How Big Diaper absorbs billions of extra dollars from American parents

I did the math meticulously when I had my first kid years ago, comparing store brand diapers vs cloth. Once you factor in the up front cost of the cloth diapers plus the cost of water and energy and detergent running the wash, the costs are virtually identical. The math looks better for cloth if you use them for years or multiple kids, but that's not super hygienic.

That's not even factoring in time and convenience.

I am convinced cloth diapers are some kind of performative environmentalialsm or performative motherhood akin to the trad wife phenomenon.

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.

Diapers are overall a tiny expense compared to what you’ll spend over the course of their childhood.

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.

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elimination_communication

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.

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!

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.

> 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.

"Big diaper" has made basically every form if diaper 80% cheaper compared to 30 years ago, also.

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.

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).

As long as people are consistent being ecologically responsible seems great.

When people tell me I need to use paper straws but they can use disposable diapers, it makes the logic in my brain meltdown

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.

For toddlers who are able to communicate, simply add an absorbent layer into the disposable diaper to give them sensory feedback about moisture. Gauze squares from the first aid aisle work well and are very cheap.

We used reusable nappies for our daughter and introduced the potty very early. The reduction in waste is many times larger than you expect particularly with a very young child ( we started with disposable, but switched in the first few months. Here’s some notes:

- Put your child on the potty during changes, and first thing in the morning. Build’s association and encourages bladder control. Do this long before trying to get them out of nappies.

- Reusable wipes are also a massive win. We have face wipes and bum wipes, basically just soft cotton. Bit of water under a tap and your good.

- Our biggest hurdle for moving away from nappies was nursery, as they wouldn’t consistently put a younger toddler on a potty.

- Introducing a potty earlier means less poopy nappies, turns out even a toddler dislikes pooping their pants.

- Expect a stupid amount of laundry, and the nappies to leak a bit ( so more laundry ). You also can’t use a drier with them as it damages the water proofing layer.

- Travelling is harder… Used nappies should be cleaned within 3 days, so expect to take dirty nappies away with you for washing plus clean nappies/boosters/cloths/bags.

- It’s easy to buy new/almost new/good condition second hand. Either people want to do it but don’t get on with it, or never start, or potty trained. Means a significant reduction in cost. But expect ones that have been used less to be more water proof and Velcro to work better etc.

- Our daughter loved playing with the clean ones, putting them on toys, using cloths etc. Probably helps they have cool designs on the outside. I expect a disposable wouldn’t work well after it had been played with.

- If you need to use disposables while you’re away etc the chemicals can cause rashes after your child has adjusted to their absence.

- When they start weaning you have to “remove the solids” before washing. Yes this is unpleasant, but more often than not is just upending it over toilet. You get used to it. Same as nappy changes in general and washing nappies.

- When we did swap to pants we didn’t do anything special. Just stop nappies, ensure you have a potty nearby, and deal with it for a few days. It’s uncomfortable for them and they learn fast. Expect a bit of frustration and wanting the old routine back.

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.

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.

Freud had a lot to say about excrement and shame -- I think cultural fears are still very resonant here. With modern washers cloth diapers clean extremely well -- you can bury your nose into them afterwards with confidence and not notice the faintest evidence what the diaper was like prior to washing. If you feel you can't, I think that is culture speaking, not reality. You are definitely already well exposed to your family's intestinal bacteria strains so any phobia here is purely psychological. While I admit it was difficult for me to consider buying used cloth diapers, after raising two children I think I wouldn't have a problem doing it now. We found buyers for all of our children's used cloth diapers. They were in great condition. One thing to also keep in mind, typically children have difficulty with bedwetting at the late stages of diaper training, so our diapers at least, were washed dozens of times without being soiled by excrement prior to re-sale.

A lot of people in this discussion seem to compare the price of single-use nappies to that of buying new cloth nappies and then giving them to the landfill once done with one child.

I can strongly recommend buying them second hand and then reselling them. They become effectively free at that point. (I get it to come out to $1.5 per week, including the iost of running laundry and the opportunity costs of tying up the capital in nappies.)

I'm also happy to hear about more people doing the hybrid approach. It's not all-or-nothing. One of our children peed so much at night they had to wear disposable nappies overnight but could do with reusable during day. We also packed disposable for longer outings or trips.

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?

Why is the US so prone to these fads ? Diapers, diets galore (all bad), the "whole language" débâcle, etc... ?

Babies and childcare can cost either a huge amount, or not very much at all.

big diaper needed to be exposed

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.

"Big Diaper" — now there's an image. Sounds like the giant nappies astronauts wear.

I wonder how much of the baby training "science" has been replicated.

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!

> In 1962, the journal Pediatrics published a Brazelton study in which he observed ~1k parents and children in the 1950s. They followed his “child-oriented” approach to toilet training, which involved starting training at about two years old. That was after the age when the vast majority of children had previously finished training but when Brazelton believed that most children would only be physically and emotionally ready to start.

No offense to babies, but what does it mean to not be emotionally ready to start potty training? I’m serious. Like, do they cry a lot at the prospect of being 2 feet away from their parents? What makes us think this is emotional turmoil? The article does say

> ... children following his approach were less likely to have bedwetting or constipation problems by the time they turned 5 than those who started earlier. (Subsequent studies have found similar issues in children who train too late.)

But it's hard for me to see that as an emotional connection? If anything it makes me wonder about latent variables (with caveat that I have not read the study, so maybe they already looked into that)

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.

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.

You don’t know the half of it. If you really want to know the truth investigate big formula.

Imagine the chemicals leaking out of the plastic diapers we aren't being told which is likely ruining our kids bodies.

tldr:

- In the 1940s, ~80% of kids were trained by their 1st birthday

-By 2004, the average completion age was 37 months (over 3 years old)

-That extra year of diapers = ~$3.1 billion annually for the industry

-A pediatrician named Brazelton popularized "wait until they're ready" advice in the 60s — and later became a paid Pampers spokesperson, which is... a conflict of interest

-Diaper companies responded by making bigger and bigger sizes (up to 65 lbs!)

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.

Now that I think about it, Big Toilet Paper is a threat to democracy by robbing billions from unsuspecting high-fiber food eaters.