The Controversial Missing Children Milk Carton Program

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I remember watching a video years ago that tested if missing kid posters did anything at all. They posted a picture of a girl in front of a mall with a big ol' "MISSING" on it, then put the girl on a bench in the busiest part of the mall. She sat there for a long time, all by herself. Nobody recognized her as the "missing" kid. Nobody really even paid attention to her.

It's depressing that Jonny Gosch (the first child talked about here) went missing on the first day that he decided he didn't need his father to supervise him, as well as the Etan Patz abduction being on the first day he went to the bus stop alone.

I am currently 28 years old. When I was 6-8yrs old, a man I had never seen before approached me at a place I was familiar with and said my parents were looking for me. He offered to drive me back to my parents. Even being a child, I still said "no I'll ride my bike back home." After years(almost 10 yrs) of not thinking anything of that incident, I told my mother. She cried. Never would she ask for a stranger to pick me up. I think back to that moment often. I joke now, but I could've been another one of these children. Missing forever.

I remember the PSA at night on TV "its 10:0 clock, do you know where your kids are"? Creepy.

I remember hearing about a little girl being kidnapped. These 12-14 year old boys decided to ride their bikes around their neighborhood. One actually found her & literally chased the car on his bike far enough they shoved her out to him. She wouldn't let go of the boy until her parents got there. He had to sit in the ambulance with her. The boys & especially that boy were true heroes that day.

The worst part about the Bonnie case is that it completely goes against the whole “stranger danger” aspect of the missing children. Bonnie wasn’t kidnapped by a stranger, but by her own mother. Not even the one milk carton success story lines up with the expectations set by it.

My mom went missing when she was 3 for two days. Everybody searched for her, my grandmother unable to eat or sleep because she was so panicked over her missing daughter. Turns out my mom was staying in an orange grove, eating oranges with a random stray dog to keep her company. She said the dog was so friendly that he let her use him as a pillow when she slept at night. She walked to the orange grove down the road while my grandmother was busy at the laundromat and decided she liked it so much she stayed there for awhile. Then when she was done, she walked back home (it was a couple of blocks away). The cops were talking to my grandmother in the house when they heard the back door open and saw my mom walking into the kitchen to ask for a drink.

I was part of the "stranger danger" generation. We all lived under the impression that someday we were going to have to run from kidnappers. The crazy part is, we were still mostly unsupervised. Our parents had no clue where we were

It should be noted that in some cases (and probably more commonly), children were abducted and/or harmed by people they knew rather than by strangers. Some kids were victims of domestic homicides that were covered up.

I remember a news program years ago where they had kids handing out missing children flyers at a grocery store. The child on the flyer was actually the kid handing them out. Only one person noticed.

When I was a kid, my mom would just scar me with stories about women going missing in her hometown in Mexico. Then she would make it worse by pointing at a random person in public and would say “if you don’t behave, they’re gonna take you like they did them.” And it would scare the hell out of me. Thanks Mom.

This reminded me of something from my childhood. My birth mother had a plan to kidnap me and my brother from school when we were kids. Our parents were divorced, we were super young, and she was our mom, so if the police hadn’t been called by our aunt, we definitely would have gotten in with her and rode across state lines. We have an older sister by the same mom who grew up with her as her primary parent. My sister and all of her friends were pimped out and strategically given drugs by our mom when they were only in high school. That was a pattern throughout her side of the family, bc if you’re a dealer, you can hook your kids at an early age and have built in clients. I am extraordinarily lucky, bc the court was really trying to give her custody since my dad wasn’t actually biologically related to me. He did get custody though, of all three of us. My sister is sober and a lot better mentally. She has kids of her own, and doesn’t plan on telling them until their late teens or adulthood that we have this secret first mother and entire family line that we were all rescued from.

'The missing kid who ate breakfast with them every day' is a very powerful line.

"The Face on the Milk Carton" is a really good series. It's about a highschool girl- close friends, happy family, big house- that steals her friends milk at lunch, and sees her own face on the milk carton from when she was three, and then realizes that her parents don't have her birth certificate or any pictures before she was three

22:00 That was always my issue with this. If a kid was legitimately kidnapped, by the time the face makes it onto the milk cartons, that kid is almost surely dead. It is very rare for a child to be kidnapped by a stranger (so not just a divorced parent taking the kid) to be found alive. As depressing as it is, almost always, the kid is already dead before the week is over.

“Don’t talk to weird people…” I accidentally became the stranger in Stranger Danger scenarios. A kid in my neighborhood had a kitten. I love cats, so I struck up a conversation with her about her kitten. It was only when I saw the nervous look on the kid’s face that I realized, “Oh, crap!” and politely and slowly booked it back home.

the most morbid thing ever, is that that the majority of the time when a family was looking at a missing child on their milk carton, they were looking at the face of a child that was already dead.

imagine asking to put your missing dad on a milk carton after he said he’s going to get milk but never came back

I remember being told “you wanna end up on a milk carton?” As a kid and not really understanding what that meant. Now we just post them on the wall at walmart. Keep up the great work brother.