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The paper deals with the recent) the two past decades) development of Finnish legislation concerning the child. It is shown that children grow up more and more commonly in more than one single family. Additionally, family forms other than the nuclear family based on the marriage of the child's parents have become more widespread as the child's growth environment. Social welfare legislation has reacted to these changes by a tendency to consider the child as an independent object of measures and an independent receipient of rights. Also in family legislation a similar—but less marked—tendency may be observed. The authors assume that the "legislative lag" in family legislation as compared with social welfare legislation may be understood as follows: social welfare legislation deals with the distribution of material benefits whereas family legislation may be seen as codifying socio-ethical evaluations concerning the family. The diffusion of overtly moral innovations thus seems to be much slower than the diffusion of innovations with a primarily material contents.