That's not even factoring in time and convenience.
I am convinced cloth diapers are some kind of performative environmentalialsm or performative motherhood akin to the trad wife phenomenon.
I would struggle to find single-use nappies for $1.5 per week in my area.
But these people talking about diaper washing services, at that point, surely what is the point? I guess the thought of diapers in a landfill keeps some folks up at night.
You're willing to wash and re-use for one kid but not then to let the next one re-use? So does that mean the wash doesn't get the diaper clean? And if that's true, why re-use them at all for anyone?
- Put your child on the potty during changes, and first thing in the morning. Build’s association and encourages bladder control. Do this long before trying to get them out of nappies.
- Reusable wipes are also a massive win. We have face wipes and bum wipes, basically just soft cotton. Bit of water under a tap and your good.
- Our biggest hurdle for moving away from nappies was nursery, as they wouldn’t consistently put a younger toddler on a potty.
- Introducing a potty earlier means less poopy nappies, turns out even a toddler dislikes pooping their pants.
- Expect a stupid amount of laundry, and the nappies to leak a bit ( so more laundry ). You also can’t use a drier with them as it damages the water proofing layer.
- Travelling is harder… Used nappies should be cleaned within 3 days, so expect to take dirty nappies away with you for washing plus clean nappies/boosters/cloths/bags.
- It’s easy to buy new/almost new/good condition second hand. Either people want to do it but don’t get on with it, or never start, or potty trained. Means a significant reduction in cost. But expect ones that have been used less to be more water proof and Velcro to work better etc.
- Our daughter loved playing with the clean ones, putting them on toys, using cloths etc. Probably helps they have cool designs on the outside. I expect a disposable wouldn’t work well after it had been played with.
- If you need to use disposables while you’re away etc the chemicals can cause rashes after your child has adjusted to their absence.
- When they start weaning you have to “remove the solids” before washing. Yes this is unpleasant, but more often than not is just upending it over toilet. You get used to it. Same as nappy changes in general and washing nappies.
- When we did swap to pants we didn’t do anything special. Just stop nappies, ensure you have a potty nearby, and deal with it for a few days. It’s uncomfortable for them and they learn fast. Expect a bit of frustration and wanting the old routine back.
It's obvious only if you save and reuse the same set of cloth diapers for 2 or more babies. (Which places some constrains on brand, durability etc.) If you have only one kid, I am not sure which side is environmentally more friendly; growing and processing all that cotton (not to mention the plastic for all the waterproof covers) uses a lot of water and energy...
The energy saving would not be as clear to me, but i wouldn't be surprised if reusable were a better choice there as well, just not as clear cut.
The amount of waste generated by disposable diapers was a concern, and we tried reusable ones. But they leaked often, the absorption material in disposable ones is way better than the cotton pads you get with reusable ones.
I would be happy with a middle ground. Reusable outer "pants" and a disposable insert designed well to work with the reusable part, as plastic free as possible.
I never had any trouble with cloth diapers. You can always have a blow out with any diaper, but I didn't have any issues beyond that. Of course, there's some technique, but it's easy enough to find a YouTube tutorial if you need it. Snappies and decent covers help.
We also got a good number of used diapers on Offer Up.
When we're done with our diapers, we will rehome them instead of throwing them out.
How does this change your calculations?
Someone else on here seemed confused about the logistics off the service. We lived in Brooklyn at the time. A big truck would drive around our neighborhood and pick up and drop off diapers from many people throughout the neighborhood at once. More amortization at work.
Also, one more thing: we're big on line drying. We will primarily line dry these diapers instead of drying them in a machine.
Oh, and one MORE thing: we got our current washer and dryer free from a friend who was about to throw them out when replacing them.
There are so many ways to mitigate and reduce environmental impact beyond the simple-minded apples-to-apples comparison many in this thread seem to be doing.
... or buy and sell second hand. Reusable nappies treated well retain surprising value.
We used glass bottles and a diaper service (we're from Santa Cruz) and people made fun. Then right after there were questions about chemicals from plastic bottles and our friends understood.
A quick search to see if there are also concerns about diapers returns https://www.ehn.org/non-toxic-diapers
A service is super easy. You can still use disposable for edge cases if needed. Why risk wrapping your child in highest profit possible+maximum convenience chemical creations 24/7 for years? Convience+chemicals+corporate profit greed have proven to be the worst combination for healthy/safe products in our capitalist system.
energy is free, it comes from the sun.
cotton is free, it grows from the ground.
plastic is not free, there will never be more of it. I think that resolves the equation.
(this is an oversimplification obviously but I wanted to reframe it from "how much of our current resources does this action use" to "how much of our TOTAL resources does this action use")
i agree with your overall point though.
What about this is obvious? Water usage, transportation, fabrication factors, different usage patterns; seems like there are many things to tease apart here.
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5a7c4096ed915...
Of course if you have a washing machine you just launder them like any other item of clothing.
With diapers, you have wash water, electricity, and a gas dryer in the mix.
Then you have people in this thread talking about services to pickup and wash them for you. How many trips car trips is that- 2 a week?
Some things working in favor of cloth diapers here are general greening of the grid, mitigating issues with electricity consumption.
