What was the effectiveness of the "milk carton kids" campaign in finding missing children?

The "milk carton kids" campaign, which began in the 1980s, utilized images of missing children on milk cartons as a way to raise public awareness and solicit help in locating these children. While this initiative was innovative and had the potential to reach a wide audience, its actual effectiveness in recovering missing children was limited.

Factors contributing to this limited success included the challenges associated with the visibility of missing person notices, as well as the nature of vanishings—many cases involved children who were abducted and not simply lost or runaway children, which may have made them less likely to be recognized through this medium. Additionally, by the late 1980s and into the 1990s, the effectiveness of using milk cartons in this way began to diminish as consumer habits and marketing channels evolved.

As a result, the campaign is generally recognized as not having had a substantial impact on the recovery rates of missing children, leading to the assessment of its overall effectiveness as being not successful at all.