About

Scumbag Parents is an advice animal image macro series based on a stock photograph of a smiling couple and captions describing various hypocrisies and "white lies" that re commonly attributed to parenthood.

Origin

In August of 2011, a "Scumbag Parents" page was created on the image macro generator website Quickmeme.^[6] The earliest featured instance was submitted on August 29th, which complained about parents demanding a room be cleaned for visiting relatives (shown below).

Spread

On November 30th, 2011, the Internet humor blog Pleated Jeans^[4] ran an image compilation of notable examples from the Quickmeme page. On July 23rd, 2012, Redditor Star_Wolf posted an image macro to /r/AdviceAnimals^[5]complaining about his parents entering his room without asking first (shown below, left), which received upwards of 7,900 up votes and 440 comments prior to archival. On April 5th, 2013, Redditor Arsestolemyname submitted another instance to /r/AdviceAnimals^[1] mocking his parents' criticism of younger generations (shown below, right), gaining over 1,600 up votes and 320 comments before it was archived.

On August 3rd, 2013, Redditor theacidrainman submitted an image macro deriding his parents' aversion toward his black girlfriend in an /r/AdviceAnimals^[2] post titled “Honey, we’ll love you no matter what" (shown below), garnering more than 1,100 up votes and 100 comments. On August 15th, Redditor mobious622 submitted an image macro to /r/AdviceAnimals^[3] denouncing his parents for lying to him about his childhood pet dog’s disappearance (shown below, right), garnering upwards of 10,700 up votes and 450 comments in the following two months.

Notable Examples

Search Interest

External References