I enjoyed the article. Nappies are very impressive and something I never really thought about before becoming a parent.
Reminds me of something I often slightly chuckle about as a parent.
I’ve often encountered non-parents, particularly teenagers, who remark how the thought of changing nappies horrifying and a really big deal. But as any parent knows, changing nappies is really one of the easier parts of looking after babies and toddlers.
I had read so many casual internet comments about infants being horrible and how unbelievably difficult it was that by the time I actually had kids, it seemed almost mild by comparison.
It's not an easy thing, but some of the histrionic claims about child raising on the internet are really out there. It's no wonder kids are horrified by the thought.
> It's not an easy thing, but some of the histrionic claims about child raising on the internet are really out there.
Have you considered that objectively difficult infants/toddlers/children exist? Children with O.D.D., for instance, show symptoms early, but diagnosis usually doesn't come until much later.
Perhaps the comments you came across online were from the parents of those kids.
-A parent of a very challenging child with Level II Autism
I can 2nd this. As a parent of a level II autistic son and then 6 years later a now 1 year old girl that does not appear to have any autistic traits. We delayed having the 2nd child by years because the first was so draining. They are night and day. During parental leave I found it hard to play with my son in ways where he acknowledged that it was fun. He mostly did repetitive activities alone like flexing a folding rule or similar. My daughter is completely different. As parents our son Ahmad thought us a lot about not projecting our expectations onto the children and meeting them where they are.
I think that might be the thing. Parents whose children are more challenging might more often "be at wits end" and turn to online communities for guidance, help, or other insights, whereas parents whose children are not as challenging just breezes through, and thus do not end up as a data point online on how difficult parenthood is.
Also, even though I don't know you, I am certain that you are a good parent, and that you are doing your very best, and that your child is lucky to have you as their parent. :) Stay strong.
This is true of many communities. The internet is full of complaints because people rarely take the time to say just “my car works just fine”. There’s no value in that info. People go out to talk about it when they have a problem, that’s a real conversation starter.
Discussion groups aren’t a balanced slice of how the overall situation looks like. They tend to sway towards the negative side because discussing about everything being fine gets old fast.
It's not that. IME people with kids with actual conditions are somewhat less likely to complain, and are far, far less prevalent than mums who just inhabit "complaining about my kids" culture.
One similar funny experience I had was that I've never had any trouble with poop or diapers, but a family member said "Just wait till she starts eating solids!" and then she started eating solids and there was no step function in experience. Changing her was still the same.
My kids were considerably larger and smellier when they started eating solids, but still nothing crazy. Changing diapers is basically nothing, but having all the stuff that they need related to diapers and just being at the age when they are in diapers is mildly challenging if you travel a lot.
> It's not an easy thing, but some of the histrionic claims about child raising on the internet are really out there. It's no wonder kids are horrified by the thought.
Could 'the horrors of parenting' be something that is promoted to younger people, to discourage then from having children? A sort of governance marketing to help address the perceived issue that there are simply too many people?
> But as any parent knows, changing nappies is really one of the easier parts of looking after babies and toddlers.
For sure, probably because stinky diapers are visceral but psychological challenges aren’t, yet I think most parents would agree about having to dig far deeper into our inner resolve to deal with age-appropriate behavioral issues.
Babies are easier because they leave the faintest stain on the diaper the first week or so.
Then it becomes more but not much scent, like a training period. And it's really only 4-6 months that it begins to get foul.
Another advantage for the baby side is a hack I can't believe more people don't do. Just notice when they make a very recognizable face or start grunting then hold them over the toilet.
False positives are no big deal (just a fun change of scenery for the baby), for false negatives you change the baby as normal.
Easier the first week? Have you forgotten the meconium days? I mean it’s nothing crazy but that stuff was so sticky. We thankfully didn’t have any total blowouts but talking to parents who do it sounded pretty rough to clean up comparatively.
Our first kid’s poops came out with velocity. For the first month or two, every poop change was also a full outfit change. We are very glad that our second kid’s poops come out at a normal speed, so that it is just the normal amount of drool which necessitates the new outfits instead.