Beyond that, line drying diapers works very well and even preserves the life of the diapers.
Cloth diapers hold their value extremely well and can easily be bought/sold/given away on sites like OfferUp or groups like Buy Nothing.
ALso, "2 car trips per week": do you have no idea how this works? No diaper service in their right mind would send out cars to make bespoke trips to individuals. They're done using a big truck on a schedule to amortize the cost of pick up and drop off as much as possible.
2. Think about the mass differences you’re comparing here. A standard plastic grocery bag is about 5 grams of material. A standard cloth bag is around 250. Cloth vs disposable diapers are approximately the same amount of material. This is the “gotcha, vegan! Iceberg lettuce is less efficient on a CO2 per calorie basis than beef! Eat more steak to be greener” type of argument.
3. You’re doing the thing contrarians often do of only counting one side of the ledger, while hand waving away the other. Disposable diapers require water, tree growing, tree cutting, tree transport, tree processing, bleaching, transport, packaging, product transport, disposal transport, disposal processing, etc etc. for each time a diaper is used. Really think about the full cradle-to-grave cycle of these things. Reusables must be washed, yes. But they, importantly, don’t require any of the other steps, which is, y’know, extremely significant. It’s not even remotely plausible single-use diapers are more resourceful than cloth ones.
You are right that we have to look at the full breakdown of the cradle to grave resource cost.
A washer and dry cycle is about 5 kilowatt hours, which is about the average household energy consumption in China or twice that in India.
Financially, in California it's about $3 per wash for power before accounting for water, soap, ect.
Let's say you got 10 diapers per day and washing every 2 days. That's 15 cents and 250 watt hours per diaper use.
American use a lot of electricity, so washing diapers would be about a 10% household increase
Example: https://www.diaperstork.com
It only lasts a few years and then you’ll never have to think about diapers again (at least until the next kid).
Just do whatever is easiest and keeps you sane. There are bigger things to worry about.
My oldest was trained at 3 years, and my youngest at 18 months.
The oldest only trained for a week, and the youngest trained for almost year.
If each person in this country buys a product for $10 they’ve spent $3 billion. Now it’s a scary headline about how billions in wealth has been siphoned.
I for one am not going to use cloth diapers. Sorry not sorry. I don’t give a shit (pun very much intended) about the benefits: I’m not cleaning diapers out, I’m not saving soiled diapers in my diaper bag to take home when I’m out and about. It’s just not something I’m going to do when Costco will sell me over 100 disposable diapers for $20.
To your point, diapers at under $100 a month is nothing compared to a single night of babysitting or a month of daycare.
-cloth diapers? Awesome
-train early? Awesome
-train later? Awesome
There's trade offs for each, and you are going to figure out what works best for you.
If you want to train later and the diaper companies make more money, that's how a market is supposed to work. They're providing a product you value. So all good!
The post you replied to referred to a real Chinese proverb 家家有本难念的经
What about the negative externalities?
What I took away is, by the early 2040s, "potty trained" is going to appear on peoples resumes.
[citation needed]
While I completely understand your positivity nihilism, this kind of parent as victim mentality needs to stop altogether.
I’m looking around where I live and literally zero of these people have to raise their children because they didn’t have the access to abortion, contraception or public services.* 99% of parents decided to keep and raise a child.
It is objectively bad to park your kids in front of an iPad for hours a day so you can work
It is objectively bad to have your kids all over social media
It is objectively bad to feed your children ultra processed foods
Etc…
If raising your children is not the most important thing in your life, to the extent that you’re going to actually do scientifically demonstrated correct things like providing them vaccines reducing sugar limiting screen time encouraging outdoor play and exploration and community building etc…then you should not have them.
If you do not have a community that can provide this if you are not independently capable enough… then you should probably not have them.
Being a parent is a transcendent privilege across every period of time, history, class and race - it literally is the driving factor of society.
*In the 18 months since Dobbs between .9% and 1.2% (should be zero but here we are) were victims of rape and forced into birthing that child according to:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/64-000-pregnancie...
> It is objectively bad to feed your children ultra processed foods
It’s not “objectively bad” To feed your children ultra processed foods.
Once you do the work of defining what ultra processed food is in the first place (which you cannot because there is no definition and your argument is already lost), you will find that many ultra processed foods are objectively good for children and adults.
But then your comment only tells you what parents shouldn’t feed kids. It doesn’t tell you anything about what they should.
And when you look into that things get a lot harder. Meat? Not ultraprocsssed but almost certainly bad for health, especially in anything more than minor amounts. You know what else isn’t ultra processed? Alcohol.
And I can’t help but comment on the ridiculousness of pointing to the percentage of children being the outcome of rape being less than 1% as a somehow low njmber, while ignoring that it was 64,000 children. And rape isn’t the only way parents may struggle or regret having kids. And you’re pretending post partum depression doesn’t exist. Then you ignore all the children born with illnesses that may make it difficult or impossible for parents to manage them. Then you’re ignoring all the states that allow abortions but parents may still not opt for them because of cultural, religious, or even personal ethical considerations. Then you’re ignoring the fact that so many American marriages end in divorce and even the ones that don’t may not remain as tight knit as they were when the parents made the decision to have a child.
