99% Invisible - The Finnish Baby Box

Episode Date: July 28, 2026

A simple cardboard box helped transform Finland into one of the best places in the world to raise a child. Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ to listen to new episodes of 99% Invisible ad-free and a whole week early. Start a free trial now on Apple Podcasts or by visiting siriusxm.com/podcastsplus.  Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. Back in May 2018, reporter Olivia Humphreys had her first baby. She remembers being in London, an allowed chaotic postnatal ward waiting to go home. And it was during this time that she was handed a small drawstring bag. Inside it, there was a little towel with a brand logo on it, a few tiny samples of baby shampoo and nappy cream, and a ton of coupons. For lots of products, I'd never. heard of, but apparently desperately needed now that I had a new baby.

It's always nice to get free stuff, but the bag didn't make me feel better. It just added to the sense that I was woefully under-prepared. It was in those first sleepless nights after she returned home with her son, that Olivia started to really consider her bag of coupons. Her mind drifted to a better alternative. And she wondered if there was anywhere in the world where new parents were sent home with something more substantial. And that's when I found out what new parents in Finland receive.

A very exciting day for us. Our Finnish Baby Box has arrived. Our package is here. We get two because we have twins. In Finland, new parents also get a package of freebies. But instead of a few sample-sized products and some advertising flyers, they get something else. The Finnish maternity package, or the baby box. So let's see what is in here.

T'da. Good Lord, there's so much stuff in here. This is a blanket. Wow. This is beautiful. Oh my God, it's got bears on it. So soft. Very soft.

Oh my gosh. Very, very cute. And look, a little toothbrush. They don't have any teeth. Why is this for? Later. For later. A Finnish Baby Box is a little bit of.

is essentially a large cardboard box full of items for a newborn and its parents. Picture books, nipple cream, warm booties for the freezing finish winters. Basically a starter kit of everything you'll need for the first six months of a baby's life. Virtually every new parent in Finland is eligible to receive one. My first thought when I heard this was, of course, it's exactly what you'd expect of Finland, the happiest country on earth, with its widely revered education system and comprehensive welfare states. The Simpsons even has a whole episode making fun of just how freaking happy the Finns are.

Oh, geez, I can't afford this. No, it's all free. Free? Who are you people? Well, in Finland, we're not only experts on nuclear power. But for six years in a row, we've been the happiest people in the world. Makes sense. She lives so close to Santa Claus. But there's more to the baby box than a nice perk for the first. the happiest parents in the world. In its almost 90 years of existence, the Finnish baby box has been

a basic survival tool, a national symbol, and a right of passage. So how did a simple cardboard box become so filled with meaning? To find out, we're going to take a peek inside the cutest little social engineering tool in the world. So the story of the baby box begins in Finland in the late 1930s. Finland wasn't in such great shape. That's design historian Michelle Miller Fisher. She told me that when the first baby box came out, Finland was almost unrecognizable. The birth rate was declining.

Many babies that were born were in ill health and there was quite a high rate of infant mortality. In the early decades of the 20th century, most Finns were extremely poor. Finland had recently emerged from a brutal civil war and revolutions in neighbouring Russia meant it had also lost its biggest trading partner. Since most of the grain in Finland came from Russia,

that loss meant that many people were left starving. Finns were living in crowded, unsanitary conditions, and dying from outbreaks of tuberculosis, smallpox, and measles. Child mortality in Finland was also higher than in the rest of Europe. Almost 20% of children didn't make it to their fifth birthday. And so the Finnish Social Welfare Committee decided, that maybe they could design something that would help in part to change this. And that policy intervention looked like, in the end,

a set of designed objects within a box. The idea of distributing critical items to new mothers wasn't an entirely original one. Since the 1920s, a Finnish charity had been lending out baskets of baby essentials to the poorest families in Finland. The baskets contained clean baby clothes, hand-sown by volunteers, from donated bits of fabric. At the time, it was pretty common for mothers

to swaddle their newborns in old rags, and this gave them an alternative. Once the baby grew out of the clothes, the basket was passed on to the next family who needed it. The government used the baskets as a blueprint for something more ambitious. They kept the clean clothes and added basic hygiene items, like soap and towels,

to help slow the spread of disease. And instead of loaning it out, They decided to make the box a gift that families could keep. In 1938, they started giving these new packages out to struggling families, not in a basket, but in a cardboard box, a box that doubled as a crib. It has been from the day one that you could put your baby to sleep in the box. That's a Nina Kwoka. She works for Keller, the Finnish Social Security Agency.

