I did the math meticulously when I had my first kid years ago, comparing store brand diapers vs cloth. Once you factor in the up front cost of the cloth diapers plus the cost of water and energy and detergent running the wash, the costs are virtually identical. The math looks better for cloth if you use them for years or multiple kids, but that's not super hygienic.
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.
Did you calculate based on buying cloth nappies second hand and then reselling them? That was a great alternative for my family. Worked out to something like $100 in total nappy costs for one child, including the opportunity cost of tying up the capital up front. That's less than $1 per week. Make it $1.5 if we include electricity and water costs of laundry, compounded over that period.
I would struggle to find single-use nappies for $1.5 per week in my area.
I guess if you buy them used the math changes. Second hand diapers was a line in the sand for my wife.
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.
What do you find confusing about the idea of a diaper service? It seems too unsanitary for you? The idea that it might cost slightly more than disposable diapers is intolerable to you?
Do you have any reason to believe washing diapers actually is unsanitary?
The price tag and environmental impact of constant diaper delivery seems off the cuff like it would negate the original benefit of cloth diapers. Admittedly I have not done math on this one.
With the service we used, they picked up and dropped off diapers once per week using a big truck. They also drove around to do the same for many other people at the same time. You can't call this diaper delivery "constant". And if the emissions from this are significant, you could always use an electric van.
How are you feeling: do you still think this is something only for performative environmentalists or "trad wives"? Neither of these descriptions apply in even the remotest sense to my wife or I.
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?
It's more about the accumulation of fecal matter over time. I don't feel convinced that a washer removes it all, hence staining. And I don't feel great about making my kid sit in another kid's shit.
There are many decisions young parents make that from the remove of a keyboard in a happily single or child-free relationship seem irrational or (mon dieu!) _inefficient_, but there is a emotional depth to these choices that are _very_ meaningful to the people involved.
Cloth diapers are good. We used them for our last kid with a diaper service and are going to do it again washing them ourselves with our next who is due at the end of the month. Regular diapers are useful to have either way. But cloth diapers are obviously much better for the environment and if they're an option for you, you should consider them. Not a hard concept, not worth a big discussion.
> But cloth diapers are obviously much better for the environment
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...
I assumed the environmental angle was the reduction in waste going to landfill with all the extra plastic generated, by the diaper and the small bags that are usually used to reduce smell and keep things clean during changing.
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.
The energy saving is clear and gets better year after year as the grid continues to green. You can also line dry cloth diapers which saves a lot of energy.
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 kept the diapers from our diaper service and the covers. The washing machines used by the service are much beefier and can handle these kind of loads easily, and will generally be more water efficient.
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.
Oops, talked to my wife and realized I got a detail wrong: we did not keep the diapers from the service, we gave them back. And the diapers we got from the service were almost surely used by plenty of other people before.
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.
The truck would come by once a week to pick up all of our dirty diapers and drop off a new set of clean diapers. The service provided a bucket with a cloth bag inside of it that had enough capacity for one kid for a week. Packaging up = closing the lid of the bucket and leaving it outside the door of our apartment. They would drop off a new one of these buckets full of clean diapers each week (visiting many other people at the same time). Beyond all the environmental benefits, living in the city this was actually super convenient.
Do you wear clothes from the store without washing them? Imagine a product straight from a plastics factory constantly on your baby's skin, designed with chemicals to make them as convenient/effective/cheap as possible versus safe/minimal chemical exposure, covered in plastics dust from the process/other products being made in the factory from worse chemicals.
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 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.
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")
Plastic is just hydrocarbos basically - hydrogen and carbon. You can totally synthetise it. Might just not be as cheap an convenient like making it from mined oil, at least initially.
water is not entirely free. it has to be cleaned, which costs energy. energy is free, but access is still limited. likewise cotton also requires effort to produce.
exactly, i mean water after use. using water to create or clean diapers pollutes it, and because overall we use and pollute water faster than nature recycles it through rain we have to add our own cleaning mechanisms to keep up. that's fine, but it makes the water not totally free.
> But cloth diapers are obviously much better for the environment
What about this is obvious? Water usage, transportation, fabrication factors, different usage patterns; seems like there are many things to tease apart here.
I think as a general rule: a reusable thing is more environmentally friendly than a single-use thing (especially when the reuse cycles are high). Yes, there are exceptions. But you’ve got the bizarre case to make here, if you want to suggest single-use diapers (that also use water, require transportation, are fabricated, packaged, etc.) are a more efficient use of resources.
My primary point is that it's not a slam dunk for either side. Nothing's obvious about the "impact" here. I you're interested in picking a product based on its environmental impact, there are going to be many factors to consider. Just peruse this 200 page report from the UK government on the subject:
This study has serious methodological issues. I would encourage you to carefully peruse it yourself before citing. This is far from the only issue, but the fact that someone who works at Procter and Gamble is on the study's advisory board is... fun.
I don't think it's that crazy. It's fairly well documented that a reusable cloth shopping bag has a break even with plastic shopping bags at around a 100-200 reuses, something most people won't reach.
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?
1. Id guess an average cloth diaper gets reused more than 100x
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.
I think it's plausible that cloth diapers are worse per use than disposable ones due to the mass industrialization of manufacture and resource intensity of cleaning.
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
Cloth shopping bags are a really bad comparison here.
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.
But there are lots of exceptions, right? Like a huge bunch of medical equipment where cleaning the thing to make it safe for reuse would be both more expensive and worse for the environment than single-use versions.
In many parts of the world they throw them in a basin of water and laundry detergent, let them soak for a bit, then hand wash them. No medical equipment necessary.
Of course if you have a washing machine you just launder them like any other item of clothing.
I had planned to do cloth diapers if we had a diaper service available, for environmental reasons, but there's none where I live now and I definitely am not up for washing diapers by hand/pooping up my nice washing machine. Props to you for sticking with it.
I would be extremely surprised if that’s better for the environment than disposable diapers. The key for most of this stuff is economies of scale. It’s why the produce from the supermarket that was carried thousands of miles on a cargo ship is better for the environment than the produce from the farmer’s market that was carried 50 miles in a diesel truck.
It’s easy for this style of journalism to get upset about “billions” but that’s just the reality of a country with over 300 million people.
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.
Have any parents tried Elimination Communication? Basically teaching your baby to inform you that they’re ready to go, and taking them to the toilet immediately.
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.
The irony of your comment is that it is actually possible to train cats to use the toilet, and it's not even that difficult.
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.
EC only works if parents are the sole carers, and every success story I've heard had one main parent doing 90% of the care-taking. No daycare would do it, and if you can find a nanny, au-pair, grand-parent or other carer who is up for it ... small kids still just behave differently around different people. If they have a different level of comfort, anxiety, or reluctance with a person it breaks down.
If one of you is a stay at home parent, then it's worth trying. But don't stress yourself out trying to make it happen.
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.
We did this with both our kids; the first one stopped pooping in diaper by 5 months. This made cloth diapers much more feasible as you just have to rinse. A local daycare was willing to do it as well and so she was fully potty trained well before starting preschool at 2 years.
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.
You can try it. Parents should try what they want and there is a huge amount of "you must do it this way or else" material that just produces unnecessary stress.
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.
the amount of extra effort required to constantly be observing the baby [...] makes [...] caring for a baby just more difficult
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.
Yes, being born in the Soviet Union this is how my parents toilet trained me, and we did it with our daughter as well but were only able to catch it for defecation and not urination, but even having done that was so handy. She eventually would grunt to let us know, which as she learned to talk transitioned easily to a verbal cue. I think we had not had a soiled poopy diaper after I want to say 12 months old, but can’t remember exact age now. Potty training for urination came much easier after this as it wasn’t such a foreign concept.
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
My partner wanted to try the same thing. And cloth nappies and exclusive breastfeeding, and infant hand signals, and every other zeitgeist baby thing you can think of.
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.
Like a sibling comment says, you risk the baby rolling on to its face and suffocating. All the midwives at the hospital and all the books say to not do it, but any mother in law will tell you to just put the baby on its side if it's fussy. If you challenge the MIL she'll throw the "I've raised more babies than you so I know better" remark in your face. A tale as old as time I guess.
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.
I’ve tried it. My youngest (21 months) can definitely inform us that she needs to go to the bathroom. But she’s not quite ready to use the toilet. She either doesn’t want to sit on it, sit long enough, or gets distracted. The kid definitely needs to be open for potty training in order to it to work.
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.
all the negativity aside. it worked well for my older son, the second is almost old enough to try. both my wife and i have full time jobs, and we were working while he was potty training using andrea olson's EC book.
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
My sibling used EC with my nieces and it worked really well! Took a bit of patience up front but the kids were basically potty trained within a few months of being born. They also used cloth diapers because accidents happen, but rarely so!
Every baby is different. Some are relaxed, others are highly strung. Some will happily sit in a comfortable seat, others will demand to be held. Some will feed quickly, others will take their time. Some will sleep in a crib from the day they're born, others will need practice. Some will be happy, others will cry for hours for no apparent reason.