Your entire comment is a whole bunch of wrong based on your personal experience, which thankfully appears to have been positive.
It is though, it's in the definition, UPF are distinguished from processed food by having additives of no culinary nor nutritional value. So at best, they aren't better than processed food, at worst, they have additive that increase negative health outcomes.
note that if an additive (let's say high-fructose corn syrup) have inferior nutritional value than the product it replace (let's say honey),it is considered UPF, even if the process is quick and easy (i.e: you don't need a big industrial process to be classified UPF)
That's the definition in my country at least, maybe it's different in the US. I think you mistakenly think UPF are the same as processed food. This isn't the case.
[edit] you're right that it isn't objectively bad, because its rare something is "objectively bad". It is objectively worse though.
And I think your comment is wrong. Parent is right in saying that there is no clear definition of what exactly ultra processed food is. However, in general, processed does not mean having additives, it means processed, running through multiple industrial processes to be made.
The definition of upf is 'food having additive of no culinary or nutritional value'. That's the current definition.
The original nova definition is 'food with additive of no culinary value', which isn't useful for nutritionists, hence it evolved.
I seriously doubt all frozen pizza are upf, the main advantage of frozen food is that you don't have to add nitrite salt or other conservatives. Maybe in some pizzas, to keep colours bright?
Breastfeeding appears to have better health outcomes than formula. It is also hard as shit. I'm absolutely not telling a parent that they should have aborted their kid if they choose to use formula because the mother keeps getting mastitis or because their kid is not strong enough to get a full meal in less than 70 minutes on the breast. Perfection is not required.
How do you think any of this relates?
This in turn likely means that quite a lot of parents were subject of a rape that did not resulted in that kid. (Otherwise we would have to assume that all rape kids are first kid).
“How the next generation of your society is raised is none of your business”. Take some ownership
Kids grow up to run the world, a world I’m going to live in. I have a stake in that. This should be obvious if we take our civilization seriously.
Potato Chips are not UPFs but tortillas with an added preservative are.
Ice cream purchased at the store that has emulsifiers is a UPF. Homemade ice cream is not. But I think we'd agree that it is the fat and sugar in the ice cream that is the bad part to feed to kids.
But everyone is entitled to their opinion, and you can't just make people shut up. It doesn't work like that.
If you feed your kid rocks yes I think you are stupid and yes I think you should've worn a condom. Whatever, who cares, listen or don't.
If everybody around me trains their children to be fascists that’s clearly my problem
How Society runs is everybody’s business
Yeah, if you don't give a shit about the environment.
People can and do have multiple priorities
What we're really seeing in all this is so many parents are insecure in their parenting and decisions that they feel the need to jump to "do it my way or you're the literal devil."
If we take the charitable view, it's that things like "cloth diapers saved so much money I'm sad others don't try it" - which may be entirely true. But trying to use things like "if you use a diaper you are the cause of climate change" is something beyond.
This is something my partner wants to try when we eventually have kids. Something I’d never heard of until last week.
This is like saying "why don't you just teach your cat to use the toilet instead of using a litter box?". I mean, yeah, that sounds awesome. Given infinite time and energy, I'm sure it's possible. Best of luck to you, though.
And I don't say that to be rude or disparaging, it's just that parenting is a little like war: your plans never survive contact with the enemy. I had similar thoughts and ideas before I had kids, and they all went out the window when you deal with the real thing. Sleepless nights, a screaming infant, being scared out of your mind when they're sick... but then you will find a calmness unattainable anywhere else as you hold your sleeping child. All of your accomplishments will pale in comparison to the joys of parenthood, and you will unironically look back at those years as some of the best years of your life. You will see.
But other than that, I fully agree with your sentiment that it's like war. My sibling comment to yours quoted Sun Tsu: "even the best laid plans will not survive contact with the enemy". My favourite example is when our 3 month old decides to have her weekly Big Shit after we get her all cleaned and dressed up for going out somewhere, right as we walk out the front door.
I think its fine if one of you is staying at home all the time doing child care.
At daycare they don't do it, that's ok. Do it at home. It's not a PROJECT, it's an orientation.
Take it easy.
I have 2 kids. The first I was able to stay home with for 1 year. We did what I'd call "light EC" which worked well and she was using the potty for BMs most of the time by 1 year old. She was fully potty trained by 2.
Second child: both parents are working full time, which means childcare is split between nanny & daycare. The nanny is pretty good about encouraging the potty, but EC went pretty much out the window. Daycare facility doesn't even have potties until the 2 year old room. She isn't 2 yet, but is just starting to understand the connection between the sensation and actually going.
Once you don’t have to change poopy nappies anymore, you’ll never want to go back. EC is actually less work in the long run.
Note that my wife and I both share responsibilities for taking care of the kids. It is not that time consuming.
As others have said though, YMMV so don't beat yourself up if your kid won't do it. 80% by age 1 in 1944 is a great data point for what's possible though.
