Current Events > Man this video on the history of missing kids on milk cartons is interesting.

(+) Yeah! (+)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YhsNinzPEb8

It's a dark and depressing subject matter so be warned but it was really fascinating to hear about.

Especially things I never really thought about like how by the time the kid was on the carton and mass produced, odds are they were already found or dead. As well as things like how all missing kids on a national level where always white or that once the scheme was in full swing the diary farms got tax breaks per kid shown and how the idea bled into Amber Alerts.

I grew up in the UK where this practice existed but was rare, most milk came in plastic bottles with nothing put on them. Cartons were a minority so I never really saw this

I mainly saw it parodied in The Simpsons and other comedies.

always saw this as a media trope but never actually witnessed it. it was ubiquitous enough in films and television that we definitely used it to insult people though. my guess is it largely just fell out of practice by the 90s and old folks writing for tv and movies just didn't let go of the idea.

Gremlynn posted...

always saw this as a media trope but never actually witnessed it. it was ubiquitous enough in films and television that we definitely used it to insult people though. my guess is it largely just fell out of practice by the 90s and old folks writing for tv and movies just didn't let go of the idea.

Sort of. There's a lot of reasons why it fell out of popularity that the video goes into.

1. It didn't really work. While we can never know exact numbers, most of the missing kids were either never found, dead, or were like at a friends house. Cases of Kids recongized via the cartons were few and far between.
2. There was a lot of disappointment at the news about the tax breaks and minority activist groups were upset that POC kids were never reported missing on cartons.
3. The practice became so widespread with so many children on cartons that people stopped even paying attention to the faces. It just became a thing that the cartons have faces on them.
4. It led to a lot of psycholoical issues that creeped out kids. Spending every morning eating breakfast with a missing possibly dead kid that was their age. While their parents told them about pedophiles, murderers and drug trafficers.

tl:dr: It basically didn't work.