New Jersey is taking a page out of a foreign nation's book and using it to give new parents a helping hand.
According to the Huffington Post, the state's Child Fatality and Near Fatality Review Board (CFNFRB) is partnering with the Baby Box Company to gift parents of newborns a shipment of essentials upon a child's birth.
Jennifer Clary, the CEO and co-founder of Baby Box Company, told HuffPo,
Our goal is to provide universal access to both education and physical resources for New Jersey parents. These two components go hand in hand.
Baby Box provides literal boxes filled with goods that, once emptied out, can be used as beds for newborns. In Finland, it's customary for boxes like these to be handed out by the government to all new mothers.
For the Nordic country, it's a tradition that spans back more than eight decades. But New Jersey will be executing its own rendition for the first time.
Here's how the distribution of these boxes will work.
Parents can sign up for the service online, where they will be prompted to take a quick education briefing on child care. After reviewing the material and taking the quiz, parents are free to pick up the baby boxes at certain sites. The boxes can also be shipped, HuffPo reports.
Meanwhile, there is the hope these boxes will help prevent infant deaths. Research points out that a high number of infant deaths are actually caused by sleep environments.
Dr. Kathryn McCans, chair of the CFNFRB, told the site,
The important thing to remember about the baby box is the real prevention is the education that comes with the box. In taking the online syllabus, we hope parents will learn the importance of safe sleep environments, thus reducing the number of fatalities related to unsafe sleep environments.
The state is expected to hand out over 100,000 baby boxes throughout the calendar year, thus proving Jersey actually does get things right... sometimes.
Citations: Huffington Post
