These days, the idea of a missing person appearing on a milk carton is something of a cliché, and it's probably better known as a sitcom trope than something that happened in real life. However, for a time in the 1980s, it was used as a method to help locate missing children, even if its usefulness was hotly debated in its day. It started in 1984, when the face of Etan Patz was displayed on milk cartons, pizza boxes, and more, but the trend only lasted a few years. Let's take a look at why we don't see missing kids on milk cartons anymore.
Category
🛠️
LifestyleTranscript
00:00In 1984, Eitan Pates became one of the first children to have his face displayed on a milk
00:05carton.
00:06The six-year-old tragically disappeared on the morning of May 25, 1979, while he was
00:11on his way to the school bus in Manhattan.
00:14His father began widely distributing images of the boy, hoping to locate someone who had
00:18seen the child.
00:19Pates' widely publicized disappearance made media headlines and grabbed the nation's
00:24attention.
00:25Thousands of years ago, a little boy named Eitan Pates, just six years old, disappeared
00:29on his walk to school.
00:30The national headlines of his disappearance frightened an entire nation of parents.
00:35Those same concerned parents soon began pushing for a nationwide system to track missing kids,
00:40eventually forming the Missing Children Milk Carton Program in 1984.
00:44Prior to the milk carton campaign, there was no national database of missing children,
00:49and once they were taken across state lines, it was almost impossible to track them.
00:53While the program began with just a few local dairies in the Midwest printing pictures of
00:57missing children on their milk cartons, it was soon adopted nationwide.
01:01But missing children didn't just appear on milk cartons in the 1980s.
01:05Other tragic, high-profile cases, like the abduction of 13-year-old Johnny Gosch from
01:10his paper route in Des Moines, Iowa, in 1982, and the kidnapping of six-year-old Adam Walsh
01:15from a Sears department store the year before, helped raise the stature of the program.
01:20Among these cases, the advocacy of groups like the National Child Safety Council, combined
01:25with the subsequent media attention, led to increased efforts to combat child snatching.
01:30By 1985, 700 independent dairies across the United States were displaying the faces of
01:36missing children on their milk cartons.
01:38The trend began to die down just a few years later, however, and by the late 1980s, most
01:43milk cartons were no longer featuring the images of missing children.
01:46The overall success of the milk carton program was controversial.
01:50While it did help raise public awareness, there is not much evidence that proves it
01:54significantly increased the number of missing children who were united with their families.
01:59There was at least one verified success story, however — that of Bonnie Lohman.
02:04Bonnie Lohman was just three years old when her mother and stepfather kidnapped her from
02:07the home she shared with her father.
02:09Her father contacted the National Child Safety Council and got Bonnie's face included on
02:13the milk carton program.
02:15Four years later, Bonnie happened to be in a Colorado grocery store with her stepfather
02:19when she recognized her own face on the back of the milk carton.
02:22According to 99 Percent Invisible, Bonnie's stepfather bought the milk carton with her
02:27likeness and allowed her to keep it.
02:29When Bonnie left the cut-out image along with some toys at her next-door neighbor's house,
02:33they saw the photo and contacted the authorities.
02:36Despite the success, there were several reasons for the program's rapid decline in popularity.
02:41Many pediatricians, including the respected child-rearing expert Dr. Benjamin Spock, claimed
02:46the images of missing children were emotionally harmful for kids to see every morning, as
02:51they increased young people's fear that they would also go missing.
02:55Others criticized the campaign's focus on stranger danger, despite strangers making
02:59up a very small percentage of kidnappers.
03:02Still, others pointed out that the milk cartons disproportionately featured white children,
03:07even though children of color make up a larger percentage of the missing child demographic.
03:12More practical reasons, such as the dairy industry's transition from cardboard milk
03:16cartons to plastic, also contributed to the campaign's demise.
03:20With the images of missing children everywhere, people got used to seeing them and no longer
03:24looked closely at the faces.
03:26And as technology improved over time, quicker and more effective methods were implemented
03:30to alert the public about missing children.
03:33In 1996, the invention of the Amber Alert system made the milk carton ads obsolete.
03:38While the actual effectiveness of the milk carton campaign continues to be debated, there's
03:43There's no doubt that the program significantly raised public awareness of the problem of
03:47child abductions, and helped give rise to the modern nationwide system of tracking missing
03:52children.