We're using cloth diapers for our daughter (6m). She's still exclusively breastfed so no solid poops but so far I estimate we've saved over $100/mo by this decision.
The story may change when she starts on solids but I recommend everyone to try out cloth diapers, just make sure you have a routine and system in place to make it less overwhelming (we have two diaper pails next to the changing table, one for disposable wipes and one for the diapers, every other day we wash the diapers and liners).
What's the unit cost of a nappy in your area? Here it's like €0.05 each, so monthly maybe €50 max incl wipes. I'll have to actually measure how much we use in a day though.
I was designing waterproof textiles a few weeks ago and somewhat accidentally also designed a Chitosan-Alginate Fleece that could be used as fleece liner, super absorbent diapers, gauze
How do the production costs for Chitosan-Alginate Fleece compare to diapers and gauze?
That does strike me as pretty early but hey, I’m sure it happened and it still happens! But I do agree with the core thesis that people seem to be waiting a very long time. How long is “too long“ is hard to determine though if you ask me. Potty training is not just about when your kid is ready, it’s also about when the parents have capacity to handle it because frankly it is an incredibly intensive, involved, messy process that usually takes several days if not weeks. It also usually has setbacks and even full resets.
One of my kids we started at 18 months and he almost got it but we started to see serious regression and had to pull back. We then tried again a few months later and he was good to go. I think it is very reasonable to have your kid potty trained by 2 for most people, but that is mostly based off my experience and that of my peers, not some sort of data driven observation or something.
Also, and this may seem obvious to folks but it’s worth mentioning, it’s of course easier to potty train your kid the older they are. So some people know that they could do it sooner but decide that it’s worth just waiting a little longer so that the process is easier. That’s valid!
I feel like the time demands of modern life are the main culprit here. Today families mostly need two working parents, which means nobody to take care of the baby full-time.
If you have someone taking care of them full-time, toilet training early is usually easy and a net time save.
But if you can't ever invest that time because of the time version of the poverty trap, you are in diapers until the kids are developed enough to make the transition themselves or by seeing other examples (at daycare, etc), or are just old enough that it can be explained to them.
My mom toilet trained me at 3 months. She had me on a schedule and she would hold me one toilet during the determined times and I would go. This was right after communism fell so she only had access to cloth diapers, and cleaning them was so annoying she did it as early as she could. She was shocked at how long my kids stayed in diapers. I asked her how, and well there is a slight difference between us. She had 2 years of parental leave. I had 1.5 weeks with my second. I did a board meeting from the hospital with my first. Let's just say I don't have the time to dedicate to it. It takes 2 weeks of dedicated focus, repeatedly putting them on the potty, rewarding them, and cleaning up. I know it's possible. Modern life tends to build on these conveniences and efficiencies until it's no longer possible to go back.
I have tried "underwear weekends" with my 2nd so he seems what it's like to pee himself but it's just not enough. He needs 2 full weeks and I'm sure he'd get it. By the end of the weekend he's just starting to grasp it, and then on Monday I put a diaper on him again and it's more confusing than helpful.
Have any parents tried Elimination Communication? Basically teaching your baby to inform you that they’re ready to go, and taking them to the toilet immediately.
This is something my partner wants to try when we eventually have kids. Something I’d never heard of until last week.
My partner wanted to try the same thing. And cloth nappies and exclusive breastfeeding, and infant hand signals, and every other zeitgeist baby thing you can think of.
In principle EC sounds interesting, but then our daughter arrived, it has balls to the wall survival for 3 months bow. We ended up bottle feeding, use disposable nappies and sometimes we put her on her side to sleep so that she can fall asleep easier. Terrible parenting if you ask any parenting influencer! Neither of us have the time, energy or mental fortitude to get baby naked and over the toilet in the 20 seconds between when the grunting starts and the poop comes!
My advice to you as a new father, assuming you will also be the father and your partner the mother: go into all this with an open mind, and focus on doing what your baby needs, not what you want, and definitely not what the internet says you should be doing. Sun Tzu said the best laid plans don't survive contact with the enemy, so don't get hung up when your plans fall apart when your little one arrives. Support your partner in the things she wants to try, but be pragmatic and prepared for all alternative outcomes. Keep baby's butt dry, keep their belly full of milk (breast or formula or both is perfectly OK), keep them warm and love them loads. That's literally all you need to do, and you will be awarded with the most amazing smiles and giggles by month 2-3.
My sibling used EC with my nieces and it worked really well! Took a bit of patience up front but the kids were basically potty trained within a few months of being born. They also used cloth diapers because accidents happen, but rarely so!