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.
Parent of 2 kids. Parents receive enough judgement. Do whatever works for you!
-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!
If I've learned anything from parenting, its to give more grace, because you really never know someone else's situation from a short interaction or fact about their parenting.
Parent of three teens headed to college/trades in the next year.
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:
Tortillas from the grocery store are UPFs. This sort of "you shouldn't have had kids if you can't cook everything from scratch every day" judgement is outrageous.
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.
> 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’s not “objectively bad” To feed your children ultra processed foods.
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.
A good example for upf that is not likely to be bad for you is (European style) frozen pizzas.
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.
> Parent is right in saying that there is no clear definition of what exactly ultra processed food is
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?
.9% and 1.2% of children being result of rape and then forced birth combo is awful lot. It implies that both rape is super prevalent and forced birth is super prevalent.
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).
We can barely even meaningfully define UPFs, and they aren't cleanly correlated with junk food.
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.
I will go further and say that eating some ice cream does not hurt kids at all. No, you are not a bad parent because you gave your kid ice cream. And fat is completely legitimate part of food. Likewise sacharides.
It can not be your business and you're allowed to still have opinions on it. It's one thing to discredit opinions you think aren't someone's business - that's fine, maybe even understandable.
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.
Lol iPad, social media, and processed food consumption is going to be your problem? OP was not talking about values, he was talking about the day to day specifics of child rearing.
>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!
Yeah, if you don't give a shit about the environment.
Technically you should kill as many as possible "for the environment".
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.
I feel like the time demands of modern life are the main culprit here. Today families mostly need two working parents, which means nobody to take care of the baby full-time.
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.
I just want to second this; a ton of parents I know had kids ready to do it earlier but waited until a major holiday/break when everyone would be home anyway to knock it out.
Related, the longer you wait to do it, the faster they seem to catch on. We waited until each of our kids’ third birthday to potty train and knocked it out in a weekend, no major subsequent accidents.
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.
Our two year old is potty training right now, and this was definitely a factor for us. We had to wait until it could be explained. Another factor is that diapers are now so absorbent that the kid feels no real discomfort from a pee or a poop. His main motivation is peer pressure and to be a bigger kid; concepts he's only recently caught.
The big difference is that 'real' nappies become extremely uncomfortable when wet (child immediately cries to be changed) so toddlers get a strong incentive to stop wetting whereas with modern disposables they barely even notice when they wee.
> More recent studies and surveys, tell us that the average age for starting toilet training is ~21 months.
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.
Agreed on the strollers. There are medical reasons sometimes or whatever I’m sure, but that doesn’t explain most of them. We pushed ours to walk outdoors as much as possible as soon as they could walk at all, otherwise you end up with the 6yo with an iPad in a stroller at the zoo, wtf. Can’t let them get used to anything you don’t want to keep doing for a looooong time.
> 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.
They also survive much more and much longer than they used to, and even compared to cloth they can store a substantial amount of wee without having the kid soaking in wet.
Of course, they have that blue line that appears at 0.01% wetness to encourage you to change it earlier, but ah well.
After nappy number 200, which you'll reach by the first month probably, you'll become very good at gauging nappy fullness, and the nature of the filling by touch and smell alone. At that point the blue stripe is basically meaningless. I can tell if my baby needs a change just by picking her up.
It talks about a study from 1944 in the US, specifically in Minnesota. How many of those parents were full-time stay-at-home parents, probably typically mothers, who were monitoring the child and helping with potty training?
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.
Absolutely. 3:1 is only common ant absolute top tier daycares. More likely you’ll have 6:1 or 8:1. And even high quality daycares might not help children potty train which is absolutely essential if both parents are working but people want to potty train early. By age 3 kids are moving towards preschool and are more intelligent and have better self awareness and are more reward motivated. I think diaper conspiracy is honestly less likely here than structural advantages and modern life leading to later potty training
We're using cloth diapers for our daughter (6m). She's still exclusively breastfed so no solid poops but so far I estimate we've saved over $100/mo by this decision.
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 care if anyone uses cloth diapers but the cloth diaper evangelists always seem to take a page out of the people who say "renting is always bad" or "leasing a car is always bad." Focusing on the (completely legitimate) negatives associated with the thing they don't like, and completely ignoring the (no less legitimate) negatives about the thing they like.
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.
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.
Kid's are too old now and we used disposable diapers. Anyway, diarrhea, accidents and just going to the park after the watering system created the cleanest mud on Earth gave us a lot of opportunities to clean cloth.
Using the water from the toilet would be considered gross here. I'm not sure if the rule make sense, but I'd prefer not to break it, so we used a small buckler instead. Filling and cleaning it each time adds some time.
Ours come with a roll of cotton 'paper' sheets to put in. You throw this away which catches pretty much all solids. The rest we throw in the washing machine on 90 as is. Worked fine.
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.
I was just objecting to the typical phrase "it costs just as much as a coffee" making it sound like nothing worth thinking about. This stuff adds up to real money over time. I have explained to several people that their Starbucks habit costs more than their car insurance (and also may give them diabetes depending on the drink). It's even worse with Doordash or Uber.
Yeah it's an interesting argument. Also, coffees (especially Starbucks coffees) rarely cost $3 anymore. Maybe if you just get a regular brewed coffee but when I think of Starbucks I don't think of their coffees on tap, I think of their $7+ lattes or frapps that are less coffee and more dessert. Anyway, I digress.
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 :)
Yeah, or 365 coffees (well for me it's energy drinks). I'm well aware which one of those brings me more total joy in my life and it isn't the flight. It isn't even close.
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.
YMMV but we usually fold diapers while watching TV or during Zoom meetings or whatever. It does take time, but it's not like we'd magically get more sleep if we used disposable diapers, since we usually sleep at a predefined time and wake whenever the little one wakes us. Maybe we get a few more minutes to watch TV or whatever. Not a huge deal IMO. But again, YMMV. If it doesn't work for your lifestyle, it doesn't work! Nothing wrong with it. My comment is merely for folks to not knock if before they try it. We certainly wouldn't have if someone didn't gift us a pack.
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.
We tried with "hybrid" diapers for all three of our kids, a cloth shell with a disposable liner. They worked, but they're still a lot of extra work. We always kept disposables on hand for when we couldn't keep up. Our second and third kids are twins (2 for 1!!) and that was a lot harder to keep up with. And I ran into problems where I didn't set the diaper right and they would leak overnight, making more work.
We had to give up on cloth just to stay sane.
I guess my point is, yes, try it if you're able to. But also when you've got a new baby, do what you gotta do for your health, physical and mental, so you can take care of your family.
Yep, absolutely! Everyone's situation is different, and I'm not gonna be on a high horse and tell people to think of the environment or their wallets. It's hard to think of the environment when you're dealing with literal shit in your house.
Looking back my wife and I have said that we could probably have done cloth diapers during the breast-feeding phase but man… Definitely not with solid foods. I don’t know how people did it. Like yes of course if we didn’t have an option we would do it, but with disposable diapers right there… There’s no way I’m ever choosing cloth diapers and solid foods lol
Indeed, we tried it back in the early 80's. When they started on solid foods, it was simply terrible and unsanitary. With our first child we had to use a laundromat, they almost banned us. With our second, we had a own washer and we banned ourselves!
I never thought solid was too bad, if it was solid. We had a sprayer on the toilet and typically everything would spray right off. There are worse kid messes that I’ve had to deal with (and >10 years later, still do).
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.
Very likely. A container of formula runs about $25 and contains 1800 calories (my count may be off). Considering the mother is often trying to lose babyweight I think you can find 1800 calories cheaper.
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.
Yeah we don't qualify for SNAP (as an aside I'd be curious how many HNers do qualify). My area also has a program called WIC (women infant children) which I'm pretty sure covers diapers but not totally sure.
Every family is different. I haven't been a parent for long but at the end of the day there's no one way to optimize everything. You'll either spend time, energy, or money. Something that saves you money may drive you insane. The $100/mo is not worth your mental health.
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.
Though, you did say formula "isn't cheap" in a comment questioning the the ROI. I'm lost because that would imply you had run the numbers to call it expensive.
I agree that every family's different. I'm overly touchy on the phrasing to a fault. You get it. My point is that people seem to lean into this or over worry about breastfeeding at all costs.
Agreed, and you're right that my statement does have that connotation.
We still keep formula on hand just in case (premixed because the powdered formula has a pretty short shelf life). We found that my daughter doesn't really like it, but that's not really relevant. But in any case, the premixed formula is 2-3x more expensive than the powdered formula, which is why it's a bit surprising to me that someone would say that formula is more cost-effective ROI. Anecdotally we haven't really noticed a increase in our monthly grocery bill, and my wife is back to her pre-pregnancy weight and has stayed there for a few weeks.