It's easier because your child is like an extension of yourself. I think changing your own kid's diaper is a walk in the park unless there's a big mess!
My mutant power is the ability to put babies to sleep. Before I had my own I'd put other people's kids babies to sleep easy peasy. It's something I've been able to do since I was a teenager.
I agree, I never found changing diapers that difficult or bad. I was also hardened by years of chronic insomnia so the sleep disruption wasn't a big deal, I took most of the night-time duties to let mom sleep.
The thing I remember being most annoyed about was cleaning all the bottles. That was really obnoxious.
Eh. Apart from sleep/scheduling it's probably the worst part about babies. We just had our first boy and we're adjusting to the whole penis spraying piss everywhere...thing. I didn't realize just how far they could spray. Also, somehow the back of his clothes keep getting wet while he's fully dressed in and in a diaper which completely boggles my mind.
Personally I'm really bad with smells, though. Even with hundreds (thousands?) of diapers changed I still really have to focus on not losing my lunch on the bad smelling ones.
i’m assuming you’re the mom? ;) Yes the pressure starts off strong, can easily fly onto their face lol. happened to me…fun times.
> somehow the back of his clothes keep getting wet while he's fully dressed in and in a diaper which completely boggles my mind.
We just solved this recently with our baby boy. I can try to offer some tips. He likely needs a different diaper size, or (more likely), his penis isn’t correctly facing downward when putting the diaper on. 1st secure one side, and before you secure the other, peek at his penis (looking into the diaper from the side - near his hips). Make sure it’s pointed straight down and adjust if necessary. then quickly strap the other side. Basically you want the diaper to gently and firmly keep that penis pointed down all day. When boys are about to pee, the penis becomes briefly erect. If the diaper is not firmly holding that penis down, the penis can easily drift sideways and shoot urine in a weird direction. When this happens the urine can leak around the hips and up the back - instead of going into the absorbent pad. A quick test - when you change his diaper, is his penis still pointed down? If not then that’s the issue. If it is, try other troubleshooting steps.
Two things that helped us:
1) "activate" the diaper [0], they are tightly pressed for transport and have to unfold the fabric to soak well.
2) Make sure the side guards are up, tight fit around the legs and a short pull around it to adjust them and not have the guards folded under the seam also helps.
> Yes the pressure starts off strong, can easily fly onto their face lol.
Into their face? Try onto the ceiling or a 6-8ft arc in any direction. One of my coworkers warned me so I usually had the situation under control but my wife had only ever changed girls (young cousins and kids she babysat), thought she was prepared but wasn't.
I think our baby boy peed on his face once when getting changed and decided never to do that again. While I think our daughter might take it as a matter of pride to pee and poop while being changed, after the diaper is off.
Also, if he’s still healing from birth, that problem solves itself over time as swelling reduces and it starts to naturally point in the preferred direction on its own
We got a top hat plus potty for ours. We put her on after every diaper and it’s surprising how often they go! After a while they know to hold it until they sit in the potty
Nappies are no big deal but I honestly think it's simply some switch in the parents' brains that goes "let's not worry too much about this, it needs doing". You filter out the gross and you simply do it on autopilot.
I sometimes wonder about the people who must clean messy public restrooms. All of the gross, none of the "but it's for the sake of a cute human that I love".
I used to clean bathrooms in a Manhattan shopping mall. I now have a tiny human. Cleaning the bathrooms was much, much more disgusting. It has been nearly 15 years and I still think about the horrible things I witnessed at that job. Changing my daughter’s diaper doesn’t even register to me as a gross thing to deal with.
Agreed. Baby stage has sleep interruptions but is otherwise super easy. Changing diapers is easy. Feeding is easy. Trying to figure out why they're crying is easy (almost always hungry, tired or poopy). The problems start for real when babies start crawling, walking, having opinions and talking.
