Missing Child

"I had a kid brother, you know? He went missing in 1985. Got on his bike to go to our neighbor's, seven houses up the street, and he just vanished. Never came back. We looked for him for months. Dad never stopped... still hands out flyers at the grocery store every Sunday."

—Claudio, YIIK: A Postmodern RPG

Hey, Billy, where'd you go?

Little Billy is missing, not abandoned, but still without parents or guardians or nanny. Maybe he's wandered off, or turned around and suddenly everyone was gone, or he's just really good at hide-and-seek. But he's missing.

If he's gone missing from school, they might signal a Code Emergency and they will count the kids. They probably also called the police. The responsible adults will be searching everywhere for him, and hopefully found that he wasn't really missing at all, he just needed to go potty and didn't tell anyone.

A logical downside of having Free-Range Children is their tendency to not be where you think they are.

Sometimes, though, the trope can get sinister. Billy isn't just hiding so you don't get mad he ate the last cookie, Billy was taken. In these cases, it crosses over with I Will Find You territory, with the adults going to all ends to get their kid back from a known threat.

This is about the storyline of adults trying to find missing children. If it happens with babysitters around, you can bet they're going to pretend the kid's asleep until they can find them. If it's at the fairground, expect the cheesy music to get creepier as the parents turn around every kid they see.

It may be subverted with the child having run away from Abusive Parents, who are wanting him back to punish him. Usually the heroes discover this before they get the kid back, but sometimes they don't.

Super-Trope to Face on a Milk Carton, which might appear if the kid spends too long missing.

Compare and contrast with The Runaway, which is where a child or teen isn't lost or taken but has left home of their own accord.

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Examples:

Anime and Manga

• A few Doraemon movies:
  • Early in Doraemon: Nobita's Dorabian Nights, Shizuka ( a fifth-grader) accidentally got herself stranded in the world of Arabian Nights, leading to Doraemon and gang trying to retrieve her.
  • Gusuke from Doraemon: Nobita and the Winged Braves, a 10-year-old kid from Birdopia, an alternate 'verse populated by andromorphic birds accidentally lose himself in the human world after entering a portal. After a Crash-Into Hello with Nobita, Doraemon and Shizuka, they decide to help Gusuke fix his gyrocopter so he may return to his world, but then the gang ends up in Birdopia instead.
  • Poko from Doraemon: Nobita and the Robot Kingdom is a missing robot child from the Robot Planet, who's separated from his mother after the planet's racist human despot ordered all robots to be arrested and stripped of emotions. Poko managed to escape when his benefactor teleports him to another planet, where he ends up in Tokyo as Nobita, Doraemon and the gang tries to unite Poko with his mother.
  • Doraemon: Nobita and the Island of Miracles ~Animal Adventure~ have an amnesiac boy named Dakke who was accidentally dragged to the titular island, a 23rd-century nature reserve, before meeting Doraemon and gang. And it turns out Dakke comes from the 1970s and is Nobita's father, Nobisuke.
• Holoearth Chronicles Side:E ~Yamato Phantasia~: A few children have gone missing from Kyo-no-Miyako, so Fubuki and Mio are sent to investigate.
• Miss Koizumi Loves Ramen Noodles: One episode focuses on a lost, German girl named Hannah who got separated from her mother and mistaken Koizumi for her.

Comic Books

• The Dead Boy Detectives 2005 graphic novel: The girls contact the Dead Boy Detectives because their schoolmate Elizabeth has vanished and the staff is not only quiet about it, but also bear suspicious links to her. She is revealed to be totally fine; she is the daughter of an unconventional reality TV family who did not share their love for the spotlight, and the staff were compensated to keep her identity secret.
• Figment: In Figment 2, Capri rides her bike to the Academy Scientifica Lucidus late at night to go and help Figment (who flies alongside her) save Dreamfinder and the aforementioned academy from the Doubtfinder, leaving a note explaining this for her mother Jess. When Jess finds the note, she drives to the academy to see what is going on for herself due to worrying about her daughter.
• Rat Queens features a prequel one-shot where Orc Dave has a child. Said child is not mentioned in the main comic until he is abruptly discovered in an enemy camp, where Dave admits the boy was kidnapped in front of him. Apparently Dave has taken no action on that front for years.
• The Sandman (1989): In "The Kindly Ones" story arc, three-year-old Daniel Hall gets kidnapped by Loki and Puck after they knock out his babysitter Rose Walker. Daniel's mother Lyta is led to believe that Dream kidnapped him though, and her attempt to get revenge drives the main plot.

