Rebecca will be graduating to a larger size cloth diaper pretty soon, and her new diapers arrived today, so I thought it might be a good time to write about why cloth diapers have been a good choice for us. Three main factors influenced the decision to go with cloth:
- Cost: Disposable diapers are expensive. Here is an article where the author did a cost comparison of disposables versus gDiapers. I think gDiapers are one of the more expensive cloth options, so if you were to go with a less expensive system the difference would be even more dramatic. Use your cloth diapers on more than one child and you are talking major, major savings.
- Environmental Impact: If you do a little research, you will find that some people think disposables are more harmful to the environment because they contribute millions of pounds of waste to landfills, while some people think cloth are more harmful because of the water and energy required to launder them. Who knows? I lean towards disposable being more harmful, but explaining my reasoning behind that would be a whole post in itself, so let’s just leave it at that.
- Early Toilet Training: As far as I know there are no studies finding this conclusively, but some people say that cloth diapers help kids potty train sooner because the child can feel when he or she is wet. With disposables, you can’t. As a result, the kids have more incentive to use the potty to avoid that uncomfortable wet feeling. Makes sense to me.
I did initially have some concerns that cloth diapering would be very inconvenient. We certainly do use disposable diapers from time to time. For example, Rebecca was pretty tiny when she was born, so the cloth diapers weren’t exactly a great fit. We used premie and newborn disposables for about the first six weeks until she grew into her cloth diapers. Even then, we continued to use disposables overnight. Initially, when she was a newborn, she pooped in every diaper, and we didn’t want to be rinsing poopy diapers in the middle of the night. Now she does not seem to poop at night, so it’s more because the disposables are pretty reliable in not leaking #1 during the night (when she doesn’t wake up and get changed anyway). We also use disposables when we go places so we don’t have to tote dirty cloth diapers around with us until we get home. In addition, the disposables are a little bit more compact for travel than the cloth diapering paraphernalia.
Occasional disposable use aside, I have not found the cloth diapers to be all that inconvenient for day-to-day use. Tossing a soaked cloth diaper in a diaper pail isn’t really different from tossing a disposable in the trash. The one exception would be poopy diapers, which have to be rinsed. This takes a bit more time and if you are not careful can lead to . . . accidents. But, now that I’ve had some practice, it does not take too long and I rarely have . . . accidents . . . anymore. Plus, Rebecca only poops once, maybe twice a day now, so rinsing diapers is no big deal.
In the few months we’ve been using cloth, I’ve also noticed two other benefits:
- No Diaper Rash: As I mentioned, Rebecca was in disposables for about six weeks. During that time, she got some pretty wicked diaper rash. We tried everything to clear it up. We changed her constantly to keep her as dry as possible. We lubed her up liberally with rash cream or ointment. We regularly let her hang out diaperless on a waterproof pad to air out her little butt. Even her doctor said we were doing all the right stuff; sometimes diaper rash just is. Well, the speed at which it cleared up when we switched to cloth was amazing, and we haven’t seen a trace of the rash since.
- Better Containment of Super Poops: In the cloth, we have had one instance of feces escaping the confines of the diaper (which I wrote about here). With disposables . . . I haven’t kept count but it has definitely been more than that, even though we don’t use them very often. So even though it may seem like a hassle to rinse poopy cloth diapers, it’s better than having to change a whole poopy outfit.
So that’s my two cents as to why I think cloth diapering was a good choice for us. It’s not for everyone, but it’s really not as much of a pain as you might initially think. What was difficult was choosing a cloth diapering system, which took me hours and hours of research to see what all the options were. But that would be a whole different post.
© 2012 The Beehive All Rights Reserved