About

The "Get Along" Shirt is an oversized t-shirt that is meant to be worn by bickering children as a disciplinary method. The humorous concept gained much of its momentum after a photograph of two children strapped together by a t-shirt reading "The 'We Will Get Along' Shirt" was posted to Reddit in November 2012.

Origin

The first "We Will Get Along" Shirt photo was taken by Katie M. from Castro Valley, California and submitted to Ellen DeGeneres's daytime talk show Ellen. A clip from the show was posted to Ellen's website with the title "We Will Get Along"^[1] on November 1st, 2012.

Spread

The same day, Redditor soltrigger submitted the photo to /r/Pics^[3], but it slipped under the radar with 383 upvotes and 284 points. Six hours later, Redditor jose116 reposted the image to the Funny subreddit^[2] with the title "When I become a parent I'm stealing this idea." This post earned more than 9100 upvotes and 1821 points overall. Over the next few days, the photo was reposted to CollegeHumor^[5], 9gag^[6], Lolfactory^[7] and Funri.^[8] On November 5th, Pittsburgh, PA radio station hosts Dave and Maria tried on their own version of the "We Will Get Along" shirt.^[9]

Throughout December and January, photos of other children wearing similar shirts appeared on humor site No Way Girl^[10], 9gag^[11], designer Sheridan French's personal blog^[12], Reddit^[13], the Huffington Post^[14] and the Nation.^[15] As of January 2013, dozens of parodies of the shirt can be found on both humor and parenting boards on Pinterest.^[4]

Response

On December 14th, 2012, Dr. Laura Markham, owner of AhaParenting.com^[16], published a guest post on parenting blog Our Muddy Boots^[17] criticizing the shirts, offering ten reasons that this method is not appropriate. She posited that Get Along shirts teach the children it's not okay to disagree with each other and that their parents are not concerned about their emotions and would rather the siblings just be quiet.

Notable Examples

Search Interest

External References