Here are some commonly asked questions about Cloth Diapers.
What do you do about the poop?
This is probably the number one cloth diaper question asked. Dealing with messes is an unavoidable part of caring for a young child, but the choice to cloth diaper means I have to deal with messes a little bit longer than if I used disposables.
So what do we do the diaper messes? The short answer is that we flush it down the toilet. Water treatment plants are equipped to handle raw sewage whereas landfills are not. In fact, it is against the law in many (perhaps most) cities to throw sewage away in the trash. Before my daughter was six months old she was completely breastfed so the diaper, mess and all, went in the washing machine. Now that she’s older, we make sure the majority of the mess is flushed down the toilet. There’s no dunking, just flicking, involved. For really messy messes, a diaper sprayer is available for purchase although we’ve never needed one.
Doesn’t it take a lot of time?
Second only to the dirty diaper question above, this is the question I am asked more often than any other. In fact, I’m asked so frequently that one week I decided to time exactly how much time I spent on cloth diapers each week. The answer? Only thirty minutes.
Since I chose pocket diapers, the actual diaper changes do not take any longer than if I were using a disposable diaper so I timed how long it took me to clean the diaper off in the case of messy diapers, put the diaper in the pail, take a full pail down the the washing machine, start a load of laundry, hang the clean diapers up to dry, re-stuff them once they were dry and put them away in my daughter’s drawers. All told, I spend just over half an hour in one week. My daughter was about one year old when I did this little experiment. The time taken to care for cloth diapers would likely be more with a younger child or with prefolds/flats and covers.
Can anybody do it?
I think that almost everybody could successfully use cloth diapers at least some of the time. However, I have known a few people who have tried cloth diapers and found that they didn’t work for them. One friend found that cloth diapers tended to make her daughter’s sensitive skin break out in a rash. (Please be aware that some children are allergic to the detergent, not the diaper itself and other children have a skin reaction to the chemicals in disposables.) Another friend stopped using cloth when she couldn’t figure out why the diapers kept leaking. (Common causes of leaking include soap buildup in the diaper, not fastening the diaper tight enough, loose elastic, using a type of diaper that doesn’t fit the child’s body well and not changing the diaper frequently enough.)
However, more often than not, I have found that people reject the thought of using cloth diapers before trying them, usually due to the dirty diaper question. I admit that I have a high tolerance for gross, but I encourage everyone to find a friend to borrow a few diapers from or purchase just one or two and give cloth diapering a try. You may be pleasantly surprised, and I guarantee you won’t miss buying disposables!
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