Fan Works

• In It All Comes Back, Camilo went missing shortly after his gift ceremony. He ended up in the same lab as Eleven, where he spent eight years. He wouldn’t return to the Encanto for another twenty years. Will’s canon disappearance also still happens.
• In Infinity Train: Blossoming Trail, Chloe runs away after an argument with her father and Childhood Friend and then gets sucked into the Infinity Train. While she is having the time of her life, her friends and family are trying to figure out where she could have gone.
• Marinette's unexplained disappearance after being struck by a person-erasing akuma is what drives the plot of Missing.
• In The Portal, 16 year-old Thomas Smith disappears from the Human World and ends up entering the Dragon Realms, leaving his parents extremely concerned about him.
• The Palaververse: In Treasures, Gallivant is on a routine exploration of a new Antlertean ruin, navigating the various deadly traps and guardians found there... and then discovers that his eight-year-old daughter snuck in before him, and is now likely deep in the ruin alongside who knows what deadly traps the ruin's old master filled his home with.
• Shadows over Meridian: When the Swamp arc starts, an eight-year-old girl in Riverdeen named Lily has gone missing, with the rebels trying to pin the blame on the local Lurdens, and her mother is desperate enough to plead for Phobos' help. Deciding to start his campaign to gather supporters by rescuing the child, Phobos discovers that the rebels captured her for associating with a field of Whisperers and trying to pass to the capital a message about their abuse of authority in the region. He then successfully rescues her and the other people held captive in an abandoned fortress, and thus earns the trust of the majority of Riverdeen.

Films — Animated

• In Finding Nemo. Nemo the baby clownfish gets captured by divers, leading his nervous dad Marlin to look for him.
• In Hilda and the Mountain King, Hilda is turned into a troll and her mother Johanna and her friends David and Frida go looking for her.
• The Rugrats Movie focuses on the babies Tommy, Chuckie, Phil and Lil trying to send Tommy's younger brother Dil back to the hospital and ending up getting lost in the woods. Tommy's spoilt, older cousin Angelica later goes missing too when she sets out to look for her doll Cynthia Dil snatched from her earlier.

Films — Live-Action

• Diary of a Wimpy Kid: In one scene of The Long Haul, Rodrick and Greg sneak off to a video game convention and their mother Susan notices they're gone. However, she sees them on TV and goes to the convention to tell them off.
• While trick-or-treating in E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Elliot goes off into the woods to help the alien E.T. and stays the night, causing his mother to report him missing. However, he comes back and that's when she discovers E.T.
• In Hocus Pocus, three hundred years before the year the film takes place, a girl named Emily Binks goes missing, and it turns out she was kidnapped by three evil witches who take her soul. Later, the witches capture a little girl named Danni, but she gets saved.
• Kruel: Early in the movie, while Jo is talking with Ben, she asks Elliot to stay put, which he does. When Jo turns back to him after her talk, however, Elliot is nowhere in sight. Finding him becomes the driving force of the plot. Elliot is revealed to be alright near the end, thankfully. In the epilogue, Jo's mom tells her Elliot is alright.
• Andrey Zvyagintsev's Loveless is about a Russian couple that formerly was in an Awful Wedded Life and temporarily reunites to search for their son, who has gone missing due to Parental Neglect.
• Prisoners is about two little girls gone missing and the hero detective trying to find them.
• Kidnap Features this trope. A lovely day at the fair turns into a tragic one when Karla's son gets kidnapped which subsequently turns Karla into an equal mix of Mama Bear and Determinator.
  Karla: You took the wrong kid!
• The entire plot of Gone Baby Gone revolves around a missing little girl.
• The Wicker Man (1973) is about a policeman investigating reports of a missing child on a remote Scottish island, and finding the locals to be disconcertingly unconcerned about the whole thing.
• Switchback: Frank LaCrosse's son was taken out of his house by the killer, who murdered the child's babysitter. Since then, naturally LaCrosse has been obsessed with finding him, as the killer promised he could, though most people think it's hopeless.
• In Son of the Stars, Zhengzheng abandons her autistic son Xinxin at an amusement park, but later comes to greatly regret it. She files a police report and is told that she could spend three years in jail for willful abandonment. She also prints Missing Child posters.

