Babylune

Diaper or Nappy Guilt

by kate baggott on April 19th, 2006

Call them disposable diapers, nappies, or just Pampers. Depending on the industrialized society you live in, they take up anywhere from 2.5 to 5% of landfill space. According to an article in today’s Guardian, the average child will use 3, 796 disposable diapers before being toilet trained.

Disposables are the source of a lot of guilt for many parents and with good reason.

I love the earth. I hate to watch myself destroy landscapes, use up resources and pollute water because I can’t deal with my own children’s waste. Plus, there is the cost issue. Disposable diapers, after housing and transportation costs, are our single biggest expense. Luckily I am not a single mother or a teen mother or a mother of multiples, for whom the cost of disposable diapers must be a real hardship.
At the same time, I have heard my mother, my grandmother, and other women of a certain generation talk about the scars washable diapers left on their very souls. Of course, they were also working with old-fashioned wringer-washing machines. Still, I can’t see myself rinsing diapers out in the toilet for two or three flushes. My mother told me (two of us were in diapers at once) that for two years her hands were so chapped from rinsing and washing diapers that the skin used to crack and bleed.

There have been a number of studies that show the environmental impact of cloth diapers is only slightly less than those of disposables. While it’s true that cotton, from which cloth diapers are made, is not an especially earth-friendly crop, the study methodology fails to take into account many aspects of cloth diaper use. Such as the fact that people who use cloth diapers tend to buy fewer than the studies assume and air dry rather than tumble dry the clothes.

While in some areas disposable diapers are composted the cost of a diaper composting program is prohibitive for many communities. The resulting compost can also only be used for industrial fertilizers on playing fields and other recreational spaces rather than for food production.

The problem is, that I just don’t feel guilty enough to switch to cloth diapers. I believe that people who use cloth diapers, along with vegans and anti-globalisation activists, belong to a special camp of highly ethical people whose sacrifices I can’t match.

To meet my own standards, I decided to reduce the typical disposable diaper consumption of my children by at least one diaper a day, saving about 912 diapers per child. To do this, I use an adapted form of elimination communication. Basically, from the time they are born, I watch the babies for signs of an impending bowel movement. When I see them turning red or grunting, I hold them over the toilet. The hold is actually quite secure. It’s not “dangling a little baby over the toilet” as some critics have suggested.

As the baby’s schedules become more regular, I get them over the toilet at specific times of day. My little boy used to wake me up, make eye contact and grunt from the time he was 4 months old to tell me it was time. My baby girl, who is just four months old, is just starting to make signals for me. Still, I am relaxed about it. If we don’t make it to the toilet, it is no loss. And, as an added benefit, I can use cheaper diapers rather then brand names. The stuff isn’t in there long enough to spill or leak. It was a little bit easier for me to use this method because we spend some time in a Bulgarian village every summer. There, when the weather is good, letting baby go bare and taking them to pee in a corner of the barn yard is traditionally how children begin toilet training in infancy, so I we weren’t considered to be weird or unusual.
While I have read and recommend Laurie Boucke’s book Infant Potty Basics: With or Without Diapers– The Natural Way, I used the information as a background guide. I don’t follow a program. I just do what feels do-able considering everything else that has to happen during the day.

While it is possible to use elimination communication to toilet your baby without any diapers at all, I haven’t been able to make that commitment to my babies or to the earth, which doesn’t reflect well on me.

What makes me even sadder are reports that parents in China, India and other parts of the world that are becoming more prosperous have been exposed to advertising for disposables and now think that they are better than their traditional methods of elimination communication. While disposable diapers might be modern and convenient, the traditional methods of elimination communication are definitely more environmentally-friendly, cost effective and baby-friendly.

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POSTED IN: Baby Care, Finances