Abstract
This article explores the role of materiality as a medium for experiencing the welfare state through the case of the ‘maternity package’ (or ‘baby box’). The state has been providing Finnish families with these packages, containing various items for the new-born and the mother, without interruption since the passing of the Maternity Grants Act in 1937. Drawing from a diverse body of source material, mainly 90 written reminiscences collected in 2020/21, the article examines the ways in which the maternity package, through its use and adaptations over the decades, has become embedded in everyday life and produced relationships between the various actors and scales of the welfare state. While the baby box experience is far from universal, the package has had recurring utopian potential in the production of a shared sphere of experience: as a health tool, an everyday emotional experience and care practice, and a symbol of the Finnish welfare state. Throughout its history, the baby box has included a set of assumptions on how to parent a child, how to be a citizen or how to encounter welfare services. It has brought these expectations and wider welfare-state meanings into interaction with bodies and human relations, along with the materialities of homes and families’ intergenerational childcare practices, all the while negotiating between individual and collective experiences.
My memories of the maternity package are happy and warm. I have two children […]. My daughter was born in November 1977 and my son in July 1981. At the time of my first pregnancy, I was 25 years old and I felt ready for motherhood. My future child was wanted, I had graduated the previous year and the father of the child was in the final stages of his studies. My closest friends were pregnant at around the same time and sharing the expectation of our firstborns was important to us. We knew the maternity package well; in general, it was perceived as a pleasant gift from society and welcomed for its varied contents. My friends and I chose the package over the cash option because we considered it to be more valuable and more practical. 1
In the above quotation, a woman born in 1952 describes her relationship to the ‘maternity package (or ‘baby box’), 2 which can be described as a core welfare object of the Finnish state and has been issued without interruption since 1937 to families with new-borns. The idea of the packages has been to provide everything necessary for infant care during the first year of life. The maternity package, as is implied in the name, has also included items for the mother. Even though the main concept has changed relatively little since the beginning, the contents of the baby box have reflected the changing ideals around welfare, care and society as new items become added and some of the earlier ones are removed over the years. For 2025, the box contains 38 items, for example, baby clothes, a baby sleeping sack, a pair of winter overalls, bedlinen as well as a first book and a toy. 3 Finnish society today is very different from that of the late-1930s, when the Finnish welfare state took its initial steps, or from the turn of the 1970s and the 1980s, when the welfare state was at its peak. Yet, in all periods, the baby box has proved to be a popular and important element in child rearing. In 2024, around 90% of first-time families chose the package instead of the cash benefit, which is always offered as an option.
As Mikkel Høghøj and Mikkel Thelle have recently argued, the scholarship on the history of the Nordic welfare state still mainly lacks ‘analytical strategies to understand the role and agency of materiality in the formation of welfare politics’. 4 I argue that the welfare state works in and through people's mundane daily material lives and situated activities in complex ways, and as an object that is part of daily childcare practices, the baby box illuminates this relationship well. In this article, I will analyse the changing dynamics of welfare and the role of materiality as a medium for experiencing the Finnish welfare state. Specifically, I will explore how the maternity package has produced relationships between the various actors and scales of the welfare state, and how it has integrated more individually framed and shared experiences. This will be done by examining the ways in which the baby box has become embedded in the practices of the welfare state since the 1930s through its recurring everyday use over the decades in institutional care settings and in families. I begin by discussing how the baby box has produced relationships between institutional health care and mothers and families, focusing on the idea of education and control through materiality. The section also provides an overall chronology of the history of the maternity benefit. 5 I then go on to examine the interaction between the welfare state and families from a more intimate perspective: the baby box as an everyday emotional experience and care practice. In the final section, before coming to the concluding remarks, I explore the baby box as a symbol of the Finnish welfare state that is produced between different scales and its abilities to convey shared experiences of the welfare.