Every baby is different. Some are relaxed, others are highly strung. Some will happily sit in a comfortable seat, others will demand to be held. Some will feed quickly, others will take their time. Some will sleep in a crib from the day they're born, others will need practice. Some will be happy, others will cry for hours for no apparent reason.
Every family is different. Some parents have lots of external support, others have none. Some parents have generous parental leave, others have to return to work almost immediately.
What's common is that babies have a constant, high-frequency stream of demands that need to be met by an adult in the household (need food, attention, comfort, to be cleaned, to be dressed, to sleep, etc.). Meeting these demands typically requires the full attention of an adult in the moment, but there's also some amount of preparation and cleanup that needs to be done. That stuff has to be done by another adult, or if one is not available, fit around the immediate demands of the baby. You can't effectively fold the laundry and comfort a crying baby simultaneously.
All of this to say: elimination communication is known to work, but whether it will work for your family will depend heavily on your specific baby and your specific family circumstances.
When you commit to EC, you are committing to another immediate demand that needs an adult's full attention in the moment. If your baby is otherwise not very demanding, or if you have a lot of external support this may work well for your family. Lots of parents, though, opt to use nappies specifically because it shifts an immediate demand ("I'm pooping") into a problem that can be solved within the next few minutes.
If you're the only adult in the house, you've got a big armful of clean laundry, and you see your baby making the poop face do you want to drop the laundry and rush to the toilet or do you want to fold the laundry and then change the baby? Your answer will be different depending on how much time in the day your family has to get the laundry done.
Parenting influencers don't share the broader context of their families or their babies. And like all influencers, many of them are liars and do not practice what they preach. EC is in vogue right now, so a lot of them are advocating for it. I personally find the idea quite appealing but our family simply did not have the time or circumstances to even attempt it.
Yes, being born in the Soviet Union this is how my parents toilet trained me, and we did it with our daughter as well but were only able to catch it for defecation and not urination, but even having done that was so handy. She eventually would grunt to let us know, which as she learned to talk transitioned easily to a verbal cue. I think we had not had a soiled poopy diaper after I want to say 12 months old, but can’t remember exact age now. Potty training for urination came much easier after this as it wasn’t such a foreign concept.
It was not particularly difficult to implement and we didn’t spend a lot of time focusing on it - we caught it by being attentive a few times and it just got easier from there. Highly recommend it
Parent of 2 kids. Parents receive enough judgement. Do whatever works for you!
-cloth diapers? Awesome
-train early? Awesome
-train later? Awesome
There's trade offs for each, and you are going to figure out what works best for you.
If you want to train later and the diaper companies make more money, that's how a market is supposed to work. They're providing a product you value. So all good!
With declining birth rates in the west, wouldn't it also make sense that Big Diaper is increasing prices and expanding into luxury products while unit sales go down? Expanding into products for the elderly, like incontinence, would also make sense, or perhaps expanding products into more countries (I don't know the global reach of say Pampers).
I know it's not the same thing as enshitification, and I don't know if the diaper industry is even vulnerable to enshitification, but it would be such a nice play on words if the diaper industry had enshitification.
All our kids were trained between 2-3 y.o, with overnight 3-4 (boys take longer (¬_¬)) honestly diapers isn't even a cost factor. When daycare is 2500-3000/month those first 3 years, diapers are picking up pennies in front of a steam roller.
I know the Hustle is a Hubspot content factory, but I got to admit they've been capturing more and more of my reading and (YouTube) watch time recently. They have fascinating topics and seem to be researched very well.
My wife tried early teaching and cloth diapers with the first one, but with the second one we just use regular diapers.
IMO early toilet training is just wishful thinking combined with confirmation bias. If you are trying it and it is going hard... just don't, you are not doing anything wrong, you've been just misled. Just wait until your child can consistently follow instructions and does so willingly for important matters. Otherwise the result is as expected.
> More recent studies and surveys, tell us that the average age for starting toilet training is ~21 months.
The way they raise kids in NA was one of the cultural shocks for us. 6yo kids in strollers. Parents never walk with their babies outside. Well, baby pram is not even a thing here. Diapers until age of 3 or 4. Overall hygiene/cleanness doesn't exist. It's ok to pour frootloops in a dirty tray and let the child eat it with their dirty hands. Kids' clothes are forever dirty. It's ok to send your kid to school/daycare with holes in their socks. School assembly? Let kids sit on the gym floor for an hour. Field trip - kids sit on the ground.
I'm not surprised society is so mentally unwell here.