Actually, in the early days, the families were poor, and their houses were small. There wasn't necessarily a safe and clean place to put the baby to sleep. So that's why it was quite important. When World War II broke out just one year later, Finland didn't have fabric to spare for the baby boxes. So the designers had to get creative.

During the moment of the war years in the 1940s, because of restrictions on materials and because of thrift, some of the clothes were paper rather than, fabric. Clean paper clothes were still better than old rags, and a simple sheet of paper could make a big difference during childbirth. In some of the very early baby boxes, there was also the sheet of paper to give birth on, to be able to create an immediate sterile birthing environment in a very low cost, but very effective manner. When the war ended, Finnish mothers could thankfully put aside their paper baby clothes. Post-war boxes included fabric and yarn, so moms could simply

use all their free time to sew or knit the clothes themselves. Around this time, Finland also made a change that would become a key feature of the baby box. In 1949, they made the box a universal benefit. It was initially given out to people who needed it, and very quickly from the 1940s became given to anybody, everybody. It became a citizen's right in Finland. Most of us are probably familiar with the Nordic countries and their universal. welfare programs. Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Iceland and Finland all provide stronger social support than most other countries in the world. And in Finland, the baby box was one of the first building

blocks in creating that system. The Finnish welfare state as we know it began in the aftermath of World War II. Finland, like the rest of Europe, was still recovering from the devastation of war. People had come back from the brink of the end of the world, and across the continent, they asking themselves, what do we want? What do we value now that we have a chance to make a new world? In Finland, one of the strongest new convictions was that families, all families, should have support. Some of the earliest universal policies were focused on child rearing, free school meals, quarterly child payments, and new maternal health clinics opening all over the country. The baby box was actually one way to incentivize pregnant women to use those new health clinics.

In order to get the box, they would have to attend the maternity and welfare clinics and to get their health checked when they were expecting a baby. The lure of the baby box seems to have worked. By the early 1950s, more than 90% of mothers had registered themselves at the new clinics. Almost 80 years later, the deal is basically the same. If you visit a prenatal clinic in the first four months of pregnancy, you get the box. What's inside the box, though, changes every year. Should we start with the oldest box?

I visited the office of Keller, the government agency responsible for the box. They've got 40 years' worth of boxes stored away in their warehouse. So this is from 1994. So more than 30 years old. This is the snow seat. It's very 90s. Yeah, the patterns. Patterns and fabrics.

Lime green stripes and fluorescent yellow. Yeah, it's very 90s. Today, Anina and her colleague Vera are responsible for deciding what each year's baby box will include. And it's a lot of pressure. Every item they pick out, be it a koala sleeping bag or a dinosaur toothbrush, will be used by thousands of families in thousands of homes all across Finland. The process of making those decisions actually begins two years before the box is set to release when they meet with a group of advisors. The group is essentially a justice list. of baby stuff experts.