In addition to welfare-state histories, the development of the maternity package also relates to nationalist discourses. With Jenni Räikkönen and Henrik Mattjus, I have discussed elsewhere the baby box as an object of post-war everyday nationalism in more depth, 6 but it is important to note here that it is a site where the ‘lived welfare state’ 7 and ‘lived nation’ 8 intersect. To make these connections explicit in the text, I sometimes use the term ‘welfare state nation’ to refer to how nationalism shaped the development of welfare states, and vice versa. The welfare-state materiality interpreted through the baby box and its utopian potential also provides a fresh perspective on Nordic welfare history and ‘the Nordic model(s)” more broadly. 9
The article contributes to the recent discussions in the history of experience that see experience as a layered process encompassing the cognitive, emotional and sensory as well as the memory. Experience should be understood as something that is not only located within individual minds and subjectivities, but also socially shared, relational and bound to societal institutions and cultural systems of meaning making which form frameworks for the act of experiencing. 10 It is possible that the welfare state, with its institutions and materialities, becomes shared through a process in which those who live through the same pivotal events, such as the birth of one's child, define themselves as a group through this experience, even if they may have experienced the event differently and at different times. 11 So far, materiality has been a relatively rarely explored aspect both within the history of the welfare state and the history of experience, with the existing body of literature focusing mainly on space and architecture. 12 However, the material world should be understood as an important medium and an intrinsic part of the process of experiencing.
When discussing the baby box at the intersection of institutional and family settings, I draw on a collection of 90 written reminiscences that were gathered in 2020–2021 and based on an open call in cooperation with the Finnish Literature Society, 13 which I supplement with archival and educational material produced by public authorities as well as newspaper articles. 14 There is a long tradition in Finland of gathering memories for archive collections through thematic writing campaigns. For the ‘Memories of the Maternity Package’ call, the youngest respondent was born in 1990, the oldest in 1930, meaning that the collection includes narratives of parenthood and the welfare state from the late-1940s onwards. Around one third of the 90 respondents were born after 1965. 15 The most recent reminiscences in the material deal with expecting a new-born during the global Covid-19 pandemic in 2020. The participants of the memory collection thus anchor their narratives in distinct historical phases of the Finnish welfare state's development: its construction, the subsequent period of expansive consolidation and the current era characterized by socio-political uncertainty. In Finland, the major expansion of social security benefits and public services occurred relatively late, primarily during the 1970s and the 1980s, when the welfare state in many other Western and Nordic countries had been declared to be in crisis. 16
The respondents to the ‘Memories of the Maternity Package’ call had complete freedom to decide how to structure their written reminiscences, hence the form varied in terms of text length and the level of factual, personal and prosaic elements. A set of questions was provided in the call, which guided the topics and genres chosen by the narrators, but again in varying ways, with some trying to answer most of the questions, whereas others made only passing reference to them. As is often the case with such campaigns in Finland, 17 well-educated middle-class women form the majority of the collection's participants, even though different socio-economic groups and genders are represented. 18
The material containing first-person narration, even though written, is dialogical in nature, since the authors write with someone – an imagined or a real respondent – in mind. 19 The memory collection material is also dialogical in relation to time, as the reminiscing always involves different temporalities. Memory and experience are intertwined, and they work as part of the same social process. Memory juxtaposes the experiences of the past with the experiences of the present, as well as with future expectations, which themselves reflect the explanations of the past. 20 The welfare state as experience can likewise be viewed as an intertwining of memories, present-bound experiences and expectations.
A further dimension in the dialogical nature of the baby box memories is seen through their shared connection with narrative-making, social interaction, and material reality. When reminiscing, people use material objects, such as the baby box, to witness events, provide the narrative with structure, and highlight the affectual and emotional capabilities that the matter carries. 21 An approach that focuses on material-discursive interactions, however, does not mean giving objects universal agency to bring forth experiences as such and on their own. Experiencing is a situated process. Even within the same society, different groups may have multifaceted emotions and experiences in relation to the same materialities due to variations in earlier experiences and life histories and different power dynamics. 22 While I will approach the maternity package mainly through written texts, the package itself and the items it contains are considered as part of the analysis, allowing reflections to be made on the question of material agency. 23 The realm of the social consists of ‘interconnected ‘doings”’ that are materially anchored. 24 The lens of materiality thus provokes thought about the everyday practices with and around the object.
An institutional object for education, health and biopolitical control
In the 1920s, charity organizations and even companies had distributed from one family to another ‘circulating baskets’, with necessities for a new-born, as a form of poor relief, demonstrating how the welfare state was not only a state-driven project. The Maternity Grants Act drew inspiration from these initiatives but ended up including products for both baby and mother. While the early benefit also included a cash allowance that could be used to cover the medical costs of the pregnancy, the emphasis was on the material support 29 and the idea of instruction by materiality. The maternity packages were also distributed during the war but were considered low quality by mothers, as most of the clothing was made out of paper. The post-war packages in the 1940s addressed the economic scarcity of the time, for example, by including a ball of wool yarn to encourage the mother to knit for the new-born. The educational objective was clear: the box, its individual items and the enclosed guidebook explaining how the objects should be used in proper infant care, co-constructed normative discourses and practices of welfare, citizenship and motherhood.