Cloth diapers are good. We used them for our last kid with a diaper service and are going to do it again washing them ourselves with our next who is due at the end of the month. Regular diapers are useful to have either way. But cloth diapers are obviously much better for the environment and if they're an option for you, you should consider them. Not a hard concept, not worth a big discussion.
The big difference is that 'real' nappies become extremely uncomfortable when wet (child immediately cries to be changed) so toddlers get a strong incentive to stop wetting whereas with modern disposables they barely even notice when they wee.
It talks about a study from 1944 in the US, specifically in Minnesota. How many of those parents were full-time stay-at-home parents, probably typically mothers, who were monitoring the child and helping with potty training?
How many kids nowadays are in daycare?
When there is a 3-to-1 adult-to-child ratio, doing something like this is much more challenging when there's just one adult and one infant.
Absolutely. 3:1 is only common ant absolute top tier daycares. More likely you’ll have 6:1 or 8:1. And even high quality daycares might not help children potty train which is absolutely essential if both parents are working but people want to potty train early. By age 3 kids are moving towards preschool and are more intelligent and have better self awareness and are more reward motivated. I think diaper conspiracy is honestly less likely here than structural advantages and modern life leading to later potty training
I was only talking about infants, and I thought Massachusetts's legal requirement of 3:1 was pretty common everywhere in the US, since one adult taking care of 3 infants seems so difficult... but a quick search shows me it's not! 4:1 is pretty common as a minimum nationally, though.
> And even high quality daycares might not help children potty train
TLDR: 80% of kids used to be potty trained by age one. Nowadays parents train later, because diapers are so convenient that its feasible to wait until the kids are older where it's easier to train them. This provides massive revenue to diaper companies.
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This seems roughly plausible. I have never been successful at training 1 year olds to be potty trained, because there is so much exposed poop & pie involved over such long times, that it's just way easier to push it back by a year or two when they can figure it out more or less by themselves.
Maybe back then diapers were so bad, that there was always a lot of exposed poop & pie involved anyway, so potty training didn't really make your life any worse.
I'd probably say those extra billion in revenue are well earned.
I had to go look at my Costco and Amazon orders to check because my intuition was that I spent so much more money in diapers in the first year and indeed, that was like ~75% of the cost of the first two years. Toddlers get changed so much less often than babies, and you can plan your purchases way more easily, so I’m not even sure they make that much money off those.
80% trained by age 1 in 1944 vs barely started by age 2 in 2026... now that seems like a regression in learning rate!
Both our kids were poop-trained before pee-trained, which made cloth diapers a lot more manageable (just rinse and toss in laundry). The first one was poop-trained around 5-6 months.
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[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 58.1 ms ] threadThe story may change when she starts on solids but I recommend everyone to try out cloth diapers, just make sure you have a routine and system in place to make it less overwhelming (we have two diaper pails next to the changing table, one for disposable wipes and one for the diapers, every other day we wash the diapers and liners).
How do the production costs for Chitosan-Alginate Fleece compare to diapers and gauze?
One of my kids we started at 18 months and he almost got it but we started to see serious regression and had to pull back. We then tried again a few months later and he was good to go. I think it is very reasonable to have your kid potty trained by 2 for most people, but that is mostly based off my experience and that of my peers, not some sort of data driven observation or something.
Also, and this may seem obvious to folks but it’s worth mentioning, it’s of course easier to potty train your kid the older they are. So some people know that they could do it sooner but decide that it’s worth just waiting a little longer so that the process is easier. That’s valid!
If you have someone taking care of them full-time, toilet training early is usually easy and a net time save.
But if you can't ever invest that time because of the time version of the poverty trap, you are in diapers until the kids are developed enough to make the transition themselves or by seeing other examples (at daycare, etc), or are just old enough that it can be explained to them.
I have tried "underwear weekends" with my 2nd so he seems what it's like to pee himself but it's just not enough. He needs 2 full weeks and I'm sure he'd get it. By the end of the weekend he's just starting to grasp it, and then on Monday I put a diaper on him again and it's more confusing than helpful.
This is something my partner wants to try when we eventually have kids. Something I’d never heard of until last week.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elimination_communication
In principle EC sounds interesting, but then our daughter arrived, it has balls to the wall survival for 3 months bow. We ended up bottle feeding, use disposable nappies and sometimes we put her on her side to sleep so that she can fall asleep easier. Terrible parenting if you ask any parenting influencer! Neither of us have the time, energy or mental fortitude to get baby naked and over the toilet in the 20 seconds between when the grunting starts and the poop comes!