Literature

• Acid Row: Early on, a ten-year-old girl named Amy Biddulph goes missing. Rumours that the paedophile on Acid Row has taken Amy is one of the things that incites a riot. Part of the plot revolves around the search for Amy. It's eventually revealed she willingly took off with her mother's ex-boyfriend, due to feeling he was the only person who treated her kindly and gave her attention (her mother is preoccupied with keeping a roof over their heads and oblivious to Amy being relentlessly bullied by her stepsiblings, while her father just uses her to get back at her mother for leaving him). She's returned to her mother unharmed, though she still has other issues that need addressing.
• Dandelion Wine: While walking with his brother and grandfather, Doug ends up going off with a group of neighborhood kids. A few hours later, his mom becomes worried when he still hasn't come home. She and Tom go out to the ravine to look for him.
• In Gangsta Granny, Ben goes off with his grandmother to steal the crown jewels and when he comes back, his parents reveal they'd been searching for him.
• The Gideon Trilogy: Kate and Peter vanish due to a time-machine accident, and the narrative regularly cuts back to the present day to follow the police search for them and the effect of their disappearance on their parents and Kate's younger siblings.
• Give Yourself Goosebumps: The second book focuses on the main character's younger brother Denny going missing due to stepping into a time machine.
• In Gone Baby Gone two Boston area detectives investigate the kidnapping of a 4-year-old girl.
• In It, kids go missing in droves every 27 years in the town of Derry. The protagonists learn that an Eldritch Abomination that feeds off fear, known only as 'It', is responsible and set out to stop it before anyone else is taken.
• It's Not the End of the World: Karen wonders if her parents would reconcile if she or one of her siblings went missing, since she's seen TV shows where that happened, and even wonders at one point which of her siblings would make the best kidnap victim. She is disabused of that notion when her older brother Jeff runs away, which not only fails to bring her parents back together, but results in one of their worst fights ever.
• In John's Lily, three-year-old Lily Maxwell disappears from a park near her wealthy father's house when the nursemaid turns her back on her for a minute. The police fail to find any leads, and Colonel Maxwell spends four years thinking his daughter is dead. Unbeknownst to him, Lily was abducted by two criminals who planned to return her for the reward money. But when they left her by the side of a country road so they could go get drunk, she was found by John Randal, who took her to his home in Markwood to raise her. John experiences this trope three years later when the kidnappers recognise six-year-old Lily and her locket at Carsham Fair and abduct her again, but the next day they make the same mistake of leaving her alone so they can get drunk, and the Blands find her and take her back to Markwood. Finally, when Lily is seven, Colonel Maxwell happens to be traveling through Markwood when he recognises Lily outside a church. When he sees her locket, her identity is confirmed.
• The plot of Piece of My Heart revolves around the Under Suspicion team trying to find Johnny Buckley, the seven-year-old nephew-to-be of producer Laurie Moran, after he is kidnapped.
• In one of the Treehouse books, Andy and Terry are babysitting Mr. Big Nose's grandchildren (six-year-old twins Alice and Albert and their unnamed baby sister) and several times, the children wander off and must be found by Andy and Terry. They never leave the treehouse, but it's so big and dangerous that it's just as dramatic.
• The central focus of Two Little Girls in Blue is the kidnapping of three year old twin sisters, with both their parents and the FBI doing everything they can to find the girls and get them home safely. One twin is returned while the other is presumed dead, but her mother is convinced she's still alive and continues to search for her, trying to get the FBI onboard too.
• Happens fairly frequently in Warrior Cats: Cloudkit and his littermates head into the forest to go "hunting" during a blizzard in Fire and Ice and are found by Fireheart and Sandstorm, Tawnypaw goes missing in The Darkest Hour when she runs off to join her father's Clan, Leafstar's kits vanish during the SkyClan manga when Sol hides them in the hope that he'll be made a warrior after "finding" them, etc.
• In the backstory of Where Are the Children?, Nancy's children went missing and were eventually found murdered. Seven years later, the same thing happens again with her new family, though this time there's a chance the children can be saved.
• The Wind in the Willows has an Arcadian Interlude subplot where Mr. Otter's son Portly goes missing, and the other Riverbank animals rally to find him, with Rat experiencing visions of a Pan-like entity helping him find the child. It's cut from most adaptations, since it has little impact on the rest of the plot, although the 1995 movie version keeps it in.

