New parents are still receiving baby boxes from 2024 as Finland's benefits agency, Kela, continues distributing leftover stock amid the country’s falling birth rates.
No family has gotten the 2025 maternity package yet, according to Kela, which has faced puzzled feedback about the situation.
"Our guess at this point is that the package will switch within a month," said Kela coordinator Veera Petäjä, who helps develop and oversee the procurement of the maternity packages. She added that the estimate could shift in either direction.
Kela procures and orders maternity packages about two years in advance. Estimating the right number is difficult, as predicting birth rates that far ahead is challenging.
For example, in the early 2020s, more babies were born than expected, leading Kela to assume the upward trend would continue. That didn't happen, leaving a surplus of last year's packages still to be distributed.
The agency said it is now trying to balance the current situation by ordering fewer packages for the coming years.
Kela announced last year that it was suspending the procurement of products for 2026 baby boxes due to the decline in birth rate.
The birth rate in Finland dropped for the third consecutive year in 2024, reaching the lowest level in the country's recorded history, according to Statistics Finland.
Kela considers removing year labels
The benefits agency is considering eliminating the year label from the baby boxes as part of a broader rethink of the package's terminology.
"Giving up the year number could help people not to be disappointed by changes in schedules," said Petäjä from Kela.
The idea has come up before at Kela, but no official steps have been taken to progress from preliminary discussions, according to Petäjä.
Under the proposed change, the maternity package would still be updated annually. However, the goal would be for recipients to happily accept whichever version is available at the time, whether it was released in the current or previous year.
Petäjä noted that people often prefer the newest package, even though the differences in contents from year to year are minor.
"The products in the package are always new, regardless," she said.
However, Petäjä said changing the terminology might prove difficult in practice, as referring to the package by its release year is ingrained in Finnish culture.
The Finnish maternity package has a long tradition, with baby boxes first introduced in 1938.
