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Here’s a proposition: Rather than delight your kid once or twice a year with a big, expensive present that will eventually get put aside, why not surprise them with a small, delightful package once a month? I have two kids, a 6-year-old and an 8-year-old. They are thrilled when something arrives in the mail that isn’t bills, replacement chargers from Amazon, or Garnet Hill catalogs.
Subscription boxes can be useful supplements for remote learning. Some of them are consumable, so your kid can have a treat that won't be left to molder in a corner of a playroom until they're 25. They're also handy to have around the house if you can’t send your sniffly kid to school or to a big indoor birthday party. They’re also usually affordable! I tested some of the subscriptions on this list, and I bought others for my kids and their friends. These are our favorites.
Be sure to check out all of our other buying guides for kids, including the Best STEM toys, Best Kids’ Headphones, Best Tablets for Kids, and Best Tech Gifts for Kids.
Updated November 2023: We added the Lovevery parent course packs, Stitch Fix for kids, Kidpik, Eat2Explore, Curio Books, StoryCaptain, the Amazon kids book box, and Zollie, and updated links and pricing.
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For years, my parents have sent a monthly Kiwi Crate to my children. My 6-year-old son now receives some of the same themed crates my 8-year-old received at his age. Kiwi Crate offers a staggering array of gift boxes for all ages, from toddlers under 2 to teenagers. You can also choose boxes aimed at specific interests, such as music, mazes, holiday crafts, and robots.
The sheer amount of stuff in most gift subscription boxes can be overwhelming, especially for smaller children. That's why I particularly like Kiwi's careful curation. The instructions are clear enough that my 6-year-old can follow them easily. The projects are fun and age-appropriate, but it doesn't break my kids' hearts when they inevitably lose or destroy them, like sewing together a baseball mitt made out of felt. Each box also includes clear instructions that require little parental supervision—my kids can follow the drawings, even if they have trouble parsing the written instructions. My son got the walking robot in a recent crate and put it together himself. I don't know who was prouder, him or me.
We received a (spendy!) Lovevery kit when my son was 2 years old. Now he’s 6, and I still find the company’s sturdy, Montessori-inspired toys in use around our house. Lovevery (pronounced “love-every”) promotes what it calls stage-based learning. At each stage of development, a baby needs different (beautiful, colorful, durable) toys to help them develop different parts of their brain.
It’s pretty cute to term every stage with a different focus, like The Inspector or The Explorer, although I have to admit that I’m not so sure my son enjoyed experimenting with gravity that much more at 10 months than at a year old (he still dropped things on the floor is what I’m saying). My much older daughter also enjoyed arranging giant, gorgeous felt flowers just as much as my son did. If you’re a special person in a little one’s life and want to send them toys that are attractive and sturdy enough to pass down to others, this is the best toy subscription to get.
★ Alternative: Is your toddler going through a specific (very annoying) phase and you need some help? Lovevery now offers parent course packs (starts at $50) to address needs like potty training or getting a new sibling. The course pack comes with access to the Lovevery app, video content, toys, and books.
If you and your family are struggling to find reading material for your required 20 minutes of reading per day for school (that's not Wings of Fire or Bear Snores On over and over again), I highly recommend a book subscription. We paid for a Literati subscription until its curation system worked against them. Literati offers book clubs that take newborn children all the way up to their teens. Literati will send your child five books each month. Return any books that you don't like and pay Amazon's list price for the rest. Every single book was a hit, and each kid had to have every book in every box. For the sake of my wallet and our already-groaning bookshelves, I had to stop the subscription.
You can gift a subscription or a one-time, age-appropriate theme box that comes with a card and personalized stickers and artwork. It's a great way to expose your children (and yourself!) to wonderful new works of art or literature without having to drag them to a bookstore.
★ Alternatives: Over the years, we have tried so many book subscriptions. If you or your child are bilingual, you might want to consider Curio ($55/month), which currently offers themed books and audio reading guides in different age ranges for Spanish, Chinese, and French. StoryCaptain ($25/month) offers themed book boxes with activity guides and small toys; Doctor Ted was one of my son's favorite books for weeks. The most affordable is probably Amazon's own Book Box ($20/month) for Prime subscribers. I do have to note here that I personally found the book selection from smaller companies to be much more engaging.