Exclusive breastfeeding (not bottle feeding breastmilk) is less labor than formula. The problem is potential discomfort, and inability for both parents to split the labor more equally.
That math does not match my math with my kids. Does that factor in the price of water and electricity and detergent? And are you comparing to store brand diapers or the luxury name brand ones? The price difference is literally 5x for some sizes.
We used cloth diapers for our son for about 8 months, and then it just got to be too much of a hectic nightmare washing the poop cloths between work and other issues. So we did disposables for about two years. We were having a hard time getting him trained off of the diapers, until one day we just decided to follow some advice we'd heard and took them off and let him go diaperless on the floors (thankfully wooden).. and he trained in a couple days.
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".
>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.
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.
That's why we started with cloth. We just didn't have the tenacity to pull through and gave in within a year.
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.
> let him go diaperless on the floors (thankfully wooden).. and he trained in a couple days.
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.
What's the unit cost of a nappy in your area? Here it's like €0.05 each, so monthly maybe €50 max incl wipes. I'll have to actually measure how much we use in a day though.
I was surprised by the price as well. We go through about 4-5 packs of disposable diapers per month for our 6mo, fewer when the kid was younger (more diapers per pack). Each pack costs $8 for the fancy kind[1] which we get, so that's just around $40 a month currently. This includes 25% VAT.
However there's a two-for-one at my local stores, so in reality we pay more like $20.
Here at Costco (where you can get stuff in bulk and items are usually cheaper per unit) it's about $0.20 per nappy which is about €0.18 if I'm doing my conversions correctly.
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.
My experience with two kids is that solids are easier. With good diet, the poop has a good chance of just being a “roll off” and into the toilet. Get a spray wand/ hand held bidet attachment for toilet to help rinse it off before it goes in wash.
It won’t ALWAYS be nice little rollers. And it depends on diet. Right now with 1 year old it’s a lot of smears but with a good shake they peel off and into the toilet, sometimes helped with the spray wand.
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.
Freud had a lot to say about excrement and shame -- I think cultural fears are still very resonant here. With modern washers cloth diapers clean extremely well -- you can bury your nose into them afterwards with confidence and not notice the faintest evidence what the diaper was like prior to washing. If you feel you can't, I think that is culture speaking, not reality. You are definitely already well exposed to your family's intestinal bacteria strains so any phobia here is purely psychological. While I admit it was difficult for me to consider buying used cloth diapers, after raising two children I think I wouldn't have a problem doing it now. We found buyers for all of our children's used cloth diapers. They were in great condition. One thing to also keep in mind, typically children have difficulty with bedwetting at the late stages of diaper training, so our diapers at least, were washed dozens of times without being soiled by excrement prior to re-sale.
We used reusable nappies for our daughter and introduced the potty very early. The reduction in waste is many times larger than you expect particularly with a very young child ( we started with disposable, but switched in the first few months. Here’s some notes:
- 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.
For toddlers who are able to communicate, simply add an absorbent layer into the disposable diaper to give them sensory feedback about moisture. Gauze squares from the first aid aisle work well and are very cheap.
I know the Hustle is a Hubspot content factory, but I got to admit they've been capturing more and more of my reading and (YouTube) watch time recently. They have fascinating topics and seem to be researched very well.
All our kids were trained between 2-3 y.o, with overnight 3-4 (boys take longer (¬_¬)) honestly diapers isn't even a cost factor. When daycare is 2500-3000/month those first 3 years, diapers are picking up pennies in front of a steam roller.
My mom toilet trained me at 3 months. She had me on a schedule and she would hold me one toilet during the determined times and I would go. This was right after communism fell so she only had access to cloth diapers, and cleaning them was so annoying she did it as early as she could. She was shocked at how long my kids stayed in diapers. I asked her how, and well there is a slight difference between us. She had 2 years of parental leave. I had 1.5 weeks with my second. I did a board meeting from the hospital with my first. Let's just say I don't have the time to dedicate to it. It takes 2 weeks of dedicated focus, repeatedly putting them on the potty, rewarding them, and cleaning up. I know it's possible. Modern life tends to build on these conveniences and efficiencies until it's no longer possible to go back.
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.
> 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.
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.
She had me on a schedule and would hold me up. Yep at 3 months babies can't even sit up. She said at the start she would hold me up until I went, even if it took hours, and if I went she would reward me. She Pavlov'ed me. I think she said I would cry or babble in a certain way, or if she even suspected I needed to go she would put me on the potty and hold me up.
that's pretty much the chinese way of doing it. i don't know about the schedule or starting time though, actually i think they start almost right after birth. since traditionally the grandparents help with taking care of children they have more time to sit around with a baby in their lap.
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)
> 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.
Fascinating. I'm not sure what would drive someone to do this, since until the child can actually go to the toilet on their own, you haven't achieved the actual point (IMO) of the training.
She had only cloth diapers, no washing machine, she had to wash them by hand and boil them to disinfect them. I guess the time lost just waiting for me to go was better than the time lost doing all that cleaning. I was her second so she had experience doing this.
Yep. Some friends of mine had their 4 month old completely toilet trained. (Their 4th child.)
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 spend a lot of time with my kids because of my work. I've worked fully remote for almost 7 years now. After my son was born I was back to work 1.5 weeks later but I got to work with him in my lap for 1.5 years (after which he started going to grandmas) He was breastfed that entire time. Taking 2 weeks to potty train is something I've deprioritized because I'd rather focus on going on vacation/recharging and the downside is minimal. There is no evidence late potty training causes any damage (except to your wallet.) You have to prioritize these things. My kids are always priority #1, but that doesn't mean I have to eliminate all other things I enjoy in life. My kids get to grow up watching me build software for millions of people, so yeah, it's worth it. I know I would be an excellent stay-at-home mom, but I'm also an excellent work-from-home mom.
As someone who grew up watching his dad build software for millions of people, some friendly advice is this may not be as “worth it” as you think it is.
A lot of people in this discussion seem to compare the price of single-use nappies to that of buying new cloth nappies and then giving them to the landfill once done with one child.
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.
I was designing waterproof textiles a few weeks ago and somewhat accidentally also designed a Chitosan-Alginate Fleece that could be used as fleece liner, super absorbent diapers, gauze
How do the production costs for Chitosan-Alginate Fleece compare to diapers and gauze?
Modern American middle class norms are that babies cost a fortune.
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?
> 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.
The vast majority of advertising is laser focused to push women's buttons it's alarming.
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.
Speaking of monitoring, your YouTube link has a tracking identifier in it… although it's ?is=, for some reason. Did you type that out manually, or has YouTube changed?
> Modern American middle class norms are that babies cost a fortune.
> 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.
> best nutrition, daycare, early childhood learning, classes, tuition
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.
Your comments are just totally out of touch with the realities of being a parent today. The average person can't afford to raise a kid because of the time demands of constant work to make rent and afford food.
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.
Do you have kids? The phone comment seems pretty out of touch.
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.
There's never just one reason, obviously. Maybe phones are a big reason we're not socializing as much and it cascades from there. But as a young parent, I'm gonna tell you flat out - the core necessities, not the best of the best, are insanely expensive today than ever before as a share of our monthly take home.
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.
The average person can absolutely afford children!
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
A big part of it may be that once you fall below a certain percentage of the federal poverty level, you start getting assistance. WIC kicks in pretty early, as do ACA assistance and Medicaid/CHIP.
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/
Child mortality saw steep improvements in the 1900s - 1940s all over the world. I didn't think I had to clear myself of this argument.
"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.
"Helicopter parents" are because of the rise of national media amplifying relatively rare cases of things like child abductions, not a conspiracy by big diaper
Babies are incredibly difficult even in the best case. Sleep deprivation is intense. Breastfeeding is difficult. Adding in small additional difficulties adds up. "This is a bit more difficult" becomes a huge mess when you are on three hours of sleep and there are 10 different "this is a bit more difficult" things that people are suggesting to you.
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.
Babies are incredibly difficult even in the best case. Sleep deprivation is intense. Breastfeeding is difficult. Adding in small additional difficulties adds up. "This is a bit more difficult" becomes a huge mess when you are on three hours of sleep and there are 10 different "this is a bit more difficult" things that people are suggesting to you.
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.
I don't judge people who order out all the time or pay for a night nanny or do any of a million things that make life easier with an infant. Infants are fucking hard.
No, but if you have a kid with no support system you’re going to find it really hard to add just a few more hours per week to clean diapers out every other day on top of everything else. If it was easy for you congratulations you had an easy one.
80% trained by age 1 in 1944 vs barely started by age 2 in 2026... now that seems like a regression in learning rate!
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.
> In 1962, the journal Pediatrics published a Brazelton study in which he observed ~1k parents and children in the 1950s. They followed his “child-oriented” approach to toilet training, which involved starting training at about two years old. That was after the age when the vast majority of children had previously finished training but when Brazelton believed that most children would only be physically and emotionally ready to start.
