Finnish maternity package (baby box)
Also: Äitiyspakkaus · Kela maternity grant
Box of baby clothes and supplies, whose cardboard box doubles as a first bed, given from 1938 to low-income mothers and from 1949 to all mothers who attend prenatal care by the fourth month. Its main mechanism was drawing women into prenatal clinics; it is now the template for baby-box schemes elsewhere.
- Years
- 1938–now
- Country
- Finland
- Topic
- Infant sleepMaternal health
- Asks people to
- Start
- Strategy
- Environmental support
- Channel
- Packaging
- Audience
- ParentsAll expectant mothers in Finland
Evidence
NoneUnknown
Finnish infant mortality fell after its introduction, but Finnish researchers (e.g., Mika Gissler) caution the box itself may not have had a direct effect; prenatal care and later health insurance mattered more. Only one small RCT (Ecuador) tested a Finnish-style box: safe sleep reported about 2.5-2.9 times as often.
Sponsor (who paid)
- Government of Finland (now Kela, the Social Insurance Institution) Foreign government
Credits (who made it)
Not recorded yet.
Related campaigns
- Back to Sleep 1994–now
Sources
- The Finnish maternity package has changed with the times (Embassy of Finland) sponsor
- Feld H et al. Baby box and safe sleep practices in a low-resource community: RCT in Ecuador. BMC Pediatr 2023 evaluation · 2023 · DOI 10.1186/s12887-022-03832-y · PMID 36658521
- Bartick M et al. Babies in boxes and the missing links on safe sleep. Matern Child Nutr 2017 reference · 2017 · DOI 10.1111/mcn.12544 · PMID 29047226
Research notes
Created 2026-10-23 from the sleep campaign literature search (PubMed and web search; OpenAlex was unreachable), see docs/sleep-campaigns-literature.md. Findings are paraphrased from abstracts, not full texts; official URLs come from search results and were not opened. Not a safe sleep campaign in origin. URL seen in WebSearch results;
Record cases/fi-maternity-package.json, updated 2026-10-23· Link to this campaign