle of the Delta computer shut-down.
“Anastasia had been held or in her carrier for many hours.”
The pair’s flights were delayed and re-booked so many times that they ended up spending 20 hours in the airport.
Molly said: “My arms were tired. She needed to stretch. And I had to communicate with all the family members wondering where the heck we were.”
The part-time paediatric nurse said she was horrified when the image – taken in 2016 – began to surface months later.
She explained: “I had recently started working on a labor floor, and I was terrified of my co-workers or boss seeing the photo and comments and believing that I should no longer work with infants. Thankfully, this never happened.