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)
It's interesting to hear this perspective, especially helpful because you have a kid and I don't. I wonder if the child really has to recognize the problems, or just has to be conditioned that this-feeling-means-potty-time. To be fair, I don't know how that conditioning would happen without the child leading the process in some way (how would they associate bowel movements with the bathroom if not by willingly going to the bathroom?)
The one that took us the longest was (3). He knew he needed to go, knew all the steps, and would pee in his pants just to spite his parents.
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.
tbh I think this is an underappreciated aspect to human behavior in general. Adults will do the same thing, sometimes even if they are corrected as politely as possible (my coworkers pee in their pants just to spite me too!) I think a lot of our systems don't explicitly account for that. We have meetings where a "correct" decision is made, and then we immediately expect everyone to get over their ego and accept the decision. In my experience, alignment is greatly improved if there can be a buffer of 5-7 days after the meeting where the topic receives no discussion. People come back in a less emotional state, and suddenly play nice. Maybe the time away helps forget the emotions, while the merits of the different options are still remembered? It also helps to remove ownership of ideas, or even reassign the "good ones" to any potentially-butt-hurt parties!! It's dishonest but it works. Finally, just because I'm writing this doesn't mean that _I_ am immune from these, I see the same behaviors in myself.
Sorry for the soap box, just seemed somewhat topical.
That does strike me as pretty early but hey, I’m sure it happened and it still happens! But I do agree with the core thesis that people seem to be waiting a very long time. How long is “too long“ is hard to determine though if you ask me. Potty training is not just about when your kid is ready, it’s also about when the parents have capacity to handle it because frankly it is an incredibly intensive, involved, messy process that usually takes several days if not weeks. It also usually has setbacks and even full resets.
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!
I had almost the same experience, with around 18 months it felt possible but ultimately it was frustrating for everyone so we waited more, a few months later we tried again and it went smoothly. The main factor was she could understand what we were doing much better just because she understood more words. I think 2 years is a sweet spot.
A big part of it is modern diapers keep them so dry unless they're absolutely soaked that the feedback loop of "have to go" and "now I'm uncomfortably wet" is snapped.
The difference between modern "swaddlers" and "training pants" is basically the absorbance.
With declining birth rates in the west, wouldn't it also make sense that Big Diaper is increasing prices and expanding into luxury products while unit sales go down? Expanding into products for the elderly, like incontinence, would also make sense, or perhaps expanding products into more countries (I don't know the global reach of say Pampers).
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.
My wife tried early teaching and cloth diapers with the first one, but with the second one we just use regular diapers.
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.
- 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!)
TLDR: 80% of kids used to be potty trained by age one. Nowadays parents train later, because diapers are so convenient that its feasible to wait until the kids are older where it's easier to train them. This provides massive revenue to diaper companies.
----
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.
I had to go look at my Costco and Amazon orders to check because my intuition was that I spent so much more money in diapers in the first year and indeed, that was like ~75% of the cost of the first two years. Toddlers get changed so much less often than babies, and you can plan your purchases way more easily, so I’m not even sure they make that much money off those.
I did the math meticulously when I had my first kid years ago, comparing store brand diapers vs cloth. Once you factor in the up front cost of the cloth diapers plus the cost of water and energy and detergent running the wash, the costs are virtually identical. The math looks better for cloth if you use them for years or multiple kids, but that's not super hygienic.
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.
Did you calculate based on buying cloth nappies second hand and then reselling them? That was a great alternative for my family. Worked out to something like $100 in total nappy costs for one child, including the opportunity cost of tying up the capital up front. That's less than $1 per week. Make it $1.5 if we include electricity and water costs of laundry, compounded over that period.
I would struggle to find single-use nappies for $1.5 per week in my area.
I guess if you buy them used the math changes. Second hand diapers was a line in the sand for my wife.
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.
What do you find confusing about the idea of a diaper service? It seems too unsanitary for you? The idea that it might cost slightly more than disposable diapers is intolerable to you?
Do you have any reason to believe washing diapers actually is unsanitary?
The price tag and environmental impact of constant diaper delivery seems off the cuff like it would negate the original benefit of cloth diapers. Admittedly I have not done math on this one.
With the service we used, they picked up and dropped off diapers once per week using a big truck. They also drove around to do the same for many other people at the same time. You can't call this diaper delivery "constant". And if the emissions from this are significant, you could always use an electric van.
How are you feeling: do you still think this is something only for performative environmentalists or "trad wives"? Neither of these descriptions apply in even the remotest sense to my wife or I.
> but that's not super hygienic.
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?
It's more about the accumulation of fecal matter over time. I don't feel convinced that a washer removes it all, hence staining. And I don't feel great about making my kid sit in another kid's shit.
I would need a second washer — you feel comfortable washing your own clothes afterwards?!
Have you ever had a wife having her first baby?
There are many decisions young parents make that from the remove of a keyboard in a happily single or child-free relationship seem irrational or (mon dieu!) _inefficient_, but there is a emotional depth to these choices that are _very_ meaningful to the people involved.
We're just talking about diapers, right?
Disposable vs. cloth? All else equal, don't the former make more sense (cleanlinesswise)?
Cloth diapers are good. We used them for our last kid with a diaper service and are going to do it again washing them ourselves with our next who is due at the end of the month. Regular diapers are useful to have either way. But cloth diapers are obviously much better for the environment and if they're an option for you, you should consider them. Not a hard concept, not worth a big discussion.
> But cloth diapers are obviously much better for the environment
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...
I assumed the environmental angle was the reduction in waste going to landfill with all the extra plastic generated, by the diaper and the small bags that are usually used to reduce smell and keep things clean during changing.
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.
The energy saving is clear and gets better year after year as the grid continues to green. You can also line dry cloth diapers which saves a lot of energy.
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 kept the diapers from our diaper service and the covers. The washing machines used by the service are much beefier and can handle these kind of loads easily, and will generally be more water efficient.
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?
Oops, talked to my wife and realized I got a detail wrong: we did not keep the diapers from the service, we gave them back. And the diapers we got from the service were almost surely used by plenty of other people before.
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.
Sorry, does the truck picks up dirty diapers? Or what’s the point of the pickup? How do you package them for pick up?
The truck would come by once a week to pick up all of our dirty diapers and drop off a new set of clean diapers. The service provided a bucket with a cloth bag inside of it that had enough capacity for one kid for a week. Packaging up = closing the lid of the bucket and leaving it outside the door of our apartment. They would drop off a new one of these buckets full of clean diapers each week (visiting many other people at the same time). Beyond all the environmental benefits, living in the city this was actually super convenient.
Do you wear clothes from the store without washing them? Imagine a product straight from a plastics factory constantly on your baby's skin, designed with chemicals to make them as convenient/effective/cheap as possible versus safe/minimal chemical exposure, covered in plastics dust from the process/other products being made in the factory from worse chemicals.
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.
> only if you save and reuse the same set of cloth diapers for 2 or more babies.
... or buy and sell second hand. Reusable nappies treated well retain surprising value.
They really do! Anyone who's thinking that a set of cloth diapers begins and ends with a single family has really got a pretty limited imagination.
Water is free, it comes from the sky.
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")
Plastic is just hydrocarbos basically - hydrogen and carbon. You can totally synthetise it. Might just not be as cheap an convenient like making it from mined oil, at least initially.
water is not entirely free. it has to be cleaned, which costs energy. energy is free, but access is still limited. likewise cotton also requires effort to produce.
i agree with your overall point though.
It depends where you are. The main problems are that a) we keep polluting water and b) most of the water is salty.
exactly, i mean water after use. using water to create or clean diapers pollutes it, and because overall we use and pollute water faster than nature recycles it through rain we have to add our own cleaning mechanisms to keep up. that's fine, but it makes the water not totally free.
> But cloth diapers are obviously much better for the environment
What about this is obvious? Water usage, transportation, fabrication factors, different usage patterns; seems like there are many things to tease apart here.
I think as a general rule: a reusable thing is more environmentally friendly than a single-use thing (especially when the reuse cycles are high). Yes, there are exceptions. But you’ve got the bizarre case to make here, if you want to suggest single-use diapers (that also use water, require transportation, are fabricated, packaged, etc.) are a more efficient use of resources.
My primary point is that it's not a slam dunk for either side. Nothing's obvious about the "impact" here. I you're interested in picking a product based on its environmental impact, there are going to be many factors to consider. Just peruse this 200 page report from the UK government on the subject:
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5a7c4096ed915...
This study has serious methodological issues. I would encourage you to carefully peruse it yourself before citing. This is far from the only issue, but the fact that someone who works at Procter and Gamble is on the study's advisory board is... fun.
I don't think it's that crazy. It's fairly well documented that a reusable cloth shopping bag has a break even with plastic shopping bags at around a 100-200 reuses, something most people won't reach.
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?
1. Id guess an average cloth diaper gets reused more than 100x
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.
I think it's plausible that cloth diapers are worse per use than disposable ones due to the mass industrialization of manufacture and resource intensity of cleaning.