When discussing the early social benefits for families and children in Finland in the 1930s and the 1940s, Minna Harjula has shown how they were a contradictory mixture of older practices of poor relief and newer ideas of the welfare state. Framed as a novelty, the maternity benefit was free of stigma. 30 However, some recipients’ experience was different because they had to collect the benefit from a poor relief office. At the same time, the maternity benefit had some characteristics of modern social benefit. It was similar for all and was available not only to mothers without means but also to those of limited means. Its distribution was based on clear criteria: a woman's pregnancy, Finnish citizenship and residence, and a recipient's income as determined by taxation criteria. 31
However, the early taxation criteria were different for rural and urban areas, which meant that in 1938, for example, around 33% of mothers of live-born babies in urban areas and 72% of those in rural areas received the allowance, 32 allowing a large part of the farming population to be defined as low-income. There was a nationalist undertone inbuilt in the income thresholds, as the benefit was to be given to those (rural) families with limited means who were considered to have the potential to be beneficial to the nation. To prove eligibility required, a statement from a midwife or two reliable persons stating the duration of the pregnancy was required. In addition, the application form included information on the applicant's income level, social status and lack of childcare items. Mothers had to apply for the maternity benefit and, in order to receive it, had to have themselves and the material conditions of their homes assessed by the authorities. 33 Figure 1 from rural Finland in the late-1940s shows how, through the materiality of the baby box, the welfare state entered people's homes. When received, the box was in turn adapted to the materialities of the home and family-specific everyday baby care needs. It was often used to keep the baby near to the mother while freeing both hands for housework. Figure 2 shows a similar use in 2020.
Baby in the box in a home in rural Lapinlahti in east-central Finland in the late-1940s. Photo: Pekka Kyytinen, 1948. Finnish Heritage Agency.
‘We had bought a crib for the baby. However, the new-born looked so tiny in it that the baby box served as the first bed, placed on the floor next to the parent's futon mattress’. Photo: Eemeli Hakoköngäs, 2020.
From 1949 onwards, the maternity benefit became nearly universal. Families could receive it regardless of their income, which reflected the wider universalization of welfare state benefits in Finnish society. 34 Nevertheless, some women were excluded. In the law of 1937, women were not eligible if their children were born during a period when they were placed under the ‘permanent, i.e., continuous full care of poor relief’ or confined to a workhouse or prison. This was justified based on the argument that these women and their children were cared for by the respective institutions, thus contesting their needs during motherhood in the eyes of the state. 35 This delimitation remained in effect until the early-1970s. Today, similar exclusion is practised in the case of asylum seekers, who are not entitled to the benefit, which is conditional on permanent residency in Finland (exceptions are sometimes made for EU/EEA residents). 36 The differential inclusion of different non-citizen groups means the reinterpretation of the welfare state principles of universalism, 37 and welfare-state institutions being modified to serve competition-state and security-state functions. 38 Under such conditions, there were historically, and continue to be, categories of mothers who are not considered to be full members of the welfare state nation.
Even after the earlier taxation criteria were abandoned in 1945, the local authorities retained the right to reject applications from women who were considered too wealthy.
39
Thus, until 1949, the maternity package was associated with the seemingly opposite experiences of the stigma of poor relief and exclusion based on excess wealth, as seen in the following excerpt from the baby box memories of a mother born in 1931: When my mother came home [after giving birth], I asked her why she had not applied for a maternity package. She answered that allowances are not for us. I noticed ‘Victorian pride’ in her. ‘We are not beneficiaries, we can make it on our own’, she taught me. Both our parents were of the opinion […] that many other Finns needed help more than us.
40
The narrator, then, continues with her own experience of acceptance of the maternity package as a welfare-state benefit ‘with joy’ at the time of the birth of her firstborn child in 1959. She knew that the law allowed everyone to receive the package and she thought that ‘the package was instructive in its offerings’. 41
Within the respondent's middle-class family, the idea of the right to receive the maternity benefit had gained approval amongst the new generation. Her narrative can be understood as part of the advancement of the objectives of the welfare state. 42 Another woman who took part in the memory collection writes how, when she had her first child in 1964, it was the ‘norm’ amongst her friends and work colleagues to take the maternity package. 43 It may be argued that by the late 1950s, the baby box concept, which is ‘instructive in its offerings’, had become both universalized and embedded in the everyday. Relatively few newspaper articles were published about the maternity benefit in the late-1950s and the 1960s compared to the early stages and again in the 1970s, when the baby box surfaced as a topic of conversation for the new generation of families. This public silence may also signal the maternity package having become a widely accepted and mundane object. 44 Many expectant families preferred the package to the cash option for practical reasons, as can also be seen in the article's opening quotation.