There's a representative from the maternity and child welfare clinics, another from the Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare, one from the Ministry of Social Affairs and Health, which sounds like the same words just rearranged. And also from the Finnish safety and chemical agency,

there's this person who we can consult about the safety issues for the items in the package. So we have these discussions about the items, which to include or what are we planning to choose. When it comes to making the final call

about what's in each year's box, Finnish law says that all items need to, quote, provide for the health and well-being of mother and child. And most of the time, the connection between item and well-being is obvious. It would be hard to make an argument against putting in a bath thermometer, say, or a teething toy. But other times, the connection is less about need

and more about encouraging certain behaviours. The box has always been about subtly influencing people's decisions. Remember, when the baby box first became a universal benefit, it was because the Finnish government wanted mothers to start going to health clinics for prenatal exams. And so despite the box's popularity, it's always carried a degree of tension between the preferences of individuals and the goals of the state. Here's Michelle Miller Fisher again. The baby box, for me, is this shining example of,

a welfare state done right, and yet, almost every object that is designed for the arc of human reproduction is fraught with politics. Take, for example, one item you won't find in your box, a baby bottle. That's because Finland strongly recommends breastfeeding for the first four to six months. A bottle, in that case, would be unnecessary. Another item where you can see the Finnish government trying to shape behavior is the condoms they included in the 1970s. That's when the Finnish government basically said, we think family planning is part of a healthy life for everyone. Here's a way you can make a decision about whether or not you want to get pregnant again right now.

Not everyone appreciated the hint. Here's Tanya Vaticari, Professor of History at Tampa University. Many saw or understood that this would be a good idea. Those who were against thought that the state should not be interfering in those. kinds of ways into the family's lives. It's an issue that also came up with nappies or diapers. Early boxes included pieces of fabric that could be folded into diapers. But when the disposable kind got popular in the 1960s,

those went into the baby box instead. That is until 2006, when experts decided it would be better for the environment to switch back to cloth diapers. And people were very strongly either for or against. Many people thought that these reusable diapers being in the box was the kind of a ideological message on part of the state that people should be using these types of nappies more, which was of course true. That was the idea. So was there a sense of resentment at all or if people were feeling they were being nudged too much? Yes, there was. There was exactly. that that they were pushed towards something they did not want to adopt.

In the end, this particular nudge didn't work. Anina said that the majority of parents reported not using the cloth diapers. So just a few years later, they were out again. The Finnish Social Security Agency Kella puts out a survey so that parents can directly voice their opinions about what's in the box. But Anina says that a lot of those discussions play out on internet forums. There's a lot of online discussions about the items in the box and they sometimes fight also about the items. A couple of years ago, a blanket wasn't included and there was an uproar.

It had to be brought back by popular demand. So Anina and her colleagues have found little ways to let parents feel like they have more of a say. Yeah, actually we have had since 2020, we have had this opportunity for our clients to vote, which patents to choose for the overall and for the sleeping bags. And do people, do a lot of people vote? I think last time it was like 10,000 or something like that, so quite many.

Something I kept thinking about while reporting this story is that the box came about at a time when Finns were poor and infant mortality was a big problem. Now, Finland is consistently ranked among nations with the lowest infant mortality. It's also frequently named as the best country in the world, to be a parent. That's partly because of the whole comprehensive package of social support that Finland gives families.

Finnish parents have universal health care, heavily subsidized childcare, and generous parental leave. But it's also because the box did its job. So does that mean the baby box has outlived its usefulness? What would be the reaction if, do you think, if the government took away the baby books? it makes people feel a lot of feelings. So I think they would be quite angry if it would, they would stop it. It's beloved. Yes, it's beloved.

Parents actually have a choice about whether or not they take the baby box or a cash alternative. At this moment it's 210 euros, cash, or the box. But most people choose the box. Almost all first-time mothers choose. just a box. And just like in the early days, many still use that simple cardboard box as a crib. Almost half of finished babies at some point sleep in the box.

Collecting and unpacking the box has become a rite of passage in Finland. Future grandparents and even great-grandparents might come over to pour over the contents and reminisce over what they received in their boxes. It's very common to find old baby boxes in finished garages and attics, filled with favourite items from the box waiting to be taken out for the next generation. Another reason the baby box remains a constant and finished life is the way it lifts the mental load of being a new parent. The box is simple and curated,

telling you exactly what you need in order to care for a baby and what you don't. Having a newborn is tough. Any parent will remember feeling disorientated, anxious, and desperate for sleep, all of which makes you the perfect target for advertisers hawking miracle products. If you don't have this, your baby won't be safe, or they won't be healthy, or they won't be smart, etc.