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
Cloth shopping bags are a really bad comparison here.
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.
But there are lots of exceptions, right? Like a huge bunch of medical equipment where cleaning the thing to make it safe for reuse would be both more expensive and worse for the environment than single-use versions.
In many parts of the world they throw them in a basin of water and laundry detergent, let them soak for a bit, then hand wash them. No medical equipment necessary.
Of course if you have a washing machine you just launder them like any other item of clothing.
Eh, you have to wash poop off them in a washer at high temps, so it’s a bit harder to compute. IIRC if you use the dryer it’s a wash: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5a7c4096ed915...
This study has issues. Take a closer look at it. See my other comment on here responding to someone else who linked to it.
I had planned to do cloth diapers if we had a diaper service available, for environmental reasons, but there's none where I live now and I definitely am not up for washing diapers by hand/pooping up my nice washing machine. Props to you for sticking with it.
They make portable nappy washing machines. They have resale value, just like well taken care of nappies.
What is a diaper service?
A service that comes to pick up dirty cloth diapers and drops off clean cloth diapers.
Example: https://www.diaperstork.com
I would be extremely surprised if that’s better for the environment than disposable diapers. The key for most of this stuff is economies of scale. It’s why the produce from the supermarket that was carried thousands of miles on a cargo ship is better for the environment than the produce from the farmer’s market that was carried 50 miles in a diesel truck.
So this wipes out the savings you'd obtain just by buying diapers by the bulk.
DaaS
What is a diaper service?
Diapers are overall a tiny expense compared to what you’ll spend over the course of their childhood.
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.
It’s easy for this style of journalism to get upset about “billions” but that’s just the reality of a country with over 300 million people.
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.
What we should all be upset about is the cost of childcare (and even at these crazy costs the providers themselves are barely scraping by).
Have any parents tried Elimination Communication? Basically teaching your baby to inform you that they’re ready to go, and taking them to the toilet immediately.
This is something my partner wants to try when we eventually have kids. Something I’d never heard of until last week.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elimination_communication
As a parent, this is a hilarious comment.
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.
The irony of your comment is that it is actually possible to train cats to use the toilet, and it's not even that difficult.
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.
Its possible to do, the problem is, it takes months cleaning piss and shit to get to there.
I think its fine if one of you is staying at home all the time doing child care.
It’s really not at all as difficult as you’re making it out to be.
EC only works if parents are the sole carers, and every success story I've heard had one main parent doing 90% of the care-taking. No daycare would do it, and if you can find a nanny, au-pair, grand-parent or other carer who is up for it ... small kids still just behave differently around different people. If they have a different level of comfort, anxiety, or reluctance with a person it breaks down.
No, you just don't have to be black or white about it.
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.
Yes. Requires complete consistency but by my third child, she consistently goes #2 on her little potty.
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.
If one of you is a stay at home parent, then it's worth trying. But don't stress yourself out trying to make it happen.
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.
We did this with both our kids; the first one stopped pooping in diaper by 5 months. This made cloth diapers much more feasible as you just have to rinse. A local daycare was willing to do it as well and so she was fully potty trained well before starting preschool at 2 years.
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.
You can try it. Parents should try what they want and there is a huge amount of "you must do it this way or else" material that just produces unnecessary stress.
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.
the amount of extra effort required to constantly be observing the baby [...] makes [...] caring for a baby just more difficult
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.
It is true that you can learn a lot by observing babies. Observing them constantly so that you don't fail to miss these cues is a bigger task.
Yes, being born in the Soviet Union this is how my parents toilet trained me, and we did it with our daughter as well but were only able to catch it for defecation and not urination, but even having done that was so handy. She eventually would grunt to let us know, which as she learned to talk transitioned easily to a verbal cue. I think we had not had a soiled poopy diaper after I want to say 12 months old, but can’t remember exact age now. Potty training for urination came much easier after this as it wasn’t such a foreign concept.
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
My partner wanted to try the same thing. And cloth nappies and exclusive breastfeeding, and infant hand signals, and every other zeitgeist baby thing you can think of.
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.
What's wrong with sleeping on your side? Most people find it very uncomfortable to sleep on their backs. No doubt this applies to infants as well.
Like a sibling comment says, you risk the baby rolling on to its face and suffocating. All the midwives at the hospital and all the books say to not do it, but any mother in law will tell you to just put the baby on its side if it's fussy. If you challenge the MIL she'll throw the "I've raised more babies than you so I know better" remark in your face. A tale as old as time I guess.
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.
> What's wrong with sleeping on your side?
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...
I’ve tried it. My youngest (21 months) can definitely inform us that she needs to go to the bathroom. But she’s not quite ready to use the toilet. She either doesn’t want to sit on it, sit long enough, or gets distracted. The kid definitely needs to be open for potty training in order to it to work.
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.
all the negativity aside. it worked well for my older son, the second is almost old enough to try. both my wife and i have full time jobs, and we were working while he was potty training using andrea olson's EC book.
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
My sibling used EC with my nieces and it worked really well! Took a bit of patience up front but the kids were basically potty trained within a few months of being born. They also used cloth diapers because accidents happen, but rarely so!
It works well! And it's not huge effort either. Don't overpressure your self or your kid but go ahead and follow the method it's fine.
You'll be fine.
To each their own man, but I have a 9 month old and it's enough work without having to be on high alert constantly for bathroom queues.
Every baby is different. Some are relaxed, others are highly strung. Some will happily sit in a comfortable seat, others will demand to be held. Some will feed quickly, others will take their time. Some will sleep in a crib from the day they're born, others will need practice. Some will be happy, others will cry for hours for no apparent reason.
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.
A friend wanted to try this, but no daycares would do it.
Nappies were an essential part of “industrialising” child care (and thus making both parents available as a labour pool outside of the home).
it must have made a big impression on you!
Enough to make a comment, that’s for sure!
Parent of 2 kids. Parents receive enough judgement. Do whatever works for you!
-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!
If I've learned anything from parenting, its to give more grace, because you really never know someone else's situation from a short interaction or fact about their parenting.
“Every family has a scripture that is difficult to read” - Chinese proverb
"An SLL error has occurred and a secure connection to the server cannot be made" - William Shakespeare
"Trying is the first step towards failure." - Homer S.
Why did you make a snarky reply?
The post you replied to referred to a real Chinese proverb 家家有本难念的经
Haha lol I look stupid now. But it definitely would've made sense to add the Chinese version for credibility.
I wish all parents had this epiphany.
> that's how a market is supposed to work.
What about the negative externalities?
I mean... they're pushing diapers for 6-9 year olds, now?
What I took away is, by the early 2040s, "potty trained" is going to appear on peoples resumes.
Those diapers are for children with medical conditions, such as bed-wetting.
>I mean... they're pushing diapers for 6-9 year olds, now?
[citation needed]
They sell diapers for adults too. Some people have medical issues. This is not a conspiracy to convince adults to avoid using the bathroom.
Parent of three teens headed to college/trades in the next year.
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...
Tortillas from the grocery store are UPFs. This sort of "you shouldn't have had kids if you can't cook everything from scratch every day" judgement is outrageous.
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.
Ok but we were talking about marginal differences in potty training methods, not neglecting kids and feeding them garbage.
I read the parent post and your post several times and don't get the connection at all.
How do you think any of this relates?
Your comment conveniently disproves itself.
> 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’s not “objectively bad” To feed your children ultra processed foods.
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.
A good example for upf that is not likely to be bad for you is (European style) frozen pizzas.
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.
> Parent is right in saying that there is no clear definition of what exactly ultra processed food is
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?
Thanks for raising the right voice
.9% and 1.2% of children being result of rape and then forced birth combo is awful lot. It implies that both rape is super prevalent and forced birth is super prevalent.
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).
It's also objectively none of your business?
Individualism taken to the insane.
“How the next generation of your society is raised is none of your business”. Take some ownership
It's insane individualism to think other ppl don't get to dictate what kind of food people feed their kids?
Yes it is.
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.
We can barely even meaningfully define UPFs, and they aren't cleanly correlated with junk food.
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.
I will go further and say that eating some ice cream does not hurt kids at all. No, you are not a bad parent because you gave your kid ice cream. And fat is completely legitimate part of food. Likewise sacharides.
I can simultaneously criticize your parenting and not want the government to "dictate" it be otherwise.
"I say whatever I want and people can't tell me to stfu" who is the insane individualist now?
Who are you quoting?
The collective well-being of the society I live in is my business.
Is it your business to tell AndrewKemendo what his business is?
Gee it’s a discussion forum my dude - people giving opinions on things that would otherwise be none of their business is what it’s for.
Well that's just like, my opinion man
It can not be your business and you're allowed to still have opinions on it. It's one thing to discredit opinions you think aren't someone's business - that's fine, maybe even understandable.
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.
All of society is impacted by terrible parents who raise terrible kids.
