I'm attempting a delicate balance in this post. I'm definitely an advocate for environmental consciousness and responsibility and I love new ways to help keep the earth healthy. I also applaud anyone who's trying to make good choices for the health of their baby. I also know several people who cloth diaper, and I love and respect them. This post is in no way trying to undermine people who use cloth diapers, or trying to convince fence-sitters to not give cloth a try. If you want to do it, you should! It's very rewarding. If it works for you, awesome! If you don't want to do it, don't do it and don't let anyone make you feel guilty. I'm trying to share my own personal experience and things I've learned in my 2 months of cloth diapering (don't let the seemingly short time frame fool you--as my husband can vouch, I've spent at least a good 100 hours researching cloth diapers. Conservatively estimating). And I want to provide some information that, with the flood of cloth diaper blogs, is hard to find when you're researching cloth diapers. I'll try to cite sources where I can, but I've literally seen hundreds of sites, so it's hard to go back and find exactly what I'm looking for. Definitely Google any ideas or terms that you have questions about. The goal is to provide information for an informed decision, since basically everything you can find is pro-cloth and a lot of it was misleading for my situation.
The Argument for Cloth: Environmental Responsibility
If you don't know this stuff by now, you will once you start researching cloth vs disposable. Disposable diapers are a huge strain on the environment. They are neatly wrapped plasticky packages of human waste that take around 500 years to decompose. According to Wikipedia, An estimated 27.4 billion disposable diapers are used each year in the US, resulting in a possible 3.4 million tons of used diapers adding to landfills each year. (Remember: used diapers=human waste. Feces, urine, nastiness.) That's a lot of garbage. Like, a LOT. And remember that disposable diapers also use thousands of trees each year and release chemical pollution into the air and water. Oh, and disposables are transported on big, diesel-sucking trucks that spew more pollution into the atmosphere, and you have to burn gas in your own car to drive to the store to buy them.
The Argument for Cloth: Baby Health and Earlier Potty Training
I'll admit, this is the primary reason I started cloth. (The environmental stuff was a definite bonus, though, don't get me wrong. I love the earth and we are responsible for keeping it clean and healthy...or trying to minimize our impact.) It's kind of a funny story--I was checking out books on parenting and I saw
Early Start Potty Training by Linda Sonna and got it because I had a 13-month-old and I always read up on things way in advance. I had read several books on pregnancy by the time I was 5 months away from actually being pregnant. (Sidenote: By far my favorite was
The Real Deal Guide to Pregnancy by Erika Lenkert. Love that book.) Anyways, it was a very interesting book filled with eye-opening facts and a few weird things, like her idea that putting a diaper on a baby sends the message that you reject their genital area and they'll be conflicted later in life. I don't know that I buy into that. But she taught me about how Pampers hired Dr. Brazleton back in the day to encourage parents to keep their kids in diapers longer, which is pretty gross, living the first several years of your life in your own waste. At the beginning of the 20th century, most kids were out of diapers before they were one year old. Sonna attributes several health issues to the increased duration of disposable diaper-wearing, including rashes, urinary tract infections, and the risk of male infertility. That last one really worried me. What parent wants to curse their tiny little baby boy with infertility later in life? The reasoning was that the plastic in the diaper trapped the heat, and there is a German study that showed an increase in scrotal temperature of 1 degree Celsius (just over 30 degrees Fahrenheit) after 24 hours of being in a disposable diaper (
http://abcnews.go.com/Health/story?id=117939&page=1#.Tt4d-bIk6so). Increased scrotal temperatures are known to kill of sperm in grown men, but the effect on babies is unknown. There's also the concern of the chemicals in the diapers and absorbent gel, one of them apparently the chemical recalled from tampons for causing toxic shock syndrome.
Yikes. What a nightmare!! Cloth sounds so much better. Add to that the idea that the increased sensation of wetness children experience in cloth diapers encourages them to potty train sooner, and how can you go wrong?
The Argument for Cloth: You can save around $2,000 per child
You can buy a reasonable stash of cloth diapers for around $300. If they're one-size, they're all you need for one child, and you can reuse them for future children. Disposables will run you upwards of $2,000 per child. 'Nuff said.
My Life with Cloth
There's a huge learning curve with cloth diapers, but I loved it...especially once I learned the perfect combination of stuffing for an overnight diaper (Doopsy is AMAZING: www.doopsy.com, buy at www.babyecomart.com), and when I found a cloth-friendly detergent (Dropps scent+dye free) and learned how little I had to use (literally, 3 drops), so that I could stop rinsing each load three extra times (you have to rinse til all the suds are gone, or you could give your baby a rash or cause the diapers to lose absorbency).