I mean, obviously, we live in a capitalist society. This is the way in which parents are turned into a demographic or a space of marketing and consumption. I've seen ads for an intravaginal speaker to encourage language development while still in the womb. And pillows shaped like giant hands, so your baby feels like they're being. being held as they sleep.

It's so easy to laugh at these products when you're not in the depths of life with a newborn. But at the time, I'd have paid a lot of money for something that guaranteed me a tiny bit more sleep or the chance to go to the bathroom on my own or five minutes to drink a hot cup of coffee. In the haze of those early days, it's so hard to tell what you actually need.

I spoke about this with a Finnish mother named Mary. When she was pregnant, a friend not from Finland had helpfully sent her a spreadsheet with everything that'd suggest a new parent buys. And it was so long of all the possible things that you could need. From clothes to what kind of bathtub to little silver nipple cups that you can wear so that when you're breastfeeding you're to help with the pain of that. And I was glad that I don't really have to think about that. I could know that all the main things were already thought of.

And I guess there's the message as well if your baby's sleeping in a box that, you know, that's fine. You know, you don't need fancy things. Like, these are the basics that you really need. But even more important than the practical benefit to parents is what the baby box stands for. 80 plus years after it helped build the foundation of the Finnish welfare system, the box is still inseparable from the culture it helped create.

The kind of idea that everyone gets the same start to life, I think, is important for finish people. The baby box creates a sort of visual equality. There's no stigma in using the items from the box because everybody does. Really? It can actually be a problem picking out which child is yours when they're all running around in their identical snowsuits. And you kind of know that they're probably around the same age as your baby because

they're wearing the same stuff. There's something about, definitely something about the shared experience. that you know everyone in Finland will have gone through of getting this box and using the same things and knowing that everyone's getting kind of quality items. There are really few more powerful equalizers than having everyone start life sleeping in an identical cardboard box. And I can't help but feel a little awe that this program that started so many years ago has persisted all this time.

The current right-wing government is making deep cuts to everything from housing support, unemployment benefits, health care, and child benefits. But no one from any political party is seriously talking about getting rid of the box. It is just too much of an icon. There's something incredibly beautiful about looking at a society, looking at this promise that a government makes to its people, that it takes from its taxes, so it's a people making this promise to themselves as well, that we will provide for the newest, the most vulnerable, the tiniest,

the most promising people in our society because it's paying it forward, but it's also paying it back to ourselves. It's infesting in this larger, yeah, social compact or social agreement that we have with one another. The concept of baby boxes is now spread across the world. There are versions of the box in Chile, South Africa, Canada, and Scotland. Michelle actually received a Scottish box. It's full of what one of her mentors called humble masterpieces. Everyday objects. that seem unremarkable, but are nonetheless worthy of celebration. I love the sling that is in there. So there's just a long, it's not a constructed sling,

it's just a long piece of fabric. Several yards of very stretchy, grey, heather grey fabric. In one of Michelle's earliest pictures of her daughter March, she's just a few days old and she's being carried in that sling by her dad, Austin. It took us, we did seven rounds of IVF to have our daughter, and it was the only pregnancy that actually worked. And so we waited years to have her. And this picture that I have of Austin, he just, he looks so happy.

It's making me feel emotional even now because it's just so special. This is the paradox of the baby box. It's full of practical items, boring items even. But that box and all its mundane contents connect you to the most profound moments of your life. And in Finland, to generations of parents. parents before you, all of them tucking their newborn children into the humble masterpiece of a simple cardboard box. After the break, Olivia Humphreys takes us on a tour of baby boxes around the world. We're back with Olivia Humphreys. Hey, Livya.