The above respondent who referred to her mother's ‘Victorian pride’ makes a reference to another central aspect of the health education and biopolitical regulation of women related to the maternity benefit: in order to receive it, one had to (and still has to) see a midwife at an antenatal clinic before the end of the fourth month of pregnancy. Mothers’ health was monitored not only to ensure that everything was in order for the upcoming delivery, but also to diagnose infectious diseases, such as venereal diseases and tuberculosis.
45
In the 1930s and the 1940s, in more peripheral rural areas, where women had previously been reluctant to consult midwives, the very materiality of the maternity package thus proved effective in bringing more women into the sphere of institutional health care.
46
The condition of health check sometimes excluded applicants in greatest need; in the mid-1950s, 2.5% of applications were rejected due to the mother's delayed health check-up, which affected many single women.
47
In the case of single motherhood, receiving the baby box could be experienced as a complex mixture of feeling both shame and much-needed support from the welfare state, as explained by a woman who became a mother at 24 while working as a recently graduated teacher in Helsinki: I wasn't allowed to visit my old home. It would have been shameful because I didn't have a husband. ‘What would the neighbours say?” The 1960s were still a very conservative time. At the last minute, I timidly went to the maternity clinic in Vuosaari. There, I was told that I could pick up a maternity package in Tikkurila. My parents drove me there to pick up the package, and I felt ashamed. As I fiddled with the tiny clothes inside, I finally felt a spark of happiness – the baby would soon be here.
48
In the 1970s, Finnish parents became more eager to take part in the discussion of what kind of items should be included in the maternity package. In response to this ‘activism’ and also as a result of the growing prosperity and consumer culture, e.g., the increasing number of washing machines in Finnish households, baby box clothes were now manufactured from colourful, patterned fabrics and easy-care materials, following the latest fashion. 49 In 1971, the newspaper Etelä-Suomen Sanomat referred to midwives’ reports claiming that mothers ‘competed’ for these new-style packages. 50
At the same time, the maternity package of the 1970s continued to be seen as an educational tool. From 1971 onwards, a condom kit was included in the package, which at the time was described as a controversial decision. 51 This new addition linked the baby box to the topical debates concerning family planning and the new abortion law of 1970. Following the law reform, the number of abortions had risen significantly and the need for contraceptive education had become an acute issue. The maternity package reached most Finnish families and it was hoped that the condoms in the box would stimulate discussion between couples concerning contraception and proper breaks between pregnancies. 52 The idea of fathers as co-recipients of the maternity package emerged in the early-1970s, reflecting societal themes of gender equality and shared parenthood, but remained mostly absent at the discursive level until the 1980s. 53 Introducing condoms can be seen as a more explicit extension of the package, through materiality, to both parents. In the reminiscence material, condoms receive several mentions and are mainly described as a curiosity or with amusement, and sometimes with disapproval. 54 In comparison to other welfare models, the ‘Nordic model’ is identifiable by its emphasis on the role and presence of the state in people's everyday lives. What is interesting is that in none of the memory collection responses is the inclusion of condoms in the baby box explicitly framed as interference or as ‘too excessive presence’ on the part of the state in the private affairs of families.
The idea that the maternity package items have the capacity to influence the everyday lives of Finnish families has remained strong to this day. Another form of biopolitical regulation was introduced by the present right-wing government, as it recommended in its programme that a ball should be added to the maternity package to promote physical exercise for children and families. 55 Despite politized ideas concerning its renewal, the maternity package remains universally supported by parties across the political spectrum.
Over the decades, the institution issuing the maternity benefit has varied. This also meant varying experiences for the receivers, including the socio-material-spatial experience of the encounter between the mothers and the issuing institutions. In the late 1930s and the early 1940s, the applicant might meet several authorities during the process, even within the same municipality. For example, in Helsinki, the child protection board was the main authority in charge, but both municipal and private maternity clinics delivered the in-kind benefit. For the cash benefit, however, the applicants needed to go to the former poor relief cashier's office. 56 After the universalization of the benefit, the maternity packages were available at the new type of municipal social welfare offices. Since 1994, Kela, the Finnish Social Insurance Institution, has been responsible for administering the provision of the maternity packages. In the course of the 1980s, families increasingly began to receive the baby boxes by mail, meaning that the person giving the box to its receiver was no longer a representative of the welfare system. The institutional connection to the welfare state, however, remained strong even after this change, since the precondition for the benefit continued to be a visit to an antenatal clinic. The maternity package and its care items have also had an important role in raising discussion at clinics, between midwives and parents, and between parents in peer groups. Still, in the written reminiscences collected in 2020–2021, antenatal clinics and child health centres are not the main sites for the narrated experience, but homes. This points to the shifting spatial scales and settings of welfare that are mobilized by the baby box.
