In this paper, we introduce adaptive Euler-Maruyama schemes for McKean-Vlasov stochastic differential equations (SDEs) assuming only a standard monotonicity condition on the drift and diffusion coefficients but no global Lipschitz continuity in the state variable for either, while global Lipschitz continuity is required for the measure component only. We prove moment stability of the discretised processes and a strong convergence rate of $1/2$. Several numerical examples, centred around a mean-field model for FitzHugh-Nagumo neurons, illustrate that the standard uniform scheme fails and that the adaptive approach shows in most cases superior performance to tamed approximation schemes. In addition, we introduce and analyse an adaptive Milstein scheme for a certain sub-class of McKean-Vlasov SDEs with linear measure-dependence of the drift.