It was not particularly difficult to implement and we didn’t spend a lot of time focusing on it - we caught it by being attentive a few times and it just got easier from there. Highly recommend it
In principle EC sounds interesting, but then our daughter arrived, it has balls to the wall survival for 3 months bow. We ended up bottle feeding, use disposable nappies and sometimes we put her on her side to sleep so that she can fall asleep easier. Terrible parenting if you ask any parenting influencer! Neither of us have the time, energy or mental fortitude to get baby naked and over the toilet in the 20 seconds between when the grunting starts and the poop comes!
My advice to you as a new father, assuming you will also be the father and your partner the mother: go into all this with an open mind, and focus on doing what your baby needs, not what you want, and definitely not what the internet says you should be doing. Sun Tzu said the best laid plans don't survive contact with the enemy, so don't get hung up when your plans fall apart when your little one arrives. Support your partner in the things she wants to try, but be pragmatic and prepared for all alternative outcomes. Keep baby's butt dry, keep their belly full of milk (breast or formula or both is perfectly OK), keep them warm and love them loads. That's literally all you need to do, and you will be awarded with the most amazing smiles and giggles by month 2-3.
Eventually we caved, and it really works to calm them down. But we only do it under supervision. When she's asleep we'll roll her on her back.
There's a chance the baby rolls from the side onto their stomach, and that is associated with an increased chance of dying[1].
So in general better to avoid if you can.
[1]: https://www.nichd.nih.gov/sites/default/files/publications/p...
You'll be fine.
Every family is different. Some parents have lots of external support, others have none. Some parents have generous parental leave, others have to return to work almost immediately.
What's common is that babies have a constant, high-frequency stream of demands that need to be met by an adult in the household (need food, attention, comfort, to be cleaned, to be dressed, to sleep, etc.). Meeting these demands typically requires the full attention of an adult in the moment, but there's also some amount of preparation and cleanup that needs to be done. That stuff has to be done by another adult, or if one is not available, fit around the immediate demands of the baby. You can't effectively fold the laundry and comfort a crying baby simultaneously.
All of this to say: elimination communication is known to work, but whether it will work for your family will depend heavily on your specific baby and your specific family circumstances.
When you commit to EC, you are committing to another immediate demand that needs an adult's full attention in the moment. If your baby is otherwise not very demanding, or if you have a lot of external support this may work well for your family. Lots of parents, though, opt to use nappies specifically because it shifts an immediate demand ("I'm pooping") into a problem that can be solved within the next few minutes.
If you're the only adult in the house, you've got a big armful of clean laundry, and you see your baby making the poop face do you want to drop the laundry and rush to the toilet or do you want to fold the laundry and then change the baby? Your answer will be different depending on how much time in the day your family has to get the laundry done.
Parenting influencers don't share the broader context of their families or their babies. And like all influencers, many of them are liars and do not practice what they preach. EC is in vogue right now, so a lot of them are advocating for it. I personally find the idea quite appealing but our family simply did not have the time or circumstances to even attempt it.
My oldest was potty trained at exactly 2 years. We just let her run around without a diaper and there was one specific time she peed that everything clicked for her.
My observation is that there is limited research showing that this actually works and that the amount of extra effort required to constantly be observing the baby for these cues makes the already extremely difficult task of caring for a baby just more difficult, even if it did work.
you learn a lot more about your baby than just elimination cues by observing it. i'd argue that that effort is not difficult at all and has a lot of other benefits. see attachment parenting.
you are right about "you must do it this way or else" producing unnecessary stress though.
there's all sorts of stuff you can do with your kids. i don't have anything more insightful (or cringe) to say besides, it's cool you are thinking about this now haha
Of course, they have that blue line that appears at 0.01% wetness to encourage you to change it earlier, but ah well.
If the diaper is darn close to a lethal weapon weight, you can wait.
How many kids nowadays are in daycare?
When there is a 3-to-1 adult-to-child ratio, doing something like this is much more challenging when there's just one adult and one infant.
The story may change when she starts on solids but I recommend everyone to try out cloth diapers, just make sure you have a routine and system in place to make it less overwhelming (we have two diaper pails next to the changing table, one for disposable wipes and one for the diapers, every other day we wash the diapers and liners).
Most diapers only get pee, but cloth diaper are more difficult to use, let's add 2 extra minutes, 4 or 5 times per day.
No solids means "not hard rock solids", they still make a nasty stinky brown paste. Hopefully only once per day. But that diaper MUST be partialy hand-washed, don't put it as is in the washing machine. At least a partial hand wash and then go with the rest to the washing machine. This is like an additional 5 or 10 minutes.
So it's like half an hour of extra sleep for $3, and when you have small kids sleep time is never enough.
I don't see it anywhere here, which is refreshing, but there's also something about cloth diaper use that lends itself to people making it their entire personality.
If people ask I do tell them I use cloth diapers but I (at least hope!) don't make it my entire personality.
Maybe I'd be surprised if I asked my friends and co-workers what my personality is though.
Cloth diaper usage seems like it could also correlate highly to being vegeterian or vegan, who have the stereotype of that being their entire personality.
Well yeah, it would become your whole personality too if you spent that much time trying to hand scrub poop off of cotton.
After changing and settling the child, take the dirty cloth diaper to the bathroom, open the toilet, drop the solids into the pot and flush. Grasp the two ends of the diaper, turn it inside out, and dip the middle of the diaper (where the solids were and where some may remain) into the toilet water several times to rinse it further. Flush. Squeeze out the diaper and drop it into a diaper pail to be washed later. Wash hands. Once done, dirty diapers in the pail can be washed at your leisure.