Hey, Roman. How you doing? I'm good, I'm good. So at the end of the story, you mentioned that there are baby box projects in other parts of the world, too. Yeah, so for decades, the finished baby box was really the only game in town. But in the last 20 years or so, that's changed. I spoke to Dr. Anorina Kuyivu, who's a researcher at Tampa University in Finland, and she did the first global study that maps baby box projects around the world. She said she and her co-authors were kind of amazed at how far and wide that idea of the baby box had spread. We were really surprised, and it was also a lovely surprise. We found over 90 projects all around the world in about 60 countries, places like Papua New Guinea. There were several in Africa, Latin America, and also Southeast Asia, and so on.

So there have now been baby box schemes on every continent except Antarctica. That's slacken. But are all these baby boxes like universal programs like the Finnish one? Actually, there's only two other countries where all pregnant women in the nation are eligible to get a box. and that's Chile and Scotland. Some of the other projects are for pregnant women in a particular geographical area, in a state or in a city, for instance. And then others are even more targeted

to the people who need it. Very specific, vulnerable groups like first-time moms. Sometimes these are low-income moms. Women in jail, refugee moms, or HIV-positive moms. And this is more like the original Finnish baby boxes.

Like, this is support going for the people who need the most support. Right. But unlike in Finland, most of these programs aren't actually run by the state. Some of them are, but the vast majority are run by research groups or hospitals, NGOs, non-profits or private parties, or by United Nations agencies like UNICEF. And how similar are the boxes themselves to the Finnish ones? Obviously, these boxes are being used in totally. different contexts and so they have been adapted a lot, which is kind of the beauty of the

baby box, I think, is such a flexible idea. In fact, one of the things that Anarina learned is that in some places the box isn't even a box. We talk about baby box because it's a sort of a common name that is often used, but not all baby boxes are boxes and not all baby boxes should be boxes either because it's very important that the baby box is appropriate for that context. So one of those instances where a cardboard box just didn't make sense was in South Africa. The box there was designed for mothers in a poor settlement and a cardboard box was just not robust enough to work in that context where there are insects and rats and it's very humid. So they decided that it makes more sense to put the items in a bag.

bathtub and that bathtub was used then for washing the baby. A plastic baby bath also made sense because in South Africa it's the norm for parents to co-sleep with babies. So the project designers thought a bathtub would get more use than a crib. And then in other places, boxes weren't used because they had negative connotations in that culture. For instance, in Malavian culture, where they first sort of considered a card box that was not supported by the mothers because it resembled a coffin. So it was not a good choice for a baby box and the program opted for a baby basket instead. That makes a complete sense. So you have baskets, you have bathtubs. What else do you have? So even if they didn't go with the box, a lot of the

projects borrowed that idea from Finland of the container having its own use. So there have been buckets for washing clothes in, bags that can double up as a kind of sling, bamboo rocking cradles in India. And in terms of what's inside the box or the basket or the bucket, like presumably that changes a lot, too, depending on the environment. I mean, some of it is the same. There's usually some basic hygiene items like soap, lots of clothes, obviously appropriate for the climate. You don't get many insulated mittens in sub-Saharan Africa like you do in Finland. But if it's an area where, say, malaria or Zika are prevalent, then boxes might include a mosquito net.

Or if the mother can't access a hospital very easily, then there might be items to make delivery at home safer, like a sterile razor blades to cut the umbilical cord or a plastic sheet to give birth on. I mean, this is kind of the equivalent of the paper sheet from the early finished baby boxes. Exactly, yes. Yeah, yeah.

And are there conditions with getting these other boxes in other countries. Like in Finland, you mentioned that, you know, they have to attend a prenatal appointment. You know, is the same for other projects? Yeah, the baby boxes almost always come with strings attached. And that's kind of the point of a lot of these programs. They're trying to get babies into their healthcare system. So in Zambia, for instance, you can't get the box unless you give birth at a healthcare facility. And in Mexico, you can only get the box once you've registered your baby's birth. And so which country is most like the classic Finnish? Baby box? Probably Scotland. The scheme's been going there for about a decade and it's been

really popular ever since it started. Take-up's been around 90%, so that's roughly the same as Finland. But when it was first brought in, there was some controversy, particularly around that idea of babies sleeping in cardboard boxes. Okay. What happened? Well, the right-leaning Scottish Sun newspaper tried to turn public feeling against it. They actually made a video. which they've now deleted, where they set fire to the box to show that it was flammable. They wanted to demonstrate on YouTube that a cardboard box was flammable. Yeah, and actually because the box is made from this kind of heavy-duty corrugated cardboard, it actually took seven minutes of concerted efforts with a lighter to set it on fire.

