Think It Over Thurs: Cloth versus commercial diapers

We don’t talk about baby issues much here at Progressive Parenting, but that’s only because my daughter is eight years old now and baby issues just aren’t on my radar as much as they used to be. There are still so many interesting baby things to talk about, though, and with new research conducted every year we continue to learn more and re-evaluate how we parent.

Today, I was thinking about how we did not use cloth diapers. I wanted to use cloth diapers because I thought it would be better for Sprite as well as the environment and our budget. A friend whose opinion I highly valued informed me that she thought that they really didn’t save that much either way with all of the washing involved. Having read about how disposable diapers dominate our landfills, take 500 years to decompose, kill 200,000 trees a year and result in a plethora of other problems, I feel guilty about using them at all. Holy cow is it a wasteful product! Is there no way we can make it more ecologically friendly?

On the other hand, I think if I had used cloth diapers it might have driven me insane. I did not do well as a first-time mama parenting a baby. Sure, I took care of her well, but I failed to take care of myself at all. Between Sprite, full-time work and full-time school, I gained more weight than a Backstreet Boy, survived on sugar and caffeine, damaged my body and slept so little that I regularly hallucinated. This is no way for anyone to live, and surely no example of ‘having it all’! Cloth diapers would have only added to the craziness that was my life at that time.

So looking back, I am both glad that I had the convenience of disposable diapers but sad that I did not even try them out. Many of the progressive parents I know use or used them and report very positive experiences. What are yours?

Photo courtesy of Wikipedia