Hope this saves you some time.
I'm from a large family. I watched my parents change my diapers and years later changed my younger siblings' diapers.
My eldest stopped using diapers during day at 2 and night at 2,5 years old.
Hopefully the youngest, too. She's only 1,5 but she already dislikes the cotton cloth being wet for too long, which is great. Modern diapers are so good they barely notice. You're essentially training them to just let it go because there's 0 feedback.
That is the real advantage for me as I hate diapers with a passion. No way I'm doing that for a year more than I have to, even with easier diapers.
Or $1000 per year? That little coffee a day already pays for a vacation flight.
Point being, a small expense once is one small expense. A small expense daily can easily become a huge expense.
That being said, I'm not gonna be prescriptive and say that no one should get their daily coffee. But they need to be aware what it costs them. If they know the cost and are ok with it then by all means, order away! I hope your friends are at least now making a conscious choice to spend $1000+ a year on coffee :)
What do you value more - $1000 or 60 hours of your time?
It's not only the time to change them, also wash, dry, fold, store. Each part adds like 1 or 2 minutes for all the diapers, in particular folding can't be done in bulk. Probably wash the diapers with shit twice once to remove most of it manually (+ 1 or 2 minute) and one in the washing machine. The 10 minutes go away too fast.
An I remember my mother talking about boiling or blenching the diapers, add like 15 or 20 minutes 2 or 3 times per week (that's like 5 minutes per day). And I may be missing other hidden time sinks.
The number I gave was a ballpark number. I actually haven't run the numbers. But in any case, this sort of argument has always made no sense to me. First I don't buy coffee every day. I make my coffee at home. And if I did, it's not like disposable diapers and daily coffee are mutually exclusive.
At the end of the day a $3 expense is a $3 expense, and adds up to over $1000 a year. Maybe that's chump change for some, but I take my wins where I can get them.
Twins... God bless you
This is probably better ROI than "breastfeeding saves money" when formula is so cheap and you avoid pumping, washing, and labor while exhausted.
We use disposables while traveling. It's just easier.
The main thing is that for many, formula is paid for via support programs, but unless you're down on SNAP you don't get diapers AFAIK.
(1) You have to ingest more than 1800 calories to get 1800 calories of milk. I'm seeing a 1.25x multiplier at a minimum so 2250 cal.
(2) That's already close to a full daily calorie intake (3 meals).
(3) Kirkland formula is $13 per 2250 calories ($32/5400cal*2250cal). You're not beating $13 per 3 meals unless you're meal prepping.
(4) This doesn't even factor in the vitamin loading via formula.
My wife breastfeeds and pumps. She doesn't love it, but she doesn't mind it.
Also, I'm no pediatrician but vitamin loading via formula seems off to me. My daughter's pediatrician told us that while breastfeeding is preferable to formula for the bonding benefits, at the end of the day it doesn't really matter as long as the baby is eating enough. We do have to supplement vitamin D in either case, which we do with pumped milk.
I don't think there's a mathematical way to optimize anything in parenting. You just try stuff and see if it works. And maybe it works for a few weeks or months. But then it stops working. Then you adapt! Maybe breastfeeding will stop working soon. Maybe cloth diapers will stop working soon. Who knows? All I know is that I'm not gonna be showing my daughter and wife a spreadsheet to show what is optimal.
Adding new parameters contingent on discretionary priorities and resources is vastly more subjective.
Enjoy parenthood.
I am enjoying parenthood, thanks :)
It’s easy enough to qualify for both even at HN salaries, you just need to have enough kids.
That assumes
-Always available to breastfeed
- mom doesn't work (or at least has tremendous flexibility)
-and doesn't need to pump
Those are overly idealistic to me and impose overhead costs.
Just thought I'd pass along the one training suggestion I have. Cloth or disposable.. when you're ready for them to move off it - it really helps if they're able to see and associate their bowel and bladder movements with the physical artifacts.
I suspect it helps it click faster that yes, "this is the stuff that needs to go into the potty and not pooling around my legs in a clammy cold puddle".
Cloth diapers help a lot with this. It's one of the reasons kids on cloth diapers are usually much earlier trained.
Modern diapers are so good there's essentially no feedback.
I agree that the modern diaper is so good that it effectively disconnects the feeling of evacuation from the consequence of it.
I think the other thing kids pick up on when you're mopping up their floor leavings is the grossness aspect, which is a bit more learned. They see you grimacing every time you touch it - they see you taking care to ensure that it doesn't get on other parts of your body. Toddlers watch body language and reactions a lot to understand how they should relate to things.
This terrifies me! We have carpets. Some tile, but also some carpets. I guess it's not too different from when the cats have an "accident" though, just bigger messes.
However there's a two-for-one at my local stores, so in reality we pay more like $20.
[1]: https://www.libero.com/product/touch-open-diaper/touch-4-ope...
We go through maybe 5-6 a day for our 6 month old. The number I was comparing was probably when she was newborn and going through 10+ diapers a day and requiring multiple diapers per change because she'd pee or poo on her new diaper while changing her. We've been using cloth diapers since she was 1 month old.
