KiwiCo (Prepaid Annual Plan)
Rather than give your kid a big, expensive present once or twice a year, why not surprise them with subscription boxes for kids once a month? I have an 8-year-old and a 10-year-old, and they are thrilled when a package arrives in the mail that isn’t bills, replacement chargers from Amazon, or Garnet Hill catalogs.
Subscription boxes for kids can be useful educational supplements for homeschool or remote learning. Most 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 a big indoor birthday party. As a bonus, they’re usually affordable. I tested some of the subscriptions on this list, like the Lovevery Reading Skill Set 3-box set ($160), and I bought others for my kids and their friends. These are our favorites. Be sure to check out our other buying guides for kids, including the Best Strollers, the Best Kids Bikes, and the Best STEM Toys.
Updated November 2025: We refreshed information on all the crates, added new pictures, and added the Lovevery reading skill set box, CrunchLabs Creative Kits, Bookroo, and Enlightened Generation. We also updated links and prices.
Best Box for All Ages
Kiwi Crate
We subscribed to Kiwi Crate's monthly subscription for so long that the company sent us a cautious email asking whether it was OK that we were getting repeat boxes. I now check in every year to discover that yes, the company's boxes are still amazing. Each box comes with a single, delightful, themed activity that's appropriate for a kid aged anywhere from a few months old to 18 years. A recent Delivery Bot ($24) aimed for 9+ years entertained my 8-year-old son for an afternoon.
I can't extoll the virtues of this crate enough. The instructions are clear enough for young kids to follow. The pieces are easy for little fingers to manipulate (he did need some adult help adjusting the wheels), and the final project is always delightful: a little remote-controlled delivery bot that you can put things in and drive your sister and mother (literally) crazy!
Kiwi Crate offers various gift boxes for all ages, from toddlers under 2 to teenagers. You can also select one-off boxes for specific interests, such as music, mazes, holiday crafts, and robots, or different themes, like Atlas Crates for geography or Doodle Crates for drawing. Kiwi is noted for its careful curation—the projects are fun and age-appropriate, but it doesn't break my kids' hearts when they inevitably lose or destroy them. If you're looking for just one crate, get this one and no one in your house will be disappointed.
Best Clothing Box
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Kids Clothes Box
As my kids have gotten older, shopping for their clothes has become more and more difficult. One child has sensory issues. He hates stiff or tight fabrics, clothes that are too fuzzy, certain colors, and all jackets. The other is a budding fashionista who is on a running team and dances and needs workout clothes, baggy jeans, or whatever else happens to not be in her closet at the moment. Whenever I find a sweatshirt they will wear, Target immediately discontinues it and my cycle of living hell continues.
Stitch Fix will cure what ails you, and you can start or stop your subscription as needed. You enter your child's age and size; 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. I recently re-tested the box with my now-10-year-old, and both of us liked the new picks. I was able to easily get an assortment of athletic clothing for her, as well as a cloud sweater she adores. This is an easy way to update wardrobes for kids who grow out of everything instantaneously and are really hard to shop for.
★ Alternative: I also tried a box from Kidpik (starts at $100) for my now-8-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. However, the selection is much smaller, and my son rejected half the clothes that Kidpik sent. Stitch Fix's extensive style quiz ensures that there's at least a fighting chance that your child will like any given garment.
Best Puzzles
Puzzlemania Book Club Subscription
My kids are 8 and 10, and they are obsessed with puzzles of all kinds. This is great because they are at the age when they need to practice reading, and there are only so many times you can force them to reenact The Lord of the Rings trilogy. The classic children's publisher Highlights also offers a few different reading and activity boxes, in addition to the iconic magazine. My kids and I tried the I Can Read book club ($14/month) and the Puzzlemania subscription ($4/month). Puzzlemania was delightful.
Each puzzle book is 32 pages and has a wide variety of puzzles, including sticker puzzles, word searches, Mad Libs–style storytelling, and riddles. We spent several afternoons filling in sticker puzzle pieces and playing the Highlights version of Sudoku. They both loved this puzzle pack so much that I bought the Highlights Great Big Book of Really Hard Puzzles ($13), which I'm anticipating will keep them occupied for at least one weekend trip or two.