Our son is 3.5 years old and it's super fun and rewarding but I'm not going to lie, it's hard to get lectured by a toddler about the difference between a Majungosaurus and Carnotaurus or a T-Rex and Giganotosaurus. Or have him ask me why the Velociraptors in Jurassic Park don't look like the paleontologists' current consensus on what they looked like... Or the million other super specific questions I need to come up with answers to (and I don't really want to discourage him as my parents did me). So even though he can currently use the washroom 100% independently, infant stage was still 1000x easier.
Was just talking to my wife about this yesterday. Our son is 10 months old so we're still in the diaper stage, and it's really not a big deal. Since disposable diapers and baby wipes became a thing, not really sure why anyone complains about it.
Compared to trying for hours to get him to sleep, or dealing with the sheer panic we felt when we had to have him rushed to the hospital, a poopy diaper is nothing.
Before I had children I've never even think changing nappies is a big deal, I've noticed the movie/TV show mentioning the sleep and didn't realize how bad is it, you have practically no proper sleep for a year, that would be the main reason why I didn't want third child.
> But as any parent knows, changing nappies is really one of the easier parts of looking after babies and toddlers.
When you have twins, or triplets, or more... Nothing at all is easy. Unless you're privileged (or have help), their early years become your living life's only work.
> ... encountered non-parents ...
One reason why I hold anxiety for infants at orphanages or under care.
Our family uses cloth diapers (except when we’re traveling). We chose them because we don’t trust the chemicals in disposable diapers that come into contact with such a sensitive area. They’re a bit labor-intensive, but having a washer and dryer helps a lot.
We did the same thing, more to avoid throwing away the plastic waste and keeping things reusable than out of any paranoia about chemicals.
But they worked well. We just did laundry every day for the first year and a half. Whether that's a net positive for ecological impact, or a negative is an open question.
> You want a covered pail partially filled with water to put used diapers in as soon as removed. If it contains soap or detergent, this helps in removing stains. Be sure the soap is well dissolved, to prevent lumps of soap from remaining in the diapers later. When you remove a soiled diaper, scrape the movement off into the toilet with a knife, or rinse it by holding it in the toilet while you flush it (hold tight).
> You wash the diapers with mild soap or mild detergent in [the] washing machine or washtub (dissolve the soap well first), and rinse 2 or 3 or 4 times. The number of rinsings depends on how soon the water gets clear and on how delicate the baby’s skin is. If your baby’s skin isn’t sensitive, 2 rinsings may be enough.
We had a lidded bucket, dump any solids into the toilet, fold any remaining mess inside, put in bucket. We primed the bucket with water into which we put tea-tree oil (for scent and disinfectant purposes). Some people will use the toilet as a pre-rinse; never did it myself.
We used nappy liners, a piece of paper to catch the worst of the poo. And 'wraps' on the outside. The nappies had poppers; you could popper them differently as they grew.
On wash day, empty the water from the bucket into the toilet, lift the nappies individually into the [front-loading] washing machine.
We bought our cloth nappies on eBay, already second-hand. We passed them on still usable years afterwards.
I did start potty training as soon as they went on solids, well before they could sit unaided! We used baby-sign, and I tried a couple of elimination communication techniques. Baby-sign was great, they could tell us they needed potty before they could talk; first child even made a new toilet sign to differentiate between wee/poo.
We had compostable nappies for times when we needed them - too rainy to dry clothes, too sleepy, backup for when they wee/poo on the nappy as you're putting it on them when you're out and about.
Only thing we'd wash with the nappies was soiled clothing (baby grows) or towels we'd lie on the bed to change their nappy on. A month or so in we got a changing table (Ikea).
If there is poop on them you need to scrape it off.
We bought a pack of thin disposable diaper liners. These go inside the diaper and catch most of the business. They then get thrown away (but it’s much less waste/garbage than an entire diaper)
They do get their own load. The ones we have tell you to run them in the wash twice.
When my mother gave birth to my younger brother, she started using cloth diapers on him, worried about the environmental impact of disposable diapers like the ones she used on me during my childhood. She went back to disposable in less than