Seems to me like people just aren't sharing the wisdom enough about how to do these things both responsibly and efficiently.
We used just use cloth diapers, put them in a diaper-only load in our washing machine, dry them in the dryer, and it worked fine.
Scraping? We just used a sprayer attached to the toilet, held in a little clip thing that keeps the spray contained. Stuff went in the toilet, mostly-clean diaper goes in the pail.
We also did "elmination communication" part-time. Just literally set the kid over the potty around the right amount of time after eating, and each time we take diaper off, and if it looks like they're about to go. It wasn't lots of extra work, and around 6-months, we had maybe half the times just going in the potty without needing to deal with a dirty diaper at all.
The entire problem is that our society is set up for the disposable approach and you rarely even know anyone in person who can guide you through managing it better, so we all figure it out for ourselves using the internet. But like, the one other family we told about what we were doing it just followed our lead and had total success too. And kids end up fully potty trained before 2yo.
It takes more than just good intentions, it takes sharing the wisdom more. Companies that profit off of a disposable economy work to get attention instead of the better wisdom we could be sharing with one another.
Super off-topic but national differences in washing lines vs dryer use are fascinating. In an early attempt to replicate the Japanese line-drying time forecast[0], I looked around for English-language articles about clothes drying, and the predominant advice was to always use a clothes dryer, because line-drying takes too long, encourages mould and mould is deadly and to be feared. Which seemed weird as I’d never owned a dryer.
Props on sticking to your guns for so long with cloth nappies, I know some couples who couldn’t make it work and felt they’d let themselves down.
Thanks for sharing your perspective. I could have better emphasized though that I know there would have been no way for us to have managed as well as we did without having learned some wisdom that came from other people.
Yes, circumstances vary. But I stick to my basic point that wisdom is not shared anywhere near enough, and a lot of the blame for that goes on the businesses who profit from people remaining unwise. This factor is at the heart of a huge portion of the world's problems.
Yea, I found this odd that kids in US used diapers well above 2 years. I found a lot of kids potty trained in India around one. My kid's day care prohibited diapers for kids above 18 months!
We used just use cloth diapers, put them in a diaper-only load in our washing machine, dry them in the dryer, and it worked fine.
Scraping? We just used a sprayer attached to the toilet, held in a little clip thing that keeps the spray contained. Stuff went in the toilet, mostly-clean diaper goes in the pail.
We also did "elmination communication" part-time. Just literally set the kid over the potty around the right amount of time after eating, and each time we take diaper off, and if it looks like they're about to go. It wasn't lots of extra work, and around 6-months, we had maybe half the times just going in the potty without needing to deal with a dirty diaper at all.
The entire problem is that our society is set up for the disposable approach and you rarely even know anyone in person who can guide you through managing it better, so we all figure it out for ourselves using the internet. But like, the one other family we told about what we were doing it just followed our lead and had total success too. And kids end up fully potty trained before 2yo.
It takes more than just good intentions, it takes sharing the wisdom more. Companies that profit off of a disposable economy work to get attention instead of the better wisdom we could be sharing with one another.