As a black man in America I can promise you that how you raise your children will objectively be my problem
If everybody around me trains their children to be fascists that’s clearly my problem
How Society runs is everybody’s business
Lol iPad, social media, and processed food consumption is going to be your problem? OP was not talking about values, he was talking about the day to day specifics of child rearing.
[dead]
please refrain from personal attacks, it makes the discussion unpleasant to read.
As a white man/parent in America - same!
>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!
Yeah, if you don't give a shit about the environment.
Best thing for the environment would be to kill your kid and then kill yourself.
People can and do have multiple priorities
Technically you should kill as many as possible "for the environment".
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.
I feel like the time demands of modern life are the main culprit here. Today families mostly need two working parents, which means nobody to take care of the baby full-time.
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.
I just want to second this; a ton of parents I know had kids ready to do it earlier but waited until a major holiday/break when everyone would be home anyway to knock it out.
Related, the longer you wait to do it, the faster they seem to catch on. We waited until each of our kids’ third birthday to potty train and knocked it out in a weekend, no major subsequent accidents.
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.
Our two year old is potty training right now, and this was definitely a factor for us. We had to wait until it could be explained. Another factor is that diapers are now so absorbent that the kid feels no real discomfort from a pee or a poop. His main motivation is peer pressure and to be a bigger kid; concepts he's only recently caught.
Swim diapers are not really absorbent and can be a good "make him feel it" substitute while still containing the worst of the explosions.
The big difference is that 'real' nappies become extremely uncomfortable when wet (child immediately cries to be changed) so toddlers get a strong incentive to stop wetting whereas with modern disposables they barely even notice when they wee.
> More recent studies and surveys, tell us that the average age for starting toilet training is ~21 months.
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.
Agreed on the strollers. There are medical reasons sometimes or whatever I’m sure, but that doesn’t explain most of them. We pushed ours to walk outdoors as much as possible as soon as they could walk at all, otherwise you end up with the 6yo with an iPad in a stroller at the zoo, wtf. Can’t let them get used to anything you don’t want to keep doing for a looooong time.
> 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.
"Big diaper" has made basically every form if diaper 80% cheaper compared to 30 years ago, also.
They also survive much more and much longer than they used to, and even compared to cloth they can store a substantial amount of wee without having the kid soaking in wet.
Of course, they have that blue line that appears at 0.01% wetness to encourage you to change it earlier, but ah well.
After nappy number 200, which you'll reach by the first month probably, you'll become very good at gauging nappy fullness, and the nature of the filling by touch and smell alone. At that point the blue stripe is basically meaningless. I can tell if my baby needs a change just by picking her up.
Yeah the only real thing the stripe does is encourage people to change early (and often).
If the diaper is darn close to a lethal weapon weight, you can wait.
It talks about a study from 1944 in the US, specifically in Minnesota. How many of those parents were full-time stay-at-home parents, probably typically mothers, who were monitoring the child and helping with potty training?
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.
Absolutely. 3:1 is only common ant absolute top tier daycares. More likely you’ll have 6:1 or 8:1. And even high quality daycares might not help children potty train which is absolutely essential if both parents are working but people want to potty train early. By age 3 kids are moving towards preschool and are more intelligent and have better self awareness and are more reward motivated. I think diaper conspiracy is honestly less likely here than structural advantages and modern life leading to later potty training
As long as people are consistent being ecologically responsible seems great.
When people tell me I need to use paper straws but they can use disposable diapers, it makes the logic in my brain meltdown
We're using cloth diapers for our daughter (6m). She's still exclusively breastfed so no solid poops but so far I estimate we've saved over $100/mo by this decision.
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).
That's like $3 per day (a coffee).
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 care if anyone uses cloth diapers but the cloth diaper evangelists always seem to take a page out of the people who say "renting is always bad" or "leasing a car is always bad." Focusing on the (completely legitimate) negatives associated with the thing they don't like, and completely ignoring the (no less legitimate) negatives about the thing they like.
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.
I don't like those people either.
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.
If it helps I can tell just by this thread it's not your entire personality! :)
> lends itself to people making it 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.
Quick trick for processing dirty cloth diapers:
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.
Kid's are too old now and we used disposable diapers. Anyway, diarrhea, accidents and just going to the park after the watering system created the cleanest mud on Earth gave us a lot of opportunities to clean cloth.
Using the water from the toilet would be considered gross here. I'm not sure if the rule make sense, but I'd prefer not to break it, so we used a small buckler instead. Filling and cleaning it each time adds some time.
Thanks for the tips! Favoriting this for future reference
Ours come with a roll of cotton 'paper' sheets to put in. You throw this away which catches pretty much all solids. The rest we throw in the washing machine on 90 as is. Worked fine.
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.
“ That's like $3 per day (a coffee).”
Or $1000 per year? That little coffee a day already pays for a vacation flight.
Yeah, but you can hunt for discounts to reduce that bill quite a bit
I was just objecting to the typical phrase "it costs just as much as a coffee" making it sound like nothing worth thinking about. This stuff adds up to real money over time. I have explained to several people that their Starbucks habit costs more than their car insurance (and also may give them diabetes depending on the drink). It's even worse with Doordash or Uber.
Yeah it's an interesting argument. Also, coffees (especially Starbucks coffees) rarely cost $3 anymore. Maybe if you just get a regular brewed coffee but when I think of Starbucks I don't think of their coffees on tap, I think of their $7+ lattes or frapps that are less coffee and more dessert. Anyway, I digress.
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 :)
Yeah, or 365 coffees (well for me it's energy drinks). I'm well aware which one of those brings me more total joy in my life and it isn't the flight. It isn't even close.
Diapers and caffeine are not mutually exclusive.
Assuming cloth diapers cost an extra 10 minutes a day, the time savings of disposable diapers are "worth" 60 hours a year.
What do you value more - $1000 or 60 hours of your time?
I's estimating like 30 minutes per day.
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.
YMMV but we usually fold diapers while watching TV or during Zoom meetings or whatever. It does take time, but it's not like we'd magically get more sleep if we used disposable diapers, since we usually sleep at a predefined time and wake whenever the little one wakes us. Maybe we get a few more minutes to watch TV or whatever. Not a huge deal IMO. But again, YMMV. If it doesn't work for your lifestyle, it doesn't work! Nothing wrong with it. My comment is merely for folks to not knock if before they try it. We certainly wouldn't have if someone didn't gift us a pack.
> That's like $3 per day (a coffee).
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.
We tried with "hybrid" diapers for all three of our kids, a cloth shell with a disposable liner. They worked, but they're still a lot of extra work. We always kept disposables on hand for when we couldn't keep up. Our second and third kids are twins (2 for 1!!) and that was a lot harder to keep up with. And I ran into problems where I didn't set the diaper right and they would leak overnight, making more work. We had to give up on cloth just to stay sane. I guess my point is, yes, try it if you're able to. But also when you've got a new baby, do what you gotta do for your health, physical and mental, so you can take care of your family.
Yep, absolutely! Everyone's situation is different, and I'm not gonna be on a high horse and tell people to think of the environment or their wallets. It's hard to think of the environment when you're dealing with literal shit in your house.
Twins... God bless you
thanks, mate! and you as well :D I love having kids, lot of work and all that. but it's the best thing I've done with my life so far.
Looking back my wife and I have said that we could probably have done cloth diapers during the breast-feeding phase but man… Definitely not with solid foods. I don’t know how people did it. Like yes of course if we didn’t have an option we would do it, but with disposable diapers right there… There’s no way I’m ever choosing cloth diapers and solid foods lol
Indeed, we tried it back in the early 80's. When they started on solid foods, it was simply terrible and unsanitary. With our first child we had to use a laundromat, they almost banned us. With our second, we had a own washer and we banned ourselves!
I never thought solid was too bad, if it was solid. We had a sprayer on the toilet and typically everything would spray right off. There are worse kid messes that I’ve had to deal with (and >10 years later, still do).
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.
> if it was solid
Big if lol but yes agreed otherwise!
I submit the cost benefit is closer to neutral with extra washer cycles, setup costs, labor, friction while travelling...
This is probably better ROI than "breastfeeding saves money" when formula is so cheap and you avoid pumping, washing, and labor while exhausted.
I'm not sure where you live but formula is not cheap here.
We use disposables while traveling. It's just easier.
Is formula more expensive than the portion of the mother’s caloric intake that’s used to produce milk?
Very likely. A container of formula runs about $25 and contains 1800 calories (my count may be off). Considering the mother is often trying to lose babyweight I think you can find 1800 calories cheaper.
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.
Yeah we don't qualify for SNAP (as an aside I'd be curious how many HNers do qualify). My area also has a program called WIC (women infant children) which I'm pretty sure covers diapers but not totally sure.
WIC doesn’t cover diapers, only food, and very specific ones at that.
It’s easy enough to qualify for both even at HN salaries, you just need to have enough kids.
I'd posit that it may be simple, but having more kids is certainly not easy!