You have to be very careful with cloth diapers. You have to find cloth-friendly detergents and creams so you don't ruin your investment. Luckily, there are a ton of detergents and creams to choose from. Unluckily, there are a ton of detergents and creams to choose from, and you can blow a fortune trying to find the one that works for your baby. I had to keep putting my little guy back in disposables every 3 days so that I could use Desitin to clear up rashes he kept getting. He has the kind of skin that requires cream with every diaper, but I wasn't using cream in his cloth diapers at first because of the millions of sites and blogs that swear up and down that cloth diapers do NOT cause rashes. Confused and frustrated at his recurring rashes, I bought 2 creams, neither of which did much, hence the continual return to Huggies. After a while, though, that didn't work anymore, and he developed a raging yeast rash that, after 3 weeks of treatment, is finally almost cleared up. He never had yeast rashes with disposables. I figure it's just his skin--he can't handle the increased moisture of cloth. EVEN though I religiously changed him after every bowel movement (I felt like some creepy poop stalker, I was so aware of his bowel movements) and constantly watched the clock to make sure he went no longer than 2 hours between changes. EVEN though I laundered the diapers properly, and even usually did a mini strip since I rinsed so many times because I was paranoid about detergent residue.
Cloth is also hard because there are so many options. You have to pick a diaper system, try it out, and if it doesn't work, try another kind. You can sell diapers that don't work for you on ebay so you're not totally out your investment, but it still costs you money. Same thing with detergent and cream: you have to sink a lot of money in to find what works, but with these, if they don't work, you definitely can't sell them to make any investment back.
My Frustration with Cloth Sites and Blogs
At my wit's end about why my baby was getting rashes in diapers that do not cause diaper rash, I tried Googling every possible combination of "why is my baby getting rashes in cloth diapers." I got no help. Cloth diapers do not cause diaper rash. Instead, I was basically getting that I was a horrible parent because I was obviously leaving my baby marinating in his waste for too long (which, given my vigilant watching of the clock and "I'm-pooping" cues, I knew wasn't true), or I was stupid for not cleaning the diapers properly (again, which I knew wasn't true). No one was allowing that cloth could cause rash, but everyone was condemning disposables for causing rashes, which was exactly opposite of my experience. I'm frustrated that the general message of most cloth sites and blogs is "If you don't use cloth, you're a horrible, lazy, irresponsible, negligent parent who doesn't care about the health of your child or of the environment." I guess it's like any deep, passionate belief, but I'm frustrated that this belief outrightly precludes what is reality for what I'm sure is many people: cloth just doesn't work for some people. That doesn't make them bad.
Why I Don't Worry Too Much about Disposables
First, I have no other option. I will not keep putting my baby in diapers that give him a yeast rash. But, upon further study, a lot of the promises about cloth diapers being better ring hollow.
Yes, disposables use materials, create pollution, and clog landfills. But cloth diapers use a ton of water to clean. It's estimated that it takes anywhere from 50-70 gallons of water every time you wash, which is every other day to every 2-3 days, adding up to 100-280 gallons of water a week--not good for drought-ridden areas. I can safely estimate that I was definitely using at least 280 gallons a week, if not more. And I don't think that's me being dumb about it: I did exactly what every cloth site said I should: cold rinse, hot wash, double rinse. Also, drying your diapers in the dryer is a big drain on resources, since dryers are the biggest energy-sucking appliances in most homes. Most cloth diapers are made from cotton, which is generally considered an environmentally wasteful crop, considering its use of arable land, water, and high chemical pesticide dependency (again, Wikipedia,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloth_diapers). With these factors, cloth diapers can actually be more damaging to the environment than disposables, according to some studies. Cloth sites argue that comparing waste production of disposables to resource depletion of cloth is comparing apples to oranges, but if the idea is to be more environmentally responsible, the options have to be weighed.
Of course, you can be more green with using cloth, by washing full loads, on cold, line drying, and buying diapers made of bamboo, hemp, or organic cotton.
Also, the idea that an increased sensation of wetness from cloth encourages faster potty training is, from what I read, an interesting idea with no data or studies to back it up. I know my guy is too headstrong at this point. I think we have to wait until he can understand a reward system of some kind. With the next one, I'm going to see if I can give elimination communication a try (also known as natural infant hygiene, again, first heard about it in Early Start Potty Training).
As to the idea of the chemicals in diapers, including the toxic shock syndrome chemical: call me crazy, but I tend to see a difference between something that you sit on compared to something you insert into your body. Yes, chemicals are absorbed through the skin, but I can't help but think that there are a lot of things that come into contact with our skin that don't bother us, but that would have a drastically heightened effect if they were inserted into our bodies (I'm thinking things like cleaning products, raw chicken juice, germs on WalMart cart handles, etc). And as for the scrotal temperature study, I'd like to know what they used for "cotton diapers" before I get too worried, because there is a plastic component to the polyurethane laminate (PUL) that cloth diapers use for the waterproof shell. PUL is equally as breathable as disposables, so I would think that temperatures would be the same in PUL cloth diapers as disposables, but I might be wrong. There is the idea that bamboo diapers are thermally regulated, so that might be a good option if you're looking to protect the scrotum, but there are no studies that I'm aware of that would support that idea.
The Bottom Line
There are lots of reasons to use cloth and lots of people have great success with cloth. There are people who, for whatever reason, choose not to use cloth. That doesn't make them bad. The important thing is to make the best decision for you and your baby that you feel most comfortable with. In order to make the best decision, you need as much information as possible, so I'm trying to even out the be-all, end-all mentality of cloth, because, really, it's up to you.