We do keep some disposables on hand when traveling and just in case we forgot to do laundry or whatever, but I think we've maybe just used 3 or 4 in the past 5 months.
We do have a bidet but it's a toilet seat bidet so we may need to rethink our system.
We also use a cheap synthetic fleece cloth liner, too. We just got a couple yards of it from fabric store and cut it into strips. The poop mostly hits that, and since it’s synthetic it slides off well.
At least one of my kids would get bad diaper rash, though, in cloth. We had to make sure the were constantly checked and changed even when it wasn’t obvious.
Big if lol but yes agreed otherwise!
Worked fine.
I can strongly recommend buying them second hand and then reselling them. They become effectively free at that point. (I get it to come out to $1.5 per week, including the iost of running laundry and the opportunity costs of tying up the capital in nappies.)
I'm also happy to hear about more people doing the hybrid approach. It's not all-or-nothing. One of our children peed so much at night they had to wear disposable nappies overnight but could do with reusable during day. We also packed disposable for longer outings or trips.
Respectfully - chill.
I have tried "underwear weekends" with my 2nd so he seems what it's like to pee himself but it's just not enough. He needs 2 full weeks and I'm sure he'd get it. By the end of the weekend he's just starting to grasp it, and then on Monday I put a diaper on him again and it's more confusing than helpful.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elimination_communication
> Elimination communication (EC) is a practice in which a caregiver uses timing, signals, cues, and intuition to address an infant's need to eliminate waste. Caregivers try to recognize and respond to babies' bodily needs and enable them to urinate and defecate in an appropriate place (e.g. a toilet).
> Keeping babies clean and dry without diapers is standard practice in many cultures throughout the world. While this practice is only recently becoming known in industrialized societies, it remains the dominant method of baby hygiene in non-industrialized ones.
> The terms elimination communication and natural infant hygiene were coined by Ingrid Bauer and are used interchangeably in her book, Diaper Free! The Gentle Wisdom of Natural Infant Hygiene (2001).
I actually know quite a few (a bit hipster) German parents who tried it with good success rate (at least they claim that). It doesn't have to be perfect, but you train regularly with nursing / waking up that the baby urinates with every nursing/waking up. This is possible from day one and they catch on quickly to it.
Edit: Here is a subreddit https://www.reddit.com/r/ECers/
Is this a typo? I don't see how it could be physically possible for a three-month-old to be toilet trained. Among other things, they can't sit up on a toilet seat or walk to the bathroom.
the chinese also invented split pants that are open at the bottom making it possible to just grab a child when you see it ready to go without having to hassle with undressing. and once the children can walk they just need to squat down to go on their own. i did a quick look on wikipedia. apparently in europe it was common for young kids of both genders to wear dresses which i suppose also made that easier. (although dresses were worn much longer than necessary for toilet training, so they must have had another purpose or benefit too)
Easier to reuse across a wider range of child sizes (either the same child over time, or siblings). You don’t need to worry about e.g. leg diameter or crotch/knee heights like you would with trousers, so can get by basically just folding it to fit height and waist. In an era where people modified and repaired their own clothes more rather than having modern cheaper but more disposable clothes, that would matter more.
That seems like a reasonable motivation to me
This is also completely normal in the third world where they can’t afford things like diapers and also can’t afford children to be constantly soiling clothes.
I hope it's worth it
If you have someone taking care of them full-time, toilet training early is usually easy and a net time save.
But if you can't ever invest that time because of the time version of the poverty trap, you are in diapers until the kids are developed enough to make the transition themselves or by seeing other examples (at daycare, etc), or are just old enough that it can be explained to them.
A lot of parents will tell you they’ve potty trained their kids and also tell you their two-year-old wets the bed evey other week.
This is also the theory of so many. We can all just go live in caves guys, it'll make it.
The best nutrition, daycare, early childhood learning, classes, tuition, etc. Extreme expenses.
All throughout history, children have been cheap, and if you look back far enough - disposable. And even parents viewed kids as a free source of labor.
Kids used to be left to roam the woods, streets, and neighborhoods. Now a lone child will get a call from CPS, fines, and jail time.
The parents that favor strong government intervention and high expense parenting basically set the rules for all other parents.
In developing countries, children do not cost this much. Those countries are growing and do not face generational collapse with the younger generations being too small and inadequate to pay for their elders.
We did okay for hundreds of thousands of years. Did Big Advertising get the best of us and make us needlessly devote expenses and energy?
ever since my wife was pregnant i've actually started paying attention to the advertising targeted at women. Holy shit, I feel so bad for them. It's easy for me to laugh at and ignore the "if you buy (this product) then this sexy woman will be attracted to you" ads (spoiler: she won't). But their advertising is very much "you should feel bad about yourself for not buying this, because it means you don't love your (self |child |pet |whatever." It really tugs at emotions and capitalizes on insecurities.
And they do it to themselves a lot of the times, it's not just the big companies doing it, it's female influencers trying to maximize their referrals/sales.
Interestingly, I was at the cinema and saw back to back adverts for monitoring where a woman is all the time is coercive control and abuse.