No way. This quick math doesn't make sense and seems grossly shortsighted.
(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.
Every family is different. I haven't been a parent for long but at the end of the day there's no one way to optimize everything. You'll either spend time, energy, or money. Something that saves you money may drive you insane. The $100/mo is not worth your mental health.
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.
You seemed to defend claims that breastmilk trumped formula on price. That's wrong and shortsighted, yet people keep repeating these myths.
Adding new parameters contingent on discretionary priorities and resources is vastly more subjective.
Enjoy parenthood.
I didn't say that. I just said formula is not cheap. I never ran the numbers because I didn't care to.
I am enjoying parenthood, thanks :)
You definitely said that by replying "very likely" to
> Is formula more expensive than the portion of the mother’s caloric intake that’s used to produce milk
You also "ran the numbers" in the same comment.
Maybe you're not getting enough sleep from tending to your kid.
That wasn't me. Do you have a newborn as well? :)
Ha! You're right. That's not your quote.
Though, you did say formula "isn't cheap" in a comment questioning the the ROI. I'm lost because that would imply you had run the numbers to call it expensive.
I agree that every family's different. I'm overly touchy on the phrasing to a fault. You get it. My point is that people seem to lean into this or over worry about breastfeeding at all costs.
Agreed, and you're right that my statement does have that connotation.
We still keep formula on hand just in case (premixed because the powdered formula has a pretty short shelf life). We found that my daughter doesn't really like it, but that's not really relevant. But in any case, the premixed formula is 2-3x more expensive than the powdered formula, which is why it's a bit surprising to me that someone would say that formula is more cost-effective ROI. Anecdotally we haven't really noticed a increase in our monthly grocery bill, and my wife is back to her pre-pregnancy weight and has stayed there for a few weeks.
Exclusive breastfeeding (not bottle feeding breastmilk) is less labor than formula. The problem is potential discomfort, and inability for both parents to split the labor more equally.
You raise a good distinction with exclusive breastfeeding and no bottle.
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.
“Potential discomfort” undersells it.
Spending the time to get the baby to really latch correctly is well worth it, if my wife's experience is anything to go by.
That math does not match my math with my kids. Does that factor in the price of water and electricity and detergent? And are you comparing to store brand diapers or the luxury name brand ones? The price difference is literally 5x for some sizes.
Every time I get tempted to try it the $20 gift card at Target keeps pulling me back in.
I haven't run the numbers that deeply.
Hard to say how much money you’ve saved because running the washer and dryer is not free though :)
This is true! Hard to gauge how much we spend there.
We used cloth diapers for our son for about 8 months, and then it just got to be too much of a hectic nightmare washing the poop cloths between work and other issues. So we did disposables for about two years. We were having a hard time getting him trained off of the diapers, until one day we just decided to follow some advice we'd heard and took them off and let him go diaperless on the floors (thankfully wooden).. and he trained in a couple days.
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".
>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.
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.
That's why we started with cloth. We just didn't have the tenacity to pull through and gave in within a year.
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.
> let him go diaperless on the floors (thankfully wooden).. and he trained in a couple days.
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.
Just get a carpet washer. Your kids will make a mess on the carpet sooner or later. Regardless of your potty training regime.
That sounds like a good investment.
If you're considering it for real and the carpet issue a real concern, the solution I've seen is one of those large plastic/rubber/foam playmats.
What's the unit cost of a nappy in your area? Here it's like €0.05 each, so monthly maybe €50 max incl wipes. I'll have to actually measure how much we use in a day though.
I was surprised by the price as well. We go through about 4-5 packs of disposable diapers per month for our 6mo, fewer when the kid was younger (more diapers per pack). Each pack costs $8 for the fancy kind[1] which we get, so that's just around $40 a month currently. This includes 25% VAT.
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...
Here at Costco (where you can get stuff in bulk and items are usually cheaper per unit) it's about $0.20 per nappy which is about €0.18 if I'm doing my conversions correctly.
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.
My experience with two kids is that solids are easier. With good diet, the poop has a good chance of just being a “roll off” and into the toilet. Get a spray wand/ hand held bidet attachment for toilet to help rinse it off before it goes in wash.
That's good to know! Makes me feel a bit better.
We do have a bidet but it's a toilet seat bidet so we may need to rethink our system.
It won’t ALWAYS be nice little rollers. And it depends on diet. Right now with 1 year old it’s a lot of smears but with a good shake they peel off and into the toilet, sometimes helped with the spray wand.
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.
That's a good suggestion!
We did cloth the entire time (G Diapers, not sure if they're still around). It was a cloth shell with cloth liners.
Worked fine.
Freud had a lot to say about excrement and shame -- I think cultural fears are still very resonant here. With modern washers cloth diapers clean extremely well -- you can bury your nose into them afterwards with confidence and not notice the faintest evidence what the diaper was like prior to washing. If you feel you can't, I think that is culture speaking, not reality. You are definitely already well exposed to your family's intestinal bacteria strains so any phobia here is purely psychological. While I admit it was difficult for me to consider buying used cloth diapers, after raising two children I think I wouldn't have a problem doing it now. We found buyers for all of our children's used cloth diapers. They were in great condition. One thing to also keep in mind, typically children have difficulty with bedwetting at the late stages of diaper training, so our diapers at least, were washed dozens of times without being soiled by excrement prior to re-sale.
We used reusable nappies for our daughter and introduced the potty very early. The reduction in waste is many times larger than you expect particularly with a very young child ( we started with disposable, but switched in the first few months. Here’s some notes:
- 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.
For toddlers who are able to communicate, simply add an absorbent layer into the disposable diaper to give them sensory feedback about moisture. Gauze squares from the first aid aisle work well and are very cheap.
Very interesting idea! I think I'll try this. Makes a lot of sense and has almost zero cost.
I know the Hustle is a Hubspot content factory, but I got to admit they've been capturing more and more of my reading and (YouTube) watch time recently. They have fascinating topics and seem to be researched very well.
All our kids were trained between 2-3 y.o, with overnight 3-4 (boys take longer (¬_¬)) honestly diapers isn't even a cost factor. When daycare is 2500-3000/month those first 3 years, diapers are picking up pennies in front of a steam roller.
If money is all you care about then sure.
My mom toilet trained me at 3 months. She had me on a schedule and she would hold me one toilet during the determined times and I would go. This was right after communism fell so she only had access to cloth diapers, and cleaning them was so annoying she did it as early as she could. She was shocked at how long my kids stayed in diapers. I asked her how, and well there is a slight difference between us. She had 2 years of parental leave. I had 1.5 weeks with my second. I did a board meeting from the hospital with my first. Let's just say I don't have the time to dedicate to it. It takes 2 weeks of dedicated focus, repeatedly putting them on the potty, rewarding them, and cleaning up. I know it's possible. Modern life tends to build on these conveniences and efficiencies until it's no longer possible to go back.
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.
In German this is called "windelfrei" (diaper free) or in english rather terribly named "elimination communication":
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/
> My mom toilet trained me at 3 months.
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.
She had me on a schedule and would hold me up. Yep at 3 months babies can't even sit up. She said at the start she would hold me up until I went, even if it took hours, and if I went she would reward me. She Pavlov'ed me. I think she said I would cry or babble in a certain way, or if she even suspected I needed to go she would put me on the potty and hold me up.
that's pretty much the chinese way of doing it. i don't know about the schedule or starting time though, actually i think they start almost right after birth. since traditionally the grandparents help with taking care of children they have more time to sit around with a baby in their lap.
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)
> 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.
Fascinating. I'm not sure what would drive someone to do this, since until the child can actually go to the toilet on their own, you haven't achieved the actual point (IMO) of the training.
She had only cloth diapers, no washing machine, she had to wash them by hand and boil them to disinfect them. I guess the time lost just waiting for me to go was better than the time lost doing all that cleaning. I was her second so she had experience doing this.
I hadn't considered that. I can see how without modern conveniences the tradeoff would make sense.
Manual labour of cleaning clothes without either a dedicated washing machine, and probably no access to a tumble drier.
That seems like a reasonable motivation to me
The point would be to not clean diapers.
Not having to change poopy nappies is a powerful motivator.
Yep. Some friends of mine had their 4 month old completely toilet trained. (Their 4th child.)
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.
Some kids are very developmentally ahead of others, its quire uneven.
> don't have the time to dedicate
I hope it's worth it
I spend a lot of time with my kids because of my work. I've worked fully remote for almost 7 years now. After my son was born I was back to work 1.5 weeks later but I got to work with him in my lap for 1.5 years (after which he started going to grandmas) He was breastfed that entire time. Taking 2 weeks to potty train is something I've deprioritized because I'd rather focus on going on vacation/recharging and the downside is minimal. There is no evidence late potty training causes any damage (except to your wallet.) You have to prioritize these things. My kids are always priority #1, but that doesn't mean I have to eliminate all other things I enjoy in life. My kids get to grow up watching me build software for millions of people, so yeah, it's worth it. I know I would be an excellent stay-at-home mom, but I'm also an excellent work-from-home mom.
