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Stop Mailing Your Children (June 13)

Here’s a bizarre story: It used to be legal to mail your children. It didn’t happen all that much, but it did happen.

June 13, 2026

Estimated reading time: 4 minutes

It goes without saying that you shouldn’t try to package your child and send them through the mail, but that is exactly what some Americans parents did between 1913-1920. Hey, it was cheaper than sending them on the train.

1920: Mailing Children is Banned

A mail carrier with a child in his bag — *(Flickr/Smithsonian)*

In 1913, the U.S. Parcel Post service began serving American households. It helped people send packages through the mail easier and less expensive than before. Sometimes that meant mailing children.

The Vintage News reports that in 1913, Mr. and Mrs. Jesse Beauge from Ohio chose to mail their 8-month-old son to this grandmother via the postal service. They paid just 15 cents for the privilege. The grandparents lived only a mile away, but still…

The following year, a 5-year-old girl was sent to visit her grandparents 70 miles away. The girl had 53 cents worth of postage stamps glued to her coat. She traveled in the mail car and arrived safely.

“Postage was cheaper than a train ticket” United States Postal Service historian, Jenny Lynch told the Smithsonian Magazine in 2016. “Mail carriers were trusted servants, and that goes to prove it. There are stories of rural carriers delivering babies and taking [care of the] sick. Even now, they’ll save lives because they’re sometimes the only persons that visit a remote household every day.”

There are other incidents of folk mailing their children, but on this day in 1920, the Post Office Department announced that they were officially banning the practice of mailing kids. One has to wonder why it took them seven years to make that decision.