Then an app for a mum to monitor where their adult daughter is at all times as a positive.[1]
Both are abuse AFAIC and that helicopter parenting is encroaching on adulthood is alarming. In sure we'll soon have diaper sizes newborn through 25 years old eventually.
The vast majority of marketing is aimed at women, and it gets pretty disgusting pretty quick.
> The best nutrition, daycare, early childhood learning, classes, tuition, etc. Extreme expenses.
Daytime childcare isn’t really optional in the first few years. Our system assumes both parents will work. In many metro areas childcare alone can take close to half of a median household income, and daycares are even pretty notoriously low-margin businesses. Moving somewhere cheaper is possible, but that often means fewer job opportunities and lower earning potential.
The result is a tough set of choices for Americans looking to have children:
1) Earn well above the median so childcare costs are manageable (obviously not an option for everyone)
2) Accept a massive drop in your standard of living after having kids, possibly to the point of impoverishment
3) Decide not to have children
Maybe that’s the part of the system worth questioning first.
EDIT: And yes, I know some countries or municipalities try to address this. No, it’s not the only reason birth rates are low in America. Communal support for childcare is one, but not the only, necessary component of a growing society.
In the past you didn't have to do any of this to be able to have a decent "middle class" living, now if one doesn't do all of that then they are already behind in the "rat race". I forgot where i read it, but basically in society we've removed any "slippage". One mistake (say an arrest record) can result in making it hard to find jobs whereas in the past you would just move. The 20 points on the sat that you might have attained if you had better nutrition in your youth make the difference between breaking into the remaining sliver of the middle class.
Yeah, why don't we just go back to the "okay" times of 40%+ child mortality rates instead of the current <1%
You're a genius
Add this on top of any sort of complex baby (illness, allergies, colic, slow weight gain, etc) and suddenly the slightly less complex disposable diaper becomes a godsend just to save a few minutes or a bit of mental load.
Add this on top of any sort of complex baby (illness, allergies, colic, slow weight gain, etc) and suddenly the slightly less complex door dashing a warm bottle of formula becomes a godsend just to save a few minutes or a bit of mental load.
Anything can become normalized.
"Helicopter parents", the desire to call CPS for unattended children - these are new and novel phenomena that are symptoms of society's desire to raise the cost of parenting through marketing, social norms, and peer pressure.
For kids without two stable parents, it soaks up their time and keeps them out of trouble.
Since when did we start viewing this as bad?
I worked at 14 doing lawn work for neighbors to save money for video games. It taught me a lot. There's nothing wrong with that.
There is also the exploitation part of this, where its much much cheaper to pay a teenager, and the bonus of, they don't know what OSHA is.
We're discussing an article about diapers.
I’ve got a buddy, his wife works at a daycare and he does network installs. They’re right around the median household income of 80k or so in a middle-low cost of living area. They have 6 kids.
Perhaps ironically, I have a household income of roughly 200k. I have three kids and wonder how does he do it, I can’t imagine having three more kids and the expense of it all. Yet somehow they do it.
I think the reality of it is folks don’t want to make sacrifices to have kids, or have many kids. My observation lately is that couples will go have one kid and look at the expenses and struggles and say they’re done. A while back my wife and the kids and I were walking down by the boardwalk and an old man fishing stopped and said “Look at that, a real family with three kids! You don’t see that anymore!” Kind of strange, but I look at my big Irish-Catholic side of the family with 13(!) aunts and uncles in the same astonished way I guess
And percentage can be anything below 400% of the poverty level, and the poverty level goes up with each kid - 400% of the poverty level for a family of 8 is $216k. https://snapeligibilitycalculator.com/fpl-calculator/
Yes they can, they just choose not to.
I think the reason people aren't having kids is that they're on their phone all the time.
I'm serious. Phone use is a dopamine sink and removes pauses throughout the day otherwise spent on relationships and thinking about the future.
I'm not the only person to think this.
https://www.vox.com/today-explained-podcast/405376/pronatali...
Furthermore, people in past times were historically more budget-conscious and stressed than we are - yet they had lots of children. And developing nations are typically much pooerer than our lower class, yet they're also having lots of children.
I have two young kids in NYC and it’s objectively very expensive. Ignoring all consumables, daycare and needing a 2 bedroom apt triples our monthly expenses as compared to before having kids.
Of course for both of these it’s technically possible to solve. If we lived in the suburbs space would be cheaper and having kids wouldn’t double our rent. If one of us didn’t work or had grandparents willing to help daycare wouldnt be needed. In less developed / modern places these issues might not be as acute, but for many modern day families they are very real issues.
Regardless, kids are a lot of work and expensive, and I don’t see how being on your phone a bit changes that.
I'm a huge fan of public schools, letting kids play and be out on their own till 10-11pm a night with other kids, etc, etc. But just the first 3 years until publicly funded pre-school kicks in is going to cost us over 100k. It doesn't become free after that of course, but definitely not 30k+ per annum.
