I didn't always know I wanted to use cloth diapers with my babies. In fact, I never thought twice about it. I always totally assumed I'd be crazy NOT to use disposables! After all, wasn't that the reason they were invented in the first place? To save poor mothers from the day-in, day-out laundry, folding and constant leaky diaper changes? It would be like comparing old fashioned cloth rags to modern tampons! (!?!?!?!!!) But strangely enough, the years of infertility led me to stumble upon the world of all things natural. I thought it just made more sense to stick closer to nature rather than rely on drugs and chemicals. Over time, the "green movement" developed, and it became even easier to choose these more environmentally friendly options. I read more and more and thus became more passionate about it.
In the beginning of my journey with diapers, even though we had registered for cloth diapers on our baby registries, most people didn't read them and we were given packages upon packages of the all too common disposable diapers. Huggies, Pampers, Kirkland, Luvs, and even the "natural" brands like Earth's Best, Seventh Generation, you name it, we had them all. Our little girl was very small as a newborn, and for the first 3 months of her life, she wore newborn sized diapers, and being as we were not the most wealthy of families, we took full advantage of the trillions of free newborn diapers we were given and used them all. But the disadvantages grew fast. It blew me away how quickly her diaper pail would fill up with dirty diapers. We were tossing full bags of used diapers twice a week, and using up 72 count packages of disposable diapers in a single week or less! It was outrageous to me, especially once we ran out of the free gifted diapers and had to start buying our own. 72 count diapers costs roughly $20. That's $100. a month and $1,200 a year. Holy crap! Literally!
Knowing already that regular store costs on diapers are insane, I went online and decided to do my research. Diapers.com and Amazon Mom were the two best choices. Their prices aren't a whole lot cheaper, but they usually have deals you can get, like $10 off your first order plus $5 off every order over $50 thereafter from Diapers.com. And Amazon Mom offers "Prime" benefits, which include prices that are cheaper than regular, quick 2-day shipping, and give even more discounts if you commit to "Subscribe & Save" to have automatic deliveries. Both places also offer free shipping. But even after all the discounts, it is still overwhelmingly expensive to use disposables. It isn't just the diapers themselves that cost, it's the diaper pail & liners that add up the monthly price you have to factor in.
So, just to make things easier, I decided to make a list of pros & cons for diapers:
Disposables: Expensive
Cloth: Economical
Disposables: Wasteful
Cloth: Reusable
Disposables: Environmentally Harmful
Cloth: Environmentally Safe
Disposables: Toxic to Skin
Cloth: Gentle on Skin
Disposables: Harder to Potty Train Early
Cloth: Easier to Potty Train Early
Disposables: Convenient
Cloth: Inconvenient (debatable)
Disposables: Quick & Easy
Cloth: Time Consuming
Disposables: Absorbent
Cloth: Not as Absorbent. (May leak through if not changed often)
Disposables: Frequent changing of baby outfits (Flimsy designs do a poor job of keeping in runny poo--which, by the way, is roughly 90% of your diaper changes in the first 6 months of life)
Cloth: Less outfit changes with proper use (Snugger cloth pants & waterproof pouch designs prevents leaky poo disasters amazingly well)
So, for me the argument was easy, but people always go a bit farther with this argument and ultimately end up making it sound like it's a "toss-up" which diaper is actually all-around better to use. Take the environmental argument, for example. Cloth is usually made with cotton, a crop that is often heavily sprayed with pesticide & herbicidal chemicals if not grown organically, then transported and processed in several factory plants before it finally becomes a cloth diaper, after which it is packaged and stored in yet more facilities before being shipped to manufacturers who finally sell them to us. However, after they are bought, they are used, washed and reused over and over and over again for the entire time your child is in diapers, and will last for years beyond that. Many people factor in, as they should, the impact of washing cloth diapers, taking into consideration the extra use of water and energy used to machine wash & dry them. Though you can cut down on these impacts if you use plant-based detergents and reuse the laundry water to water your garden, for example, and of course line dry instead of machine dry. But even if you didn't take any of those extra "green" steps, the comparison is hardly notable to the vast damage disposables do to the environment in their life cycle. Bottom line, the fact that cloth is a reusable one time purchase makes it the best choice in my book.
For the disposable diaper, the road is far bumpier. Think of the list of vast ingredients in making a disposable diaper as a list of factories and processes used in it's development. Each separate chemical must come from a different place. Many people forget that disposables also use cotton, among other things, in the making of their diapers, so the same process applies to disposables as to cloth, only with added processes. There are toxic gels and plastics involved in creating disposables in order to assure their absorbancy, but at a large cost. They are also shipped all over the place from factory to manufacturing plant, to store, to customer, etc. But unlike cloth, the disposable doesn't stop there. It's only just begun, really. After your baby's bottom absorbs it's toxic substances and sufficiently irritates the skin, causing everything from an allergic rash to the development of cancer, it moves on to bigger and better things. Solid waste left in the diaper and tossed away in the trash becomes a bio-hazard when it runs off into streams and rivers. Plastic used to keep the diaper from leaking now keeps it from ever decomposing as plastic is not biodegradable. And when you recall the amount of diapers needed per week/month/year, etc, for a single baby alone, you put this into perspective and suddenly understand what a disaster the disposable diaper is.