So it wasn't quite the gotcha that they were looking for. Yeah. And obviously it didn't have much effective. 90% of people are taking the boxes. Yeah, and they also weren't convinced about the boxes not being safe to sleep in. So about 40% of people use it for babies to sleep in, just like in Finland. So you mentioned that new boxes and new box programs are cropping up all the time. What's the latest place to get a baby box or have a program like this in the works? So New York Mayor Zora and Mamdani had a proposal for baby baskets for all newborns in the city as part of his campaign last year. That sounds like him.

Yes. And Wales actually has just started a government-funded program as well. But at the moment, it's only for babies who are in the most deprived parts of the country. And the response really highlights one of the problems with these targeted projects, which is that people are saying anecdotally that they might not use the clothes that are in the box because they feel like there's a stigma attached. So it's kind of the opposite of that feeling of togetherness and belonging that people in Finland describe. And for people who are listening who really want to get their hands on a baby box,

like this all sounds great, but they don't live in New York or Wales or Scotland or Chile and all these fantastic places. Do you have advice for them? So Keller, who are the government department who are responsible for giving out the box in Finland, they get emails all the time, they say, from people who would love to pay for a box. But it's illegal for Keller to sell the box because it's the state benefits. Right. It's just like it's illegal for me to listen to BBC Sounds in the United States. Right. Yeah, sorry about that. But inevitably, some canny entrepreneurs have spotted that there's a gap in the market, and they've started

selling commercial baby boxes. One of the first companies doing that was founded by three Finnish dance, and they just started off pretty much including what was in the keller boxes. But then they started getting feedback from customers in Australia who didn't have much use for the snow suit, and they switched it so that you'd get different stuff, depending on where in the world you are. Yeah, so it's complicated to make an internationally appropriate baby box. Yeah, yeah. So they're not exactly flying off shelves. Not really. One issue is that in the United States, back in 2021, it became illegal to sell a cardboard box marketed as a sleeping space for a baby because it was decided it just didn't meet safety guidelines. But even in other parts of the world, a lot of the businesses who sell these boxes seem to have gone bust after a few years. And obviously, I don't know why that's happened exactly. But I do wonder if the appeal of the box is really that sense of being cared for and being part of something. And that's what people want to appease of. you just don't get that feeling from a box that's been sold to you by a commercial company.

It just loses a lot of the magic, and it's just kind of a cardboard box full of clothes that you didn't choose. Yeah. This is so much fun. Thank you so much for doing the story for us. It's been such a pleasure. Thank you, Roman. 99% Invisible was reported this week by Olivia Humphreys, edited by Kelly Prime, mixed by Martine

Martin Gonzalez, music by Swan Real and George Langford. Fact-checking by Graham Hesha. Special thanks this week to Pia of Roak. Kolsky, as well as Mary's mom, Tina. Kathy, too, is our executive producer. Kurt Kolstad is the digital director. Delaney Hall is our senior editor. The rest of the team includes Chris Barubei, Jason DeLeon, Emmett Fitzgerald,

Christopher Johnson, Vivian Lay, Lashamadon, Joe Rosenberg, Jacob Medina Gleason, Talon and Rain Stradley, and me, Roman Mars. The 99% Invisible Logo was created by Stefan Lawrence. We are part of the Series XM podcast family, now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora, building in beautiful uptown Oakland, California. You can find us on all the usual social media sites as well as our own Discord server. There's a link to that as well as every past episode of 99PI and 99PI.org.