The Missing Children Milk Carton Program
Photo from Buzzfeed.
Caroline Aron
It’s a Saturday morning in 1984; you wake up and rush out of bed in order to not miss the new episode of Fraggle Rock. Grabbing your favorite sugary cereal on the way, you settle into the couch for a great day of cartoons and doing nothing! You’re just about to pour the milk on your heaping bowl of Count Chocula when something catches your eye—more importantly, someONE. Like you, thousands of other kids around the midwest were also thinking, Who is this boy, and what's he doing on the back of a milk carton? His name is Johnny Gosch, and he was one of the first kids to ever be on the back of a milk carton. The Missing Children Milk Carton Program revolutionized public awareness of child abductions by bringing missing children's faces into millions of households, but its effectiveness and controversies are still being debated to this day.
Johnny Gosch was a 12-year-old boy who left home for the last time on a warm Sunday in Iowa. He was last seen by another paperboy, collecting newspapers for his paper route in the early morning. Someone later called the Goschs to tell them that they hadn’t received their paper, and when the father went out looking for Johnny, he found his red wagon full of papers. Johnny was missing. At the time, children who disappeared were not treated differently than adults, which meant that they had to be gone for three days before they could be reported missing. Despite extensive searches, Johnny stayed missing, and two years later, another young paperboy in Des Moines, Eugene Martin went missing too. Gene had a relative who worked at a local dairy who wanted to help in any way he could, so he and his boss got together and hatched an idea to help find both boys. They contacted each family and offered to put both boys’ pictures on the side of milk cartons, thinking it would make more people remember their faces. The families agreed, and within weeks, the missing boys’ faces were in grocery stores all over Des Moines.
Over the next few weeks, the campaign spread to other Midwestern cities and other Midwestern dairies. Once this happened, the National Child Safety Council got involved and pushed to get the campaign nationwide so that a child’s picture who went missing in California might have her face on a milk carton in Pennsylvania. The word “MISSING” was put on top of two different black and white photos, laid side by side with the relevant information printed underneath. According to CNN, over 700 independent dairies had signed on to participate within several months, and an estimated 5 billion milk cartons with pictures were printed, with a total of 200 children having their pictures printed on the cartons.
This seems like a great idea, right? Thousands of children must have been found due to their faces being seen all around the nation, right? Think lower. Hundreds? Not quite. Try two. Of the 200 children featured, only two were ever found alive as reported by MissingKids.org, and one of those was unrelated to the milk carton. The one success story was the case of 7-year-old Bonnie Bullock, who spotted her own photo on a milk carton while in Colorado and showed a friend who told her parents. Bullock, who had been taken by her mother during a custody dispute, was later reunited with her father according to the Associated Press.
One advantage the program accomplished was engaging the public in the search for missing children and brought forth the idea of "stranger danger." Informing kids about how you should never talk to or go with strangers began to increase drastically due to the milk cartons, creating “stranger danger” programs all over the United States. While this is very important for kids to know and understand, the vast majority of missing children are kidnapped by someone close to them—not by a stranger. Every year, 800,000 children are reported missing to the authorities; of those, only 115 are taken by strangers according to the Dept. of Justice. One of the many problems with the program was simply the time frame. From the time it takes an investigation to file a child as missing to when a local dairy hears about it, gets a picture of the child to put on milk cartons, and then gets it out to stores, chances for the child being found are pretty slim.
Additionally, the milk carton program heavily featured white children on milk cartons only. In 1997—while making up only 15 percent of the U.S. child population—Black children were 42 percent of all non-family abductions. Hispanic children, too, were slightly more likely to be victimized this way than average, making up 16 percent of the population. Despite these numbers, white children were still the only ones to be featured on the cartons.
Another con is that for families who bought milk, the face of a missing child was now the centerpiece of their morning breakfast. According to the National Child Safety Council, many children developed acute senses of paranoia due to the fact that every morning they now had to sit next to a picture of a child their age with the big words “HAVE YOU SEEN ME?” or “MISSING” next to them. This would be fine if the program worked in the long run, as the life of a child is more important than the comfort of another child. But, as stated before, the program had many problems, and historians today still debate whether the milk carton program was doing any good at all other than scaring kids and raising the idea of stranger danger.
The Missing Children Milk Carton Program only lasted until the late 80s and early 90s before the dairy companies began to phase milk cartons out of stores, therefore eliminating the program entirely. In 1984, the Missing Children Division at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) was created, and the milk carton program greatly influenced the way they go about informing about missing kids today. In the years following the program, the NCMEC transitioned to a paper version of a missing child poster, which could be sent to the public as part of mass mailings or hung in local businesses. Later this would evolve into a digital version, the Amber Alert System, where they now utilize social media and cell phones to get the pictures of missing children into the general public within hours of a child going missing. According to Data.gov, only about 62% of missing children were found alive in 1990. Thankfully, these numbers have increased significantly with the introduction of new technology, and as of 2023, 97% of missing children are successfully recovered.
Overall, the Missing Children Milk Carton Program played a significant role in raising public awareness about child abduction. While its effectiveness in directly locating missing children was limited, it sparked a crucial national conversation about child safety and spurred the development of more successful systems like the Amber Alert. At its core, the program serves as a stark reminder of the enduring power of community engagement and the importance of ongoing efforts to protect children. So the next time you pour yourself a nice, heaping bowl of your favorite cereal, spare a moment to remember the children whose faces were once imprinted on those cartons and the families who still long for their return.
Sources:
-What Happened To the Missing Kids on Milk Cartons, from Etan Patz To Johnny Gosch and Adam Walsh?
-Greeley case shows how missing-child investigations evolved | AP News
-National Center for Missing & Exploited Children
