When reporter Olivia Humphreys had her first baby in London, the hospital sent her home with an underwhelming package: a small drawstring bag containing a few tiny samples of baby shampoo and diaper cream, and tons of coupons. And looking through the bag she couldn’t help but wonder if there was anywhere in the world where new parents were given something more substantial to care for their newborns. That’s when she learned about the Finnish baby box.
©Kela
In Finland, new parents also get a package of freebies. But instead of sample-sized products and advertising flyers, they get a large cardboard box full of supplies for a newborn and its parents: items like picture books, nipple cream and warm booties for the freezing Finnish winters. The box itself even doubles as a crib. It’s a starter kit of everything a family will need for the first six months of a baby’s life, and virtually every new parent in Finland is eligible to receive one.
Researching the box, Olivia learned that in its almost 90 years of existence, the Finnish baby box has evolved from a basic survival tool to a national symbol, a rite of passage— and possibly the cutest social engineering tool in the world.
The story begins in the late 1930s, when Finland was almost unrecognizable. The country had recently emerged from a brutal civil war, and revolutions in neighboring Russia meant it had lost its biggest trading partner. Most of Finland’s grain came from Russia, and the loss left many people starving. Finns were living in crowded, unsanitary conditions and dying in outbreaks of tuberculosis, smallpox, and measles. Almost 20 percent of children didn’t make it to their fifth birthday. Since the 1920s, a Finnish charity had been lending struggling families baskets of baby essentials, with clean clothes hand-sewn by volunteers from donated fabric, an alternative to the common practice of swaddling newborns in old rags. The government used those baskets as a blueprint for something more ambitious. They kept the clean clothes, added soap and towels to help slow the spread of disease, and packed it all into a cardboard box that could double as a crib. In 1938 they started giving the packages to poor families not as a loan, but as a gift.
When World War II broke out a year later, fabric was scarce, so some of the baby clothes were made of paper. Early wartime boxes also included a sheet of paper to give birth on, a way to create a sterile birthing environment at very low cost. Then in 1949, Finland made the box a universal benefit, given not just to those in need but to everybody, a citizen’s right. It was one of the first steps in building the Finnish welfare state, alongside free school meals, child payments, and new maternal health clinics opening across the country. The box was also a way to pull expectant mothers into those clinics: to get one, a woman had to have her health checked while pregnant. The lure worked. By the early 1950s, more than 90 percent of mothers had registered at the new clinics. And almost eighty years later, the deal is basically the same. Visit a prenatal clinic in the first four months of pregnancy, and the box is yours.
What’s inside changes every year. At Kela, the Finnish social security agency, the process of choosing the contents begins two years before each box is released, in consultation with a panel of advisors. There are representatives from the Maternity and Child Welfare clinics, the Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare, the Ministry of Social Affairs. and the Finnish Safety and Chemical Agency— all weighing in on the contents of the latest box.
By law, every item has to provide for the health and wellbeing of mother and child. Usually the connection is obvious, like a bath thermometer or a teething toy. But the box has always been about subtly influencing people’s decisions, and so some items carry a message. There is no baby bottle, for instance, because Finland strongly recommends breastfeeding for the first four to six months. Not all of these nudges are popular. In the 1970s, the state decided to add condoms to the box, which some people felt was too intrusive. In 2006, experts swapped disposable diapers for reusable cloth ones on environmental grounds, and some parents pushed back; most reported never using them, and within a few years the cloth diapers were out again. The public takes the contents personally. When a blanket was dropped one year, the uproar brought it back by popular demand, and since 2020 parents have been able to weigh in by voting on the patterns for the snowsuit and sleeping bag.
It’s easy to wonder whether today, the Finnish baby box has outlived its usefulness. The box came about at a time when Finns were poor and infant mortality was a big problem. Now, thanks in part to the baby box, Finland ranks among the countries with the lowest infant mortality in the world, and is frequently named the best place to be a parent. And yet the box endures as a beloved part of Finnish society. Parents actually get the choice to take a cash alternative instead of a box, currently 210 euros, but almost all first-time parents choose the box. Collecting and unpacking it has become a rite of passage: grandparents and great-grandparents might come over to pore over the contents and reminisce about what came in their boxes, and old ones sit in garages and attics, filled with favorite items waiting for the next generation.
One reason for the continued popularity is that the box lifts the mental load of new parenthood. In a marketplace happy to sell anxious, sleep-deprived parents high-tech products, the box provides a curated selection of what a baby actually needs. The box also creates a kind of visual equality that is culturally important to Finns. There’s no stigma to using items from the box because everybody does. The real problem is picking out which child is yours when they’re all running around in identical snowsuits.
The idea of the baby box has now spread across the world. A recent study by researchers at Tampere University found more than 90 baby box projects in about 60 countries, on every continent except Antarctica. Only Chile and Scotland have gone universal like Finland; other programs cover a particular state or city, or target the people who need support most, from first-time mothers to refugees to women in jail. The box isn’t always a box, either. A South African project packed its items into a plastic bathtub, sturdier than cardboard in a humid settlement with insects and rats. In Malawi, mothers rejected the cardboard box because it resembled a coffin, so the program opted for a basket. Despite the differences, the boxes almost always come with strings attached that echo the original Finnish bargain, like requiring birth at a healthcare facility.
Not all international baby box programs have gone smoothly. In Scotland— where the government box has been going for nearly a decade— a right-leaning tabloid once tried to turn the public against it, by setting one on fire to prove it was flammable. The box is made from heavy-duty corrugated cardboard, and it apparently took seven minutes of concerted effort with a lighter to set it on fire, so it wasn’t quite the gotcha they’d hoped for. Take-up has hovered around 90 percent, roughly the same as in Finland.
Kela gets constant emails from people abroad who want to buy a box, but it’s illegal for the agency to sell a government benefit. Entrepreneurs have spotted the gap in the market and launched commercial baby boxes, but in the United States it became illegal in 2021 to sell a cardboard box marketed as a sleeping space for a baby, and elsewhere a lot of the businesses have gone bust after a few years. Maybe that’s because the appeal of the box was never really the contents, but the sense of being cared for and being part of something, a feeling that loses its magic when the box comes from a company. The box is full of practical items, boring items even, but they connect parents to the most profound moments of their lives, and in Finland to generations of parents before them, all of them tucking their newborn children into the humble masterpiece of a simple cardboard box.
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