For a brief period of time in the early twentieth century, it was quasi-legal to mail children in the United States. On January 1, 1913, the U.S. Post Office introduced Parcel Post, which raised the limit on items that could be mailed from four pound to eleven pounds. Soon after, a family in Ohio mailed their eight-month-old son, who was not quite eleven pounds, to his grandmother, a few miles away.[1]

According to accounts from the time, "People immediately started testing its limits by mailing eggs, bricks, snakes and other unusual 'packages.' So were people allowed to mail their children? Technically, there was no postal regulation against it."[2] And mailing a child was less expensive than buying them a train ticket--the above-mentioned baby cost only fifteen cents to mail. Older and larger childr...

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