This is actually the best box. This is the box that I spend my money on every month. My kids tear into the Universal Yums snack box like a very small pack of very tiny wolves. My colleague Louryn Strampe recommends it in her Best Snack Boxes guide. You can choose a small, medium, or large box, and it includes an informative booklet, games, and trivia.
Food is a great way to learn about geography and different cultures. Every month, my kids and I open the box, look at a globe, and do a lot of Googling. We have liked several foreign candies enough to start ordering them separately on Amazon. Even when the snacks aren't a hit—I got the salted truffle French fries all to myself—my kids always try them and ask a lot of questions about why a country is called the Kingdom of Butterflies and when we can visit.
Just as parents used to give their children tiny kitchen sets and toy hammers, now we've got coding kits. Even if kids don't grow up to become professional software engineers, basic programming fluency will undoubtedly come in handy. The Bitsbox is aimed at children who can already read and write. Following the instructions in the booklet, your child can create a simple app to use on any computer, tablet, or smartphone with a web browser (although younger children will probably require a lot of supervision).
Little Passports caters to a variety of ages and interests, with an Early Explorers box aimed at children as young as 3. The activities for younger users are adorable and engaging, and the science boxes for older kids offer creative introductions to a wide variety of subjects. I tested the introductory kit, which was on forensic science. I don't recall having learned anything about forensic science, even in high school, and I had never extracted the DNA from a squashed strawberry before. It was fascinating.
★ Alternative: I also very much enjoyed the Steve Spangler Science Club box ($33), which features classic hands-on projects. You might think you could put together a simple marshmallow masher yourself. But do you have time to look for old soda bottles? No.
We also recently tested Little Passports' Craft Discovery line, which sends your child one themed, seasonal craft per month. Boxes have included a Spooky Shadow Box kit for Halloween and a Winter Glow Cottage for December. We received the Summer Party Piñatas kit and the Easter Egg Artist kit, and both were tremendous hits. I found that the projects, like assembling and decorating a little posterboard cactus, or weaving a basket out of yarn, were engaging but easy enough for my 5- and 8-year-old to do without too much assistance on my part. Both kits were also pretty substantial. Two piñatas and 24 decorated eggs are way more than two kids needed. This would be a good kit if you wanted to purchase just one for multiple kids.
★ Alternatives: The Kids Craft Boxes ($48) are aimed at kids 3-7 and despite the high price was quite extensive—5 activities can keep a young kid occupied for quite a while! The box is billed as “no prep, no planning,” but I did have to find extra paint brushes, trays, and jars for my kids to craft together.
We also received a few Zollie (starts at $55) craft kits. I have to say that these boxes are not subscription-based, but you can order up to 5 kits at once. Each kit comes with everything you need to complete several small fiber-art projects, like embroidering flowers or knitting washcloths. My 8-year-old spent several happy afternoons looking up the QR code, watching the videos, and teaching herself how to do slip stitches and French knots. If you have crafty or artsy kids, I very highly recommend these kits.
Kids aren’t naturally empathetic. Entertaining books that feature a diverse cast of characters are one of the best ways to show them what life is like for families that are interracial or LGBTQ+. Little Feminist is expressly anti-racist, body-positive, trans- and gender-inclusive, and against ableism and classism. Memberships start at $5 per month, are age-appropriate, and each package includes a book (or two, if they’re small) along with an activity, discussion card, and family letter to explain why the company picked this book.
What I like best about the selections Little Feminist sent us is that the books aren’t didactic. Rather than lecturing children on racism or inequality, they simply show diverse families and kids doing … well, the exact same things that cisgender, white, heterosexual families also do. Mama and Mommy and Me in the Middle showed a queer interracial family where a parent went on a work trip, just like my spouse happened to be doing when we read it. It never even occurred to my children to comment that this family might have looked different than ours, which is the way it should be.
Cooking and baking subscription boxes are some of the best subscription boxes I've tried. Feeding kids every day is a chore, and I welcome any way to get some variety. Bake Eat Love is the first kit that I was just as excited to try as my kids.