In the reminiscences of parents of different decades, collecting the package and opening it for the first time is an embodied and sensory experience that is associated with practical-material concerns as well as feelings of excitement: I picked up the maternity package with our Beetle from the social office in the city centre. The box was quite large, and I had to fit it through the door to the back seat of the Volkswagen, trying to be careful not to get it dirty. Opening the package at home was exciting, like the best Christmas present ever.
57
Receiving and using the maternity package has also meant reproducing the meanings and values of the welfare society at the nexus of encounters between the objects, bodies and social relations among family and friends. Before getting their own first baby box, many contributors to the memory collection had been acquainted with the boxes of their siblings’ or friends’ families. 58 Together, people have looked at, touched and commented on the baby box items, especially baby clothes, and parents have shared experiences and knowledge, more recently increasingly online. Grown-up children have explored their baby boxes with their parents, often after planning to have their own children. 59
In the early years, the baby box was a novelty, or as one respondent put it, ‘a wonder that we had not seen earlier’. In the mid-1950s, when Aili, the wife of the respondent's uncle, opened the package cover and took out the items, the whole family gathered around to see it. 60 The maternity package also retained a novelty value when it was taken for several children in the same family, symbolizing a fresh start: ‘The new package was always a new experience. There were nicer [things] and something extra.’ 61 Parents became attached to the baby box clothing, even to those that ‘in the beginning did not please the eye.’ 62 The newness of the clothing was a central value especially in the immediate post-war era and still in the early-1960s in more peripheral areas, where there were fewer baby clothes available in the shops. For the parents of the 1960s, the maternity package also became a means to distinguish themselves from the material austerity of their own childhood. 63 The package therefore signalled societal progress and modernity in the context of the growing welfare state.
The respondents of the memory collection confirm the effectiveness of the state-level institutional use of the maternity package as an educational tool. They explain how getting the box made more concrete the imminent arrival of a new family member and all that was involved. For example, many recall the tiny nail scissors as a token of the caring welfare state: ‘I hadn't seen such small scissors anywhere in the shops. What an important accessory, which we never knew we needed!’ 64
Although the individual baby box items have changed over the years, many key objectives of the early welfare state, such as cleanliness and hygiene, 65 which were produced in relations to the material objects of the baby box, have been long-lasting. For example, an enamel covered bowl was included in the baby boxes and used for washing after changing nappies and boiling them until it was removed in the early 1970s. Demonstrating the changing practices of bathing babies, a thermometer was added to the box in 1999. Using the baby box objects, people reproduce and reinterpret welfare society goals in parental practices but not in a straightforward way. Sometimes people have left some items in the package unused. There may have been practical reasons for this, for example, some of the clothes being in the wrong size or not fitting to the recipients’ taste. Sometimes, the baby box items, the condoms being the most obvious case, may have given rise to negative feelings among the recipients. Interestingly, some baby box items have also had a second life – the enamel bowls, for instance, have ended up at summer houses and in saunas – thus continuing to serve as subtle material reminders of the welfare state in people's everyday surroundings.
Baby box objects have been entangled with the reoccurring emotional and sensory baby care measures: dressing and undressing the new-born, changing a nappy, combing the baby's hair, measuring temperature of the bath water and giving the baby a bath, making the bed, reading a bedtime story and putting the child to bed. These care practices can be seen as situated and momentary encounters in which welfare state meanings are formed, as ‘relational accounts of the processes of emergence and intermittence, foregrounding and backgrounding, individualizing and collectivizing, presence and absence’.
66
They are also intimate practices and moments of togetherness between parent and child. Answering the call to reminisce about the baby box and describing the everyday uses of its items, offered the participants a way to voice parental experiences and emotions, including love as well as negative feelings, such as sorrow in the case of the loss of a child.