We'll see how quickly we can potty train, I'd like to avoid using diapers after a while, but that's not the major expense for us since we're your run of the mill dual income couple. Just standard day care is 2500 a month in Chicago. Unlike the bay or NY, there isn't a wait-list or competition to get in but it's definitely priced at the high end. We're delaying using that until both our parental leaves finish up, which not everyone gets to have in the US. We also have my parents moving close to us to help with the kiddo. Most of the things that made a village what it was without professional services (except day care which is a big one) we're gonna do, and it still is going to be stupid expensive. My parents are in shock compared to what their expectations were based on how I grew up vs today's reality.
Both our kids were poop-trained before pee-trained, which made cloth diapers a lot more manageable (just rinse and toss in laundry). The first one was poop-trained around 5-6 months.
When people tell me I need to use paper straws but they can use disposable diapers, it makes the logic in my brain meltdown
No offense to babies, but what does it mean to not be emotionally ready to start potty training? I’m serious. Like, do they cry a lot at the prospect of being 2 feet away from their parents? What makes us think this is emotional turmoil? The article does say
> ... children following his approach were less likely to have bedwetting or constipation problems by the time they turned 5 than those who started earlier. (Subsequent studies have found similar issues in children who train too late.)
But it's hard for me to see that as an emotional connection? If anything it makes me wonder about latent variables (with caveat that I have not read the study, so maybe they already looked into that)
1. Seeing a problem with having a dirty diaper
2. Recognizing (at least subconsciously) that on balance, using the bathroom will be easier than waiting to have your diaper changed
3. Being willing to react positively (not obstinately) to parents' reminders to use it
4. Being able to focus enough to, say, not play in the water, and old enough to practice all the steps.
And that's just to practice. Even if they're all of the above, they'll still take time.
Source: watching my now-3 year old overcome each stage listed, one at a time
It's really eye opening and frustrating to see children be stubborn just for the sake of it. They're literally still developing and it's normal, but they are just too young to reason with. You have to create the environment where positive feedback happens, and... wait a very long time for them to work it out.
Sorry for the soap box, just seemed somewhat topical.
The way they raise kids in NA was one of the cultural shocks for us. 6yo kids in strollers. Parents never walk with their babies outside. Well, baby pram is not even a thing here. Diapers until age of 3 or 4. Overall hygiene/cleanness doesn't exist. It's ok to pour frootloops in a dirty tray and let the child eat it with their dirty hands. Kids' clothes are forever dirty. It's ok to send your kid to school/daycare with holes in their socks. School assembly? Let kids sit on the gym floor for an hour. Field trip - kids sit on the ground.
I'm not surprised society is so mentally unwell here.
> It's ok to send your kid to school/daycare with holes in their socks.
My kids wreck clothes. Others (like the people we buy them from, used) seem to fare better but each of my kids probably puts four holes in clothes per week, not even considering stains. Sure you can mend them but not when you discover the hole two minutes before you have to be out the door.
> Kids' clothes are forever dirty
Mine never, ever were as a kid—but I had one homemaker parent. You can do a way better job at this stuff while also feeling less-stressed and overall doing less total work under those circumstances. Between paid work and non-fun kid stuff / housekeeping my wife and I put in probably 70 hours a week, each, and don’t keep up as well as my mom did (granted, we have more kids too, but still). Coordination costs and having to chop the work into little bits between other things makes it way less efficient, and it can be hard to get to everything quickly. Things that go wrong Monday may not get addressed until the weekend, where my mom would have had it taken care of within an hour.
I know it's not the same thing as enshitification, and I don't know if the diaper industry is even vulnerable to enshitification, but it would be such a nice play on words if the diaper industry had enshitification.
They're also probably developing a baby with two butts to double sales.
- In the 1940s, ~80% of kids were trained by their 1st birthday
-By 2004, the average completion age was 37 months (over 3 years old)
-That extra year of diapers = ~$3.1 billion annually for the industry
-A pediatrician named Brazelton popularized "wait until they're ready" advice in the 60s — and later became a paid Pampers spokesperson, which is... a conflict of interest
-Diaper companies responded by making bigger and bigger sizes (up to 65 lbs!)
How do the production costs for Chitosan-Alginate Fleece compare to diapers and gauze?
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This seems roughly plausible. I have never been successful at training 1 year olds to be potty trained, because there is so much exposed poop & pie involved over such long times, that it's just way easier to push it back by a year or two when they can figure it out more or less by themselves.
Maybe back then diapers were so bad, that there was always a lot of exposed poop & pie involved anyway, so potty training didn't really make your life any worse.
I'd probably say those extra billion in revenue are well earned.
IMO early toilet training is just wishful thinking combined with confirmation bias. If you are trying it and it is going hard... just don't, you are not doing anything wrong, you've been just misled. Just wait until your child can consistently follow instructions and does so willingly for important matters. Otherwise the result is as expected.
One of my kids we started at 18 months and he almost got it but we started to see serious regression and had to pull back. We then tried again a few months later and he was good to go. I think it is very reasonable to have your kid potty trained by 2 for most people, but that is mostly based off my experience and that of my peers, not some sort of data driven observation or something.
Also, and this may seem obvious to folks but it’s worth mentioning, it’s of course easier to potty train your kid the older they are. So some people know that they could do it sooner but decide that it’s worth just waiting a little longer so that the process is easier. That’s valid!
The difference between modern "swaddlers" and "training pants" is basically the absorbance.