About

Casually Approach Child refers to an exploitable template taken from a U.S. Army PSA which humorously gives parents a step-by-step guide on how to pat one's child on the back. One of the steps, called "Casually Approach Child," demonstrates walking towards a child. The still has been edited to feature various pop culture characters.

Origin

It is unclear when the PSA first appeared online. The earliest extant post was uploaded to Know Your Meme by former managing editor Brad on May 13th, 2016 (shown below, left). In the source, Brad linked to mediaspanonline, though the link is currently dead. Additionally, much of the spread can be traced to the Tumblr account JennyHoezler,^[1] though the original post was deleted. Reblogs of the post show it had the popular crop of the image,^[6] which only shows "Casually Approach Child," appeared there (shown below, right).

Spread

Over the following four years, the image became the subject of numerous exploitable parodies, changing the father in the PSA to a popular culture character. For example, on September 5th, 2019, Redditor AtemAndrew^[2] posted an Oh? You're Approaching Me? edit to /r/shitpostcrusaders, gaining over 3,500 points (shown below, left). On February 27th, 2020, Redditor Scarlet_slagg^[3] also posted a Jojo's Bizarre Adventure edit to /r/shitpostcrusaders, gaining over 4,600 points (shown below, right).

Other popular edits include an edit by Twitter user @wheel_able^[4] which changed the man to a skeleton, gaining over 10,000 retweets and 41,000 likes (shown below, left). This was used in myriad edits on its own; for example, a Prequel Meme posted by Redditor butAnotherIsTaken^[5] on April 4th, 2020 gained over 3,800 points in /r/prequelmemes (shown below, right).

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References