67
Thus, the wider sphere of the welfare state and the intimate sphere of parenthood, family and home are interconnected in the baby box experience. The following quotation exemplifies this point. In an interesting way, the narrator changes her position in the middle of the text from an expectant mother to a more general commentor on maternity care in Finland, and back: The box would become the first bed for our baby, once she was born in the due course of time. I got the bed ready in good time. I sewed a ruffle onto the box made from a lace curtain, and for the inside, I folded a bottom sheet onto the existing mattress and a lacey bed sheet with a blanket. So, the maternity package already came during the pregnancy, a concrete, tangible thing, through which the whole maternity care became an integral part of Finnish families with children and women's health. Those ruffles I now touch with my hand and listen carefully to the baby moving inside me.
68
The narrator above refers to the long-standing tradition of decorating and using the baby box as the baby's first bed. The early maternity package guidebooks already advised mothers to decorate the baby's bed with a special ruffle. 69 Many chose to do so, often using old curtains or other fabrics, like the narrator above, who had her first child in 1967. Later on, there were also other ways to decorate the box, such as painting or covering it with contact plastics. 70 Decorating the box, especially in the early years, demonstrated one's compliance with institutional expectations concerning the proper uses of the box. At the same time, it was and is an act of personalization and reinterpretation, along with an expression of love and care for the unborn child, which turns a plain cardboard box and a mass-produced welfare-state item into a unique bed for a unique child. The practices of using the maternity package as the baby's first bed and of its embellishment have also been handed down in families from one generation to the next, showing how the experiences that the baby box transfers are shared and intergenerational. Several respondents indicate that in addition to the baby box being a practical solution for baby's first bed, they wanted to carry on a tradition. Sometimes the future parent made the ruffles based on family models, sometimes it was the aunt or grandparent who made them. 71 The baby box reminiscences give a nuanced account of intergenerational emotional and sensory encounters with the object and a sense of continuity in the family and within society. 72 The idea of caring that is strongly associated with the baby box, thus, works at multiple levels and in multiple interrelations.
As part of the intergenerational temporalities, the baby box is an object of the future. It relates not just to parents’ hopes but also to uncertainties concerning their children's future, the health and well-being of the child in particular, as well as expectations regarding a new-born's place in the family as a child and a sibling. 73 For the welfare state, the maternity package is a collection of items that should secure a fair start for everyone, and this wider societal meaning is also shared by many memory collection participants. Through all these levels, the baby box has represented a materialization of the utopian potential of the Finnish welfare state.
. A symbolic object of the welfare state
In recent years, the concept of the maternity package has been adopted in around 60 countries, ranging in scale from small and targeted to nationwide and initiated by governments, UN institutions, NGOs and individual hospitals. 74 James Reid and David Swann, when developing a culturally sensitive design concept of the baby box for use in Zambia, point to how different versions of the baby box always convey deeply symbolic messages. According to them, the exterior motif of the Finnish box, in colour and always having a theme based on nature, signals the cultural importance of the natural environment for Finns. 75 As we have seen, historically the Finnish maternity packages were plain brown or white cardboard boxes and quite institutional in appearance. People did the decorating of the boxes themselves, whereas the state did not see any need to convey symbolic messages in this way. This only happened later, in the 2010s, in response to parents’ requests. Moreover, I would argue, this change occurred in response to the growing international fame that definitively turned the baby box into a symbolic object of the welfare state nation. At the same time, the maternity package as a material object remained an important vehicle in the welfare state's attempts to educate parents in ‘proper’ ways of child-caring and to create feelings of care, belonging and equality.
Reid and Swan also note that in Finland the use of cardboard as the baby box's building material transmits the Nordic principles of social justice and equality.
76
Equality and inclusiveness are a pervasive theme that surfaces in people's baby box reminiscences and the shared experience produced in relation to the object. One mother, who was born in 1986 and had her first child in 2013, writes: It is amazing to think that babies who are born into very different families sleep in the shelter of the same sleeping bags. Thus, the baby box is also a symbol of an equal world, perhaps small, perhaps temporary, but still a strong sign that, even for a moment, different people can be tied together.
77
The cardboard box can be seen as a sign of equality. In addition, what is in the box, the baby clothes in particular, can be interpreted as a material transmission of the idea of equality: every age group of Finnish children gets the same first set of clothing. 78 Even though not all parents actually use the baby box sleeping sacks for their babies, many of them do and they at least all have the option to do so. Another piece of clothing mentioned several times by the reminiscence-collection participants and conveying equality through materiality, are the outdoor overalls included in the box since the early-1980s. From the sleeping bags in baby buggies and overalls that toddlers wear, it has been possible in public spaces to distinguish children who were born in the same year. 79 Both items can also be linked to the Finnish and Nordic ideal of a healthy, active child who plays outdoors. 80 Not dressing one's baby in the overalls, or other clothes included in the baby box, is also a choice, which may be practical or more ideological.