Live-Action TV

• Some Cold Case episodes about the murder of a child—"Shuffle, Ball Change", "It Takes A Village"—started out as examples of these.
• In Dark (2017) several kids go missing. Some of them have been kidnapped by the Sic Mundus group, while others have just wandered off through a time portal. The search for Mikkel Nielsen drives much of the first season.
• Diff'rent Strokes:
  • "The Spanking," from Season 1, when everyone thinks that Arnold — who is in line for a spanking due to pranks that he had pulled in the apartment building — is indeed missing. He is later found and eventually forced to take his medicine.
  • "Sam's Missing," the very-real Nightmare Fuel episode when Sam fails to return home from a trip to the store. It is later determined he was kidnapped by a seemingly benevolent stranger who is anything but.
• Janda Kembang:
  • The first episode revolves around all the main characters looking for the missing Laila, who actually just sneaks into Neneng's house and is unknowingly locked inside.
  • Episode 16 has a neighbor of the main characters looking for her missing son. By the time of the episode, he has been missing for three days, so the RT leader is forced to look for him himself. After the police gets involved, the kid reveals that he just ran away to a friend's house for some Internet.
• SOKO Potsdam: Da Chief Henschel's young adult son Max goes on a vacation to Croatia in the second half of season two, or so he claimed: Henschel loses contact with him, then learns he never got on his flight. Max is discovered alive at the start of the next episode by a SWAT Team, chained up in the hideout of a bank robbery suspect outside Potsdam. He actually went to live with his previously unknown boyfriend, the suspect's son, and the suspect discovered Max standing over his son's body and kidnapped him demanding to know what happened (to no avail: Max had only discovered the body moments earlier).
• The first season of Stranger Things revolves around, but really is mostly just framed by, family and friends trying to find 12-year-old Will Byers who went missing. Little do they know that he is Trapped in Another World. Most works involving missing children typically emphasize the effects of the disappearance's effects on their family, the parents particularly. Stranger Things demonstrates that a missing child's friends are affected, too, and that the disappearance or death of a friend could be an concerning for children, too. Now imagine at least thirty different people having to cope with this due to the Mind Flayer's Assimilation Plot.

Poetry

• In the poem Emmeline by A. A. Milne, a small girl named Emmeline disappears for more than a week after being told her hands were dirty. Where she went is a mystery, but when she returns, she claims to have gone to visit the Queen, who said her hands were "purfickly clean".

Video Games

• Alba: A Wildlife Adventure: When Alba runs away from her grandfather during the wildfire to find the lynx, the player switches to the grandfather as he attempts to find her before she's injured by the fire.
• There are two objectives in Banjo-Tooie that involve finding lost children. In Witchyworld, Mrs. Boggy is looking for her three children, Groggy, Soggy, and Moggy. Groggy wants Banjo and Kazooie to bring him a cheeseburger, and then carry him back to his mom, since he is too fat to walk back on his own. Soggy wants Banjo and Kazooie to bring her french fries, and Moggy doesn't want to leave, but if you hit him, he will run back to his mom to tell on Banjo and Kazooie. In Terrydactyland, Scrotty's daughter, Scrut, has run away to visit Witchyworld, and ends up becoming captured and put on display in the Cave of Horrors as a "Mighty Evil Dinosaur". Banjo and Kazooie must destroy her cage, and then take her back to Terrydactyland with Chuffy the train.
• In From Next Door, Namie finds newspaper clippings in the safe (collected by Sen) revealing a young boy went missing from the house nearly ten years ago; the police found nothing to suggest he'd been abducted but his parents insisted he wouldn't run away. And then a few weeks later the parents disappeared as well. It's obvious that the creature next door was responsible.
• Halflight begins with your kid brother unexpectedly disappearing, and you try searching for him... only to become this trope yourself, when an unexpected portal drags you into the Chinese underworld, given you're 7 years old.
• The Origami Killer from Heavy Rain kidnaps young boys, traps them in a pit that slowly fills with rainwater, and forces their fathers to complete a series of extremely dangerous trials in exchange for the chance to save their son before he drowns. Some of the fathers are never seen again. Protagonist Ethan Mars' son Shaun is kidnapped shortly into the game, forcing Ethan to undertake the trials himself. And he can fail them; there's a Bad Ending where Shaun is never rescued.
• Missing Children has three. Kanae, Mizuki, and Akiko, who've all run away together. Sato's goal is to find them.
• Paper Dolls begins with your child, Meng-Meng (Molly in the dub) being abducted after a car crash. You'll need to search for her in a spooky Oriental Mansion in a quest spanning two games, but the story ends with a Tomato Surprise that she never really existed at all when you reunite with your deceased wife.
• Early in The TakeOver, your adopted daughter Megan was abducted from her home, and your rescue mission forms the game's main plot. It turns out Megan's kidnapper is none other than her biological mother, the Steel Haven mob kingpin Freya who abandoned her years ago after believing having a child would be a distraction for her rise to power; but now seeks to steal her back due to not having another successor.