My advice to you as a new father, assuming you will also be the father and your partner the mother: go into all this with an open mind, and focus on doing what your baby needs, not what you want, and definitely not what the internet says you should be doing. Sun Tzu said the best laid plans don't survive contact with the enemy, so don't get hung up when your plans fall apart when your little one arrives. Support your partner in the things she wants to try, but be pragmatic and prepared for all alternative outcomes. Keep baby's butt dry, keep their belly full of milk (breast or formula or both is perfectly OK), keep them warm and love them loads. That's literally all you need to do, and you will be awarded with the most amazing smiles and giggles by month 2-3.
Every family is different. Some parents have lots of external support, others have none. Some parents have generous parental leave, others have to return to work almost immediately.
What's common is that babies have a constant, high-frequency stream of demands that need to be met by an adult in the household (need food, attention, comfort, to be cleaned, to be dressed, to sleep, etc.). Meeting these demands typically requires the full attention of an adult in the moment, but there's also some amount of preparation and cleanup that needs to be done. That stuff has to be done by another adult, or if one is not available, fit around the immediate demands of the baby. You can't effectively fold the laundry and comfort a crying baby simultaneously.
All of this to say: elimination communication is known to work, but whether it will work for your family will depend heavily on your specific baby and your specific family circumstances.
When you commit to EC, you are committing to another immediate demand that needs an adult's full attention in the moment. If your baby is otherwise not very demanding, or if you have a lot of external support this may work well for your family. Lots of parents, though, opt to use nappies specifically because it shifts an immediate demand ("I'm pooping") into a problem that can be solved within the next few minutes.
If you're the only adult in the house, you've got a big armful of clean laundry, and you see your baby making the poop face do you want to drop the laundry and rush to the toilet or do you want to fold the laundry and then change the baby? Your answer will be different depending on how much time in the day your family has to get the laundry done.
Parenting influencers don't share the broader context of their families or their babies. And like all influencers, many of them are liars and do not practice what they preach. EC is in vogue right now, so a lot of them are advocating for it. I personally find the idea quite appealing but our family simply did not have the time or circumstances to even attempt it.
It was not particularly difficult to implement and we didn’t spend a lot of time focusing on it - we caught it by being attentive a few times and it just got easier from there. Highly recommend it
-cloth diapers? Awesome
-train early? Awesome
-train later? Awesome
There's trade offs for each, and you are going to figure out what works best for you.
If you want to train later and the diaper companies make more money, that's how a market is supposed to work. They're providing a product you value. So all good!
I know it's not the same thing as enshitification, and I don't know if the diaper industry is even vulnerable to enshitification, but it would be such a nice play on words if the diaper industry had enshitification.
They're also probably developing a baby with two butts to double sales.
It only lasts a few years and then you’ll never have to think about diapers again (at least until the next kid).
Just do whatever is easiest and keeps you sane. There are bigger things to worry about.
My oldest was trained at 3 years, and my youngest at 18 months.
The oldest only trained for a week, and the youngest trained for almost year.
IMO early toilet training is just wishful thinking combined with confirmation bias. If you are trying it and it is going hard... just don't, you are not doing anything wrong, you've been just misled. Just wait until your child can consistently follow instructions and does so willingly for important matters. Otherwise the result is as expected.
The way they raise kids in NA was one of the cultural shocks for us. 6yo kids in strollers. Parents never walk with their babies outside. Well, baby pram is not even a thing here. Diapers until age of 3 or 4. Overall hygiene/cleanness doesn't exist. It's ok to pour frootloops in a dirty tray and let the child eat it with their dirty hands. Kids' clothes are forever dirty. It's ok to send your kid to school/daycare with holes in their socks. School assembly? Let kids sit on the gym floor for an hour. Field trip - kids sit on the ground.
I'm not surprised society is so mentally unwell here.
When people tell me I need to use paper straws but they can use disposable diapers, it makes the logic in my brain meltdown
How many kids nowadays are in daycare?
When there is a 3-to-1 adult-to-child ratio, doing something like this is much more challenging when there's just one adult and one infant.
> And even high quality daycares might not help children potty train
Definitely. I think that's pretty rare.
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This seems roughly plausible. I have never been successful at training 1 year olds to be potty trained, because there is so much exposed poop & pie involved over such long times, that it's just way easier to push it back by a year or two when they can figure it out more or less by themselves.
Maybe back then diapers were so bad, that there was always a lot of exposed poop & pie involved anyway, so potty training didn't really make your life any worse.
I'd probably say those extra billion in revenue are well earned.
Both our kids were poop-trained before pee-trained, which made cloth diapers a lot more manageable (just rinse and toss in laundry). The first one was poop-trained around 5-6 months.