Over the decades, the baby box has been received by families whose life situations differ widely from each other. However, as a material object that is given and received, used and handled, the baby box has brought different social groups together into a shared sphere of welfare and care. One mother, who responded to the memory collection, describes this as follows: ‘Society accepted me as a mother, even though I had not given birth to a child, but adopted.’ 81
The fact that the baby box has served as a tool of equality and inclusion, does not make it automatically inclusive for all, for example for migrant groups and refugees. The research materials that I refer to in this article are silent about such forms of potential exclusion, as migrant experiences of the baby box have not been a topic of discussion in the press and the people who wrote their baby box memories do not have migrant backgrounds. Maiju Remes's Master's thesis in social anthropology among South-Asian immigrant mothers in Southern Finland, however, shows that despite differences in child-care practices and lacking intergenerational knowledge, these women place the baby box firmly within the narrative of the Finnish welfare state, focusing on pride and gratitude. 82 Other migrant groups may have different experiences, but the example of South-Asian immigrant women suggests that the concept of the baby box as a care and welfare object is relatively widely shared, even though individual items in the box could be more contested and used in varying ways.
That the baby box is inextricably linked to the cultural context of its giving and receiving is illustrated by its adoption in the UK. Since 2017, the Scottish Government has provided a free baby box for all new-borns in the country 83 and some hospitals in England have entered into a partnership with a US commercial baby box provider. In both countries, the narrative around the impact of baby boxes focused on their potential in reducing the incidence of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS). 84 In Finland, the box was framed from the outset as a safe sleeping place, however, never directly in relation to reducing SIDS but rather as a way to separate the baby's and mother's sleep to avoid the spread of infectious diseases. 85 Many who shared their memories of the baby box remembered the box as their baby's first bed. None of them, however, approached sleeping in the box from the point of view of safety, but rather, as described above, in relation to its wider intergenerational socio-cultural-material meanings.
In Scotland, sleeping in the box and whether it could reduce SIDS became the subject of a heated political debate in 2018 in which the government used the Finnish model to argue in favour of introducing the baby box concept. 86 This was disputed by the opposition and certain experts and at one point a representative of Kela was called upon to state in the Guardian that the Finnish government had never claimed that the decreased infant mortality in Finland was a result of the baby box alone. Rather, the low infant mortality was to be attributed to a wider set of maternity and infant health care measures, including the maternity benefit. 87 Blair et al., drawing on an alternative Nordic model, pointed out that the reduction of infant mortality in Finland to one of the lowest levels globally did not prove that sleeping in the baby box reduced SIDS, since: ‘Rates in neighbouring countries, such as Sweden and Denmark, are equally low, despite them not traditionally providing boxes’. 88 Historically, the other Nordic countries provided only financial maternity benefits. In Finland, the universal child benefit, which was paid in cash, had been introduced in 1948 and there were similar discussions around the maternity benefit around 1960. The Ministry of Social Affairs was strongly opposed to the change, as the maternity package had proven successful in bringing mothers to the clinics. 89 The experts understood that the way forward was to renew the material provisions from time to time.
People reminiscing about the baby box were also keen to discuss its exemplary role from an international comparative perspective. An account that is reproduced in several recollections is the way foreigners react to the box. Foreigners are depicted as looking up to the Finnish baby box as a model in Britain or in reference to Sweden as missing out on something very crucial about the essence of the welfare state. According to a woman born near the Finnish Swedish border in Northern Finland (Tornionjokivarsi Region), ‘the mothers on the Swedish side have always known about Finland's special maternity package, but they have not had access to such a benefit. How they would have loved to have one.’ 90 Traditionally, in Finland, the Nordic model represented a future normative standard ‘identified in everything that had ‘already” been achieved in Sweden’. 91 Here, the baby box is presented both as a nationally exclusive model and at the same time a necessary extension to the full enjoyment of a Nordic welfare model.
In the baby box reminiscences, foreigners are depicted as wondering about the peculiar Finnish ways of child-care, particularly letting the baby sleep in the box. One such example is the Russian son-in-law of one narrator, who, when tired of carrying the baby around in the nights, ‘finally understood the value of the box as a first bed.’ 92 Differentiating how children are taken care of in Finland in contrast to other countries is not merely a way people produce their sense of national belonging as a shared experience; it also involves politics of belonging.
