Evil Toddler

2012image macroclassic

Published August 20, 2026

Evil Toddler is an advice animal image macro that pairs a photo of a grinning boy clasping his hands like a cartoon villain with captions describing petty schemes only a small child would think up. It started on Reddit in October 2012 and became one of the defining kid-photo macros of that era.

advice animalsimage macro memessubreddit origin memeschild virality memes2012 memes

Overview

Evil Toddler is an advice animal built around a snapshot of a young boy grinning wide while clasping his hands together like a scheming cartoon villain1. The captions describe the small, petty plots only a toddler could pull off, from ruining diaper changes to hiding remote controls, all written in a mock-serious voice that matches the pose.

The format sits inside the /r/AdviceAnimals boom of late 2012, when reaction-based image macros dominated Reddit's front page3. What set Evil Toddler apart from the fictional-character advice animals of the time was the real photo, whose expression reads as pure scheming, giving writers a narrow lane: every caption had to sound like something a small child would actually plot, in Snidely Whiplash cadence1.

Origin & Background

Platform
Reddit (r/pics origin, r/AdviceAnimals viral spread)
Key People
altmedsol; tattedspyder
Date
2012

On October 19th, 2012, Redditor altmedsol posted the source photo to /r/pics under the title "Evil Plan"2. In the comments, user Lochness Digital shared a Photoshop pasting the toddler's head onto a Snidely Whiplash frame from the 1960s animated series Dudley Do-Right, which set up the villain read the meme later ran with5. That /r/pics submission cleared 14,000 upvotes and 200 comments over three months2.

Later the same day, Redditor tattedspyder turned the image into the first captioned macro on /r/AdviceAnimals, with the line "I will save all of my urine / for right in the middle of the changing"3. The post pulled in more than 10,100 upvotes across the same window and seeded the template the wider meme would follow3.

How It Spread

Three days after the original post, on October 22nd, 2012, humor blog Pleated Jeans ran a "Best of the Evil Toddler Meme" roundup of 16 macros pulled from Quickmeme1. The Huffington Post published its own compilation the same day4, and BuzzFeed and UpRoxx followed within weeks, pushing the format beyond Reddit5.

The meme jumped languages fast. On December 2nd, 2012, a Polish-language Facebook page titled "Złowrogi Brzdąc" (translated from Polish as "Sinister Toddler") launched and pulled in more than 20,000 likes over two months6. New captions on that page kept the same villain pose but tuned the jokes to a Polish audience.

Reddit kept generating hits into 2013. On January 19th, 2013, Redditor AlphaPigs posted an Evil Toddler macro about placing stickers on car windows, which cleared 7,200 upvotes and 50 comments in three weeks3. By that point the template was locked in, and any petty plot a small child might realistically pull off was fair game1.

How to Use This Meme

The template typically uses the same cropped photo of the grinning boy with hands clasped. Captions usually run in two lines framed as a plan, setup on top and punchline underneath, in a mock-serious cartoon-villain voice. Common examples describe holding urine for a diaper change, hiding TV remotes, or drawing on walls the second a parent looks away1.

Frequently Asked Questions