Visual Novels

• Spirit Hunter: NG:
  • Kakuya kidnaps Akira's young cousin, which kickstarts the plot and motivates him to play along with her game. Meanwhile, her mother is shown to be worried sick, spending most of her time at the police station while they try and fail to track her down.
  • The Screaming Author chapter features a serial kidnapping case, with elementary-school girls being kidnapped every ten years around the Miroku Mansion. Said girls were victim to horrible experimentation by the house's owner, until the last victim turned into a spirit and started haunting the place.

Web Animation

• The Twins (2022): As the credits roll, someone posts a missing child flyer for Lake. This is Dramatic Irony because we know that it's actually Lucas who is missing and he's not really missing; he's dead.

Web Video

• AFK: Q, it turns out, has a daughter, and being sent into the game world left her behind. As a result she doesn't know if her daughter's properly being taken care of since she's been left alone. Of course, her daughter also has no idea where she went, and Q is distraught at the idea of the distress it's no doubt caused. She later takes comfort in the fact her parents were coming to visit that day, so her daughter wouldn't be alone for long. Then she's further relieved learning that almost no time has passed.

Web Original

• In The Crawlspace, Teenagers Alisha, Lindsay and Stephanie vanish without a trace whilst on the foreign exchange trip, never to be seen again. The narrator counts herself lucky she got out of there sharpish, or she would've vanished along with them.

Western Animation

• Arthur: In Lost!, Arthur gets lost after falling asleep on the bus.
• In an episode of Babar, Princess Elizabeth goes missing in the castle, and her brother Prince Alexander thinks she has gone to the dump.
• In the Braceface episode "Twenty Four Hours" Sharon's little brother Josh runs away after feeling neglected when Sharon would rather spend time with her friends than help him with piano. They find him hiding in his snow fort.
• Family Guy:
  • In "Extra Large Medium", Chris and Stewie get lost in the woods during a camping trip.
  • In "JOLO", Peter climbs onto a billboard to see if its three-dimensional prop pudding cup has real pudding in it, but finds that a kid is already in there. Joe identifies him as "the lost Nicholson kid", and Peter is hailed as a hero.
    Peter: They arrested a custodian 'cause of you.
• P.C. Pinkerton: In "Calling All Units", Mrs. Beatty informs P.C. Pinkerton that her 4-year-old daughter, Joanna, has gone missing. After describing her to him, Pinkerton orders all cops in the jurisdiction to look for her. She is found soon after.
• A Thousand and One... Americas: In the tenth episode, Chris and his pet dog Lon help a priest find the whereabouts of a child who got lost in the interior of the Chavín de Huántar, and manage to pinpoint his location thanks to Lon having followed the trace of the kid's smell with the help of his stray clothes.

Real Life

• Tragically Truth in Television, although in many First World countries at the least, the risk has historically been quite overstated. The '80s saw a particularly dramatic rise of missing child reports, along with subsequent panic and emphasis on "stranger danger", but much of this has been criticized in hindsight as not only did it foster a pretty intense and distrustful mindset within children, many widespread statistics of "800,000 children a year go missing in America" tend to be based on missing child reports rather than actual cases that were investigated, which likely included those by paranoid parents wondering why their child didn't return home on time filed before they showed up unharmed sometime later, inflating the numbers. Studies have also proven that a vast majority of "missing children" tend to be either runaways (usually motivated by a conscious reason for why they're fleeing their home) or in fact abducted by close family members (usually disaffected divorced parents), with more sensationalized reasons like nonfamily abductions being exceptionally scarce.

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