The recent recognition of the baby box internationally as a social and health innovation has contributed to the contemporary narrative of the maternity package as a longstanding symbolic object of the Finnish welfare state. Some participants of the memory collection write specifically about how the maternity package they received had first and foremost ‘a huge symbolic value’, as ‘it signalled how much the state cared for the mother and the baby’. 93 Several authors describe the baby box as a gift from the welfare state nation, echoing the earlier nationalist framings as well as an idea that the baby box, as a gift, is part of a system of reciprocity. 94 The respondents born in the 1970s and the 1980s in particular write about the baby box as a more abstract symbol of equality. 95 Some narrators, on the other hand, explicitly frame the baby box through the everyday. One author suggests that granting the practical baby box a symbolic status would imply its undesirable divergence from everyday life and use. 96
The contemporary narrative of the maternity package as a symbolic object of the Finnish welfare state is visible in the public discussion: criticizing the box is often considered to be unacceptable. Gratitude is an emotion interwoven with the concept of gift: in the memories of the baby box, gratitude is framed both as a personal feeling and as a wider societal experience. Some, especially elderly authors, write how young parents should be grateful to receive the baby box. 97 When someone does not seem grateful enough, this may be denounced as being incongruent with the shared narrative and experience. Nevertheless, the sustainability of the maternity package has been recently debated in public. Some people see the package as a symbol of overconsumption and question its need in most families. 98 These views have provoked comments for and against, but one theme in the recent debate has been that those who criticize the baby box have been seen to downplay its association with the shared experience of intergenerational belonging and its symbolic significance for its recipients. 99
Conclusion
The maternity package serves as an entry point to the changing dynamics of the Finnish welfare state and particularly to the relationships between the multiple actors and scales involved in the production of the (experience of) welfare. Applying for, receiving and using the package has produced encounters between babies and parents, family members of different generations, and families, midwives, and local and state-level authorities. The baby box has brought into interaction the professional guidelines, symbolic meanings and the families’ own material and intergenerational but evolving care practices. The welfare system has gained legitimacy through these material encounters. The co-production of the intimate and the broader scales of welfare through experience and materiality, makes the baby box an important case for welfare histories in the Nordic context and beyond. The longevity of the popularity of the baby box allows several interpretations of the Nordic model of welfare: other countries utilizing the Nordic model for inspiration; an extension of the Nordic model, including the central role of the state, in relation to materiality; or the Finnish model standing on its own, separate from other Nordic countries.
Since 1949, as the maternity benefit became (nearly) universal, it began to represent a more direct relationship between the individual and the state; 100 however, it is never entirely distanced from the biopolitics of the state. The maternity package has had wide-ranging utopian and nationalistic potential from the beginning as a sign of societal progress and modernity in the context of the growing welfare state, materialized in the new and unused baby box clothes and other objects, and building future expectations towards family life and the welfare state. Over the years, the box, as part of the wider institutional setting of maternity care, has adjusted to the changing needs of both state and people, thus exemplifying how shared experiences as reciprocal interaction between individuals and society – and materiality, as this article has demonstrated – can contribute to change within institutions. 101 Perhaps recycled boxes, as hoped by some parents, will be the next step, supporting the idea of the sustainable welfare state.
The article has also shown that we should pay more attention to the affective formation of welfare-state meanings and experiences in momentary and often routinized encounters between human bodies, objects and spaces. By becoming part of the home and recurring emotional and sensory childcare practices, the baby box has carried the welfare-state values of care and equality, with its capacity to bring different groups in society together into a shared sphere of experience aiming to transcend class and regional background.
This article has shown that the forming of a shared sphere of experience is dependent on several factors: the maternity package has been embedded into welfare state structures, institutions and practices over a long period of time; it connects with the pivotal event of the birth of one's child; the baby box is almost universally received by Finnish families; and it is part of the wider national narrative of the making of the welfare state, constructed also in relation to the symbolic role and approval abroad. In addition, the subsequent reminiscing about encounters with the baby box produces a sense of belonging to the welfare state as a shared experience. Still, there is nothing universal about the baby box experience; it is both shared and situated, inclusive and exclusive, central and peripheral. Objects, such as the baby box, do not elicit meanings and experiences as such on their own, but in relation to the socio-materialities of each time and place.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the Kone Foundation (grant number 3122800582) and the Research Council of Finland Centre of Excellence in the History of Experiences (grant number 352730).