As someone who grew up watching his dad build software for millions of people, some friendly advice is this may not be as “worth it” as you think it is.
Take that up with your dad, not a stranger on the internet offering an extremely limited window into their life.
A lot of people in this discussion seem to compare the price of single-use nappies to that of buying new cloth nappies and then giving them to the landfill once done with one child.
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.
> and the opportunity costs of tying up the capital in nappies
Respectfully - chill.
I have an HP 12c, so doing compounding maths is about the same level of chill as not doing it.
I was designing waterproof textiles a few weeks ago and somewhat accidentally also designed a Chitosan-Alginate Fleece that could be used as fleece liner, super absorbent diapers, gauze
How do the production costs for Chitosan-Alginate Fleece compare to diapers and gauze?
Why is the US so prone to these fads ? Diapers, diets galore (all bad), the "whole language" débâcle, etc... ?
Low education populace with highly un regulated market incentives
Babies and childcare can cost either a huge amount, or not very much at all.
Modern American middle class norms are that babies cost a fortune.
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?
> 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.
The vast majority of advertising is laser focused to push women's buttons it's alarming.
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.
[1] https://youtu.be/37w6DeEUbVg?is=lOnp2PhSYzydkK51
Speaking of monitoring, your YouTube link has a tracking identifier in it… although it's ?is=, for some reason. Did you type that out manually, or has YouTube changed?
Id not noticed but can't edit it now!
that’s one of the most horrific ads i’ve ever seen. I wonder if an ad like that is allowed outside america?
I'm in Europe!
The No New Things book (written by a woman!) pointed out that women are the primary purchase decision-maker 78 percent of the time!
The vast majority of marketing is aimed at women, and it gets pretty disgusting pretty quick.
> Modern American middle class norms are that babies cost a fortune.
> 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.
You should consider “Make better care more affordable” as an alternative to “Take worse care of your kids.”
> best nutrition, daycare, early childhood learning, classes, tuition
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 keep up the fight against big baby keeping our child labor rights down.
Kids should have jobs in high school. It's a fantastic way to learn budgeting, work ethic, entrepreneurship, and gives them a drive to study harder.
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.
So there is a difference between a kid having a safe job to keep them preoccupied and a kid needing a job to make ends meet.
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.
Since we learned those types of kids vote "wrong".
Your comments are just totally out of touch with the realities of being a parent today. The average person can't afford to raise a kid because of the time demands of constant work to make rent and afford food.
We're discussing an article about diapers.
> The average person can't afford to raise a kid
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.
Do you have kids? The phone comment seems pretty out of touch.
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.
There's never just one reason, obviously. Maybe phones are a big reason we're not socializing as much and it cascades from there. But as a young parent, I'm gonna tell you flat out - the core necessities, not the best of the best, are insanely expensive today than ever before as a share of our monthly take home.
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.
The average person can absolutely afford children!
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
A big part of it may be that once you fall below a certain percentage of the federal poverty level, you start getting assistance. WIC kicks in pretty early, as do ACA assistance and Medicaid/CHIP.
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/
> We did okay for hundreds of thousands of years.
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
Child mortality saw steep improvements in the 1900s - 1940s all over the world. I didn't think I had to clear myself of this argument.
"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.
"Helicopter parents" are because of the rise of national media amplifying relatively rare cases of things like child abductions, not a conspiracy by big diaper
I’m no expert, but I suspect that going from disposable diapers to cloth diapers would not be quite that bad.
Babies are incredibly difficult even in the best case. Sleep deprivation is intense. Breastfeeding is difficult. Adding in small additional difficulties adds up. "This is a bit more difficult" becomes a huge mess when you are on three hours of sleep and there are 10 different "this is a bit more difficult" things that people are suggesting to you.
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.
Babies are incredibly difficult even in the best case. Sleep deprivation is intense. Breastfeeding is difficult. Adding in small additional difficulties adds up. "This is a bit more difficult" becomes a huge mess when you are on three hours of sleep and there are 10 different "this is a bit more difficult" things that people are suggesting to you.
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.
I don't judge people who order out all the time or pay for a night nanny or do any of a million things that make life easier with an infant. Infants are fucking hard.
Couldn’t agree more. This entire comment section reads as a bunch of 20 year olds with no kids talking about parenting.
No, but if you have a kid with no support system you’re going to find it really hard to add just a few more hours per week to clean diapers out every other day on top of everything else. If it was easy for you congratulations you had an easy one.
imo childcare is at most two of: low cost, high quality, low time commitment
Just like government, just let us watch!
This is also the theory of so many. We can all just go live in caves guys, it'll make it.
big diaper needed to be exposed
And changed!
80% trained by age 1 in 1944 vs barely started by age 2 in 2026... now that seems like a regression in learning rate!
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.
I wonder how much of the baby training "science" has been replicated.
> In 1962, the journal Pediatrics published a Brazelton study in which he observed ~1k parents and children in the 1950s. They followed his “child-oriented” approach to toilet training, which involved starting training at about two years old. That was after the age when the vast majority of children had previously finished training but when Brazelton believed that most children would only be physically and emotionally ready to start.
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)
You're not mentally modeling the child correctly. The child has to have several things going to successfully practice using the bathroom:
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 interesting to hear this perspective, especially helpful because you have a kid and I don't. I wonder if the child really has to recognize the problems, or just has to be conditioned that this-feeling-means-potty-time. To be fair, I don't know how that conditioning would happen without the child leading the process in some way (how would they associate bowel movements with the bathroom if not by willingly going to the bathroom?)
The one that took us the longest was (3). He knew he needed to go, knew all the steps, and would pee in his pants just to spite his parents.
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.
tbh I think this is an underappreciated aspect to human behavior in general. Adults will do the same thing, sometimes even if they are corrected as politely as possible (my coworkers pee in their pants just to spite me too!) I think a lot of our systems don't explicitly account for that. We have meetings where a "correct" decision is made, and then we immediately expect everyone to get over their ego and accept the decision. In my experience, alignment is greatly improved if there can be a buffer of 5-7 days after the meeting where the topic receives no discussion. People come back in a less emotional state, and suddenly play nice. Maybe the time away helps forget the emotions, while the merits of the different options are still remembered? It also helps to remove ownership of ideas, or even reassign the "good ones" to any potentially-butt-hurt parties!! It's dishonest but it works. Finally, just because I'm writing this doesn't mean that _I_ am immune from these, I see the same behaviors in myself.
Sorry for the soap box, just seemed somewhat topical.
That does strike me as pretty early but hey, I’m sure it happened and it still happens! But I do agree with the core thesis that people seem to be waiting a very long time. How long is “too long“ is hard to determine though if you ask me. Potty training is not just about when your kid is ready, it’s also about when the parents have capacity to handle it because frankly it is an incredibly intensive, involved, messy process that usually takes several days if not weeks. It also usually has setbacks and even full resets.
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!
I had almost the same experience, with around 18 months it felt possible but ultimately it was frustrating for everyone so we waited more, a few months later we tried again and it went smoothly. The main factor was she could understand what we were doing much better just because she understood more words. I think 2 years is a sweet spot.
A big part of it is modern diapers keep them so dry unless they're absolutely soaked that the feedback loop of "have to go" and "now I'm uncomfortably wet" is snapped.
The difference between modern "swaddlers" and "training pants" is basically the absorbance.
With declining birth rates in the west, wouldn't it also make sense that Big Diaper is increasing prices and expanding into luxury products while unit sales go down? Expanding into products for the elderly, like incontinence, would also make sense, or perhaps expanding products into more countries (I don't know the global reach of say Pampers).
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.
Big Diaper already makes product for elderly, etc (look at the brand owners, there's not very many).
They're also probably developing a baby with two butts to double sales.
My wife tried early teaching and cloth diapers with the first one, but with the second one we just use regular diapers.
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.
You don’t know the half of it. If you really want to know the truth investigate big formula.
"Big Diaper" — now there's an image. Sounds like the giant nappies astronauts wear.
tldr:
- 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!)
TLDR: 80% of kids used to be potty trained by age one. Nowadays parents train later, because diapers are so convenient that its feasible to wait until the kids are older where it's easier to train them. This provides massive revenue to diaper companies.
----
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.
I had to go look at my Costco and Amazon orders to check because my intuition was that I spent so much more money in diapers in the first year and indeed, that was like ~75% of the cost of the first two years. Toddlers get changed so much less often than babies, and you can plan your purchases way more easily, so I’m not even sure they make that much money off those.
Now that I think about it, Big Toilet Paper is a threat to democracy by robbing billions from unsuspecting high-fiber food eaters.
As a high-fiber food eater, I think Big Toilet Paper actually gets less money from me than they would otherwise.
Add-on bidets are a fabulous life hack.
also the nefarious population control by Big Condom