Even when you factor in cloth diaper services, the cost might be comparable, but the driving to and from local laundering facilities and the use of the facility's water & energy is hardly comparable to that of a disposable diaper, so I wish people would quit using that as an argument against cloth. From what I understand, diaper service facilities use extremely hot water to sterilize their cloth diapers, not chemicals, and actually use less water than you would laundering them at home, so if you wanted to spend the extra money on the service to save yourself on the "inconvenience" of cloth, it's not a bad deal, in my opinion, and you can still feel good about it since the pick-up & delivery costs (money and environmentally alike) can't be any worse than that of shipping & handling on an Amazon order of disposables or a comparable trip to the store and back to buy them!
And lets not forget the wipes! A folded stack of wet wash cloths in a tupperware container makes for a fantastic alternate to disposable baby wipes. In fact, they are even better at doing the job. First, if you use the terry cloth kind, they are perfect at wiping away sticky poo and messes, and 99% of the time only need one of them. Secondly, they do not contain anything but water, so there is nothing irritating constantly rubbing against your baby's tender bum. Then you just wash them right along with the cloth diapers. Thirdly, again, they are CHEAP! Here's a little story for you: When I was a CNA, working for a nursing home/rehab center, I learned one of the biggest costs of running that type of facility was the adult diapers or incontinent pads and wipes. In order to cut down on costs, the owners decided to eliminate the disposable wipes and re-train the staff to use wash cloths and water. I figure if a large facility like that concluded the benefits of using wash cloths & water over buying disposable wipes was less costly enough to warrant the big change of procedure, it must have been a considerable amount less!
My daughter is now 18 months old, so I've been using a combination of disposables & cloth diapers for about 15 months! We used disposables whenever we went out of the house because of the fact that toting around dirty cloth diapers can be a stinker. But for argument's sake, I did get myself a wet bag and tried it for a while. I didn't like how it made everything else in my diaper bag smell like pee, and it didn't hold very many at a time, so I begrudgingly went back to using disposables for long outings and trips where we didn't have access to a laundry. I kept the wet bag to hold soiled clothes from the disposable diaper leaks. I'm sure there are stricter cloth diaper parents who would dispute that, but I'm just telling you what I did. You can make your own decisions.
So, after these 15 months, I can say with complete certainty that cloth diapers are no harder than disposables. I swear. Yes, they may take more time when you are washing/folding/assembling them yourself, but when it comes down to it, the best benefits are that cloth diapers are WAAAAAAAAAAAAAY cheaper, they NEVER cause a rash, they NEVER leak poop up my baby's back like disposables, and honestly, they make me feel good to use them. I love all the cute colored pants my daughter gets to wear. I don't mind the extra time it takes to wash, dry & fold them, because quite frankly, I hardly notice it with all the other baby laundry I'm doing anyway! And here's my bottom line: cloth diapers are no more difficult to use than disposables. I have them all pre-assembled and ready to use at the changing table, and can whip them on in the exact same amount of time it takes for me to use a disposable diaper. Even my husband can do them, and believe it or not, he is quite partial to them as well!
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| gDiaper (3 months old) |
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| Flip (8 months old) |
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| Grovia (12 months old) |
Okay, I figured this part needed a title just to warn you that I'm getting detailed here. Baby poo is quite the focus in new parenting. There's no way around it. Whether you decide to use cloth, disposable or nothing at all, you are going to deal with poo!
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| This wasn't one of the pictures we shared after birth! |
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| Discovering the poo on Mommy |
What we discovered later on was that once she started on solid foods, her poo changed almost immediately! It was more formed and became more of the stereotypical poo-poo most people think about when they think about poo. It's a lot more smelly, and depending on what they ate, it changes colors, textures and smells. I'm sure you get it. My husband was very disappointed about this change, and longed for the exclusive "breast milk poo" back. So, once that happened, we introduced a new step to cloth diapering: Diaper Liners. These are wonderful inventions to the land of cloth diapering because they take the biggest gross factor out of changing a poopie diaper. They are basically thin sheets, similar to a dryer sheet, that you lay over the cloth insert in the diaper that catches the solid poo so that all you have to do is toss/flush the sheet and wash the liner as you normally would! Another great perk is that they are extremely cheap and biodegradable!
Later on, we learned that the further weaned she became from the breast (the least breast milk she consumed), the firmer the poopies became. This for us, occurred during the toddler months. This is the time diapers start getting the "loaded" look to them, drooping down and making it appear as though your baby's legs just got a little shorter as they're toddling around in a disposable diaper (not so much in a sturdy cloth diaper, instead, their bum looks a bit bigger). In addition to large poopies at this stage, changing diapers became a HUGE chore. She fought it with everything she had, kicking and screaming until finally we were through. It was during this time, after all that diaper nonsense, when she was about 17 months, that I started researching early potty training, and discovered something referred to as "EC" or "Elimination Communication" in which parents toilet train their babies from birth, therefore eliminating or at least limiting the need for diapers at all! I wished we had done that, because then our troubles would most likely be over by now, but we can't undo the past. All we can do is move forward with this knowledge that it can be done. So, we decided to make a very big decision: to say bye-bye diapers! Hello potty!!!