With that said, the Bake Eat Love boxes are probably best suited for an older age group, with slightly more sophisticated palates. We tried the sampler box with tiramisu cupcakes. While I love the light, fluffy texture of tiramisu and the innovative recipe, my 5-year-old was perturbed to find that that a cupcake he assumed was chocolate tasted more like Mommy's coffee. The kit does include a few prepackaged ingredients, but as with most cooking and baking sets, you do have to have a basic set of cooking utensils and a few ingredients that might require an extra shopping trip, like mascarpone.
★ Alternatives: I have gifted several Raddish Kids cooking club subscriptions ($24) to several nieces and nephews. The recipes are extremely easy for little kids to follow (my children particularly loved making pretzels), and the included tiny utensils are adorable and perfect for tiny hands (and for moms who just like using tiny things). We also tried Eat2Explore ($30), which was founded by a graduate of the French Culinary Institute. Each box features fun tools, nonperishable seasonings, recipe cards, and educational booklets from different countries. Salmon teriyaki was not the right pick for a child who has described fish as smelling like “stinky garbage,” but he did love using the included chopsticks. It was a relatively affordable, fun opportunity to expand his palate.
As my kids have gotten older, shopping for their clothes has become a misery. One child has sensory issues. He hates stiff or tight fabrics, clothes that are too fuzzy, dumb graphics, certain colors, all jackets. The other is a budding fashionista who stands in front of her closet, just flinging things to the ground. Whenever I find a sweatshirt or pant they will wear, Target immediately discontinues it and my cycle of living hell continues.
It's expensive, but you can start or stop your subscription as needed. You enter your child's age and sizes; color preferences and patterns to avoid; themes that they like; features to avoid (no crop tops); activities they like; and most importantly, budgets for every category. Stitch Fix sends you a box and you and your child keep what you like and send back the rest. My 8-year-old loved everything. Given my stated budgets, I'm not surprised that many of these garments simply did not hold up. However, we did get many months of hard wear out of certain beloved sandals and shorts. This is an easy way to update wardrobes for kids that grow out of everything and are starting to voice their own preferences.
★ Alternative: I also tried a box from Kidpik (starts at $100) for my 6-year-old. Kidpik's selection is so appealing and stylish that my husband asked if the clothes came in his size. The clothes are much sturdier than the Stitch Fix selections, which included sandals that my daughter loved that we had to stick together back with tape. However, the selection is much smaller. Stitch Fix's extensive style quiz ensures that there's at least a fighting chance that your child will like any given garment.
Kids are small factories of chaos. The constant stream of worksheets, drawings, and crafts is great for encouraging creativity and hand-eye coordination, but every surface in our house is perpetually cluttered. Rather than contributing to the mess, the Keke (Keep Every Kid Engaged) bag keeps every item organized. This frankly adorable, durable, handled bag has four activities in separate pouches that clip into binder rings, and extra storage pockets for masks or hand sanitizer. Every 12 weeks, the Keke subscription sends three new activities in new pouches to swap out. (You need to buy the bag separately.)
Even though the activities are aimed at 3-to-6-year-olds (and some, like a simple puzzle, were too easy even when my son was 5), I love these bags for travel. I’ve been experimenting with different travel organizers to hold all my kids' markers, stickers, and card games for travel and the Keke Bag is the best I’ve seen yet.
This has been a pretty news-heavy few years. Other parents may disagree with me, but my kids really want to know what's going on in the world around us—in a safe, understandable, kid-friendly way, of course. The Week Junior is aimed at 8- to 14-year-olds, and my 8-year-old can now read it herself. Every week, we cuddle on the couch while they look at pictures and pick out which current events to read about, like the Olympics, or whether apps should have likes. It's a great way to keep my kids informed without worrying that they'll hear swear words in my podcasts.
★ Alternative: I read Cricket magazines when I was a kid, so I was also delighted to find that the company still offers publications for kids ages 0-14. The selection ranges by age and subject matter, but in general these are a good pick if your child prefers to read well-written fiction or nonfiction stories, rather than keeping up with current events. Don't forget to examine the margins for tiny stories threading through the bigger ones.
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