Best Science Box
Hack Pack
This is coming with a big disclaimer: CrunchLabs, the company founded by former NASA engineer and YouTuber Mark Rober, says that its Hack Pack is for people over 14 years old. However, my 8-year-old put it together with minimal help in an afternoon, although it did take him much longer than the 60-minute estimated time for a teenager. ("Why are you so worried, Mama?" he admonished me when I showed skepticism. "The drawings show you exactly what to do.") Each box has a robot to assemble that illustrates a STEM principle, complete with a battery and an Arduino microcontroller. You can also unlock a video, but the drawings in the included manual were clear and big enough that we could put it together without the help of the internet.
Our box had the infrared turret to illustrate the principle of infrared communication. My 8-year-old was thrilled, hiding it and using the infrared remote to ambush his sister with a barrage of foam darts. You can also unlock a web-based coding console to hack the robot by locking out other users. It's expensive, but the price-per-payoff valuation is worth it—the STEM principle it illustrated was interesting, the build process was engaging without being frustrating, and the project itself was very fun.
★ Alternatives: I love Mark Rober, so this is obviously the best box, but there are a ton of different science boxes. Kiwi Crate has a dedicated science crate. For much younger kids, Little Passports has an Early Explorers box ($25/month) aimed at children as young as 3. Science Expeditions is aimed at children over the age of 8; the projects are a little bizarre, like extracting the DNA from a strawberry. Neither my child nor I knew what we were supposed to do with this. Finally, a lot of people like Steve Spangler's Science Club STEM kits ($35), which are huge and come with multiple projects. These are fairly simple, like a marshmallow masher that you could Google yourself and make with stuff you probably have at home. However, I thought it was worth it to have the lesson and objects bundled so I didn't have to drink and empty a plastic soda bottle myself.
Best Craft Kit
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Creative Kit
CrunchLabs is great, but it is aimed at older kids—my son needed a bit of help. The newly launched Creative Kit is aimed at 6- to 10-year-olds, so it's for a slightly younger demographic. I'm shocked at how well-thought-out these kits are. CrunchLabs sent the Ice Cream Stand and the Architect's Treehouse. The morning after both of the crates were assembled, both begged to get more.
Even after my 8-year-old son had put together the tiny ice cream stand, he continued to play with it all afternoon. It comes with delightful little accessories, like moldable ice cream in different “flavors” (colors), little toppings, and tiny cones and cups. (I was just offered a tiny scoop of “Super Strawberry Smash.”) Unlike most tie-dye or pinwheel kits, the Creative Kit encourages play long after the craft has been completed. My 10-year-old likes these better than the Kiwi Crates because “it's like building a tiny town!”
Best Reading Support Box
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Reading Skills Support Box
Now, my third-grader is a voracious reader. But it took him a few years and some hurdles to get to this point. In that time, the Reading Skill Set ($155) by Lovevery was invaluable. These books and games are a complete homeschool reading curriculum aimed at kindergarten through the second grade, but we used them as supplementary materials. Each set comes with three separate components: lovely, sturdy games; a few books; and parent course materials to explain both.
The set was particularly crucial for my son during the second grade years. I particularly liked that the skill set addressed common errors and advanced vowel rules. It is really hard to remember what the letter “e” does in a word! My son found the board game to be very fun, like Chutes & Ladders but for word play. It was almost a disappointment when we realized, at the end of the summer, that he could actually read perfectly.
Best Book Club
Book Club
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 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 up to their teens. Literati will send your child five books each month. Return any books you don't like and pay Amazon's list price for the rest. Every 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 with a card, personalized stickers, and artwork. It's a great way to expose your children (and yourself!) to wonderful new works of art or literature without dragging them to a bookstore.
★ Alternatives: Having to send back books your kid loves is a trap. If you want to just get and keep a book subscription, Bookroo ($20) is what you want; my son's first box just arrived with The Map Trap, of Andrew “Frindle” Clements fame, and he loves it. Also, if you or your child is bilingual, you might want to consider Curio ($58/quarterly), which currently offers themed books and audio reading guides in different age ranges for Spanish, Chinese, and French.
Best Snack Box
Snack Box
This is the best box. And kids need to snack every day anyway, so you might as well read and learn while you're at it. 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 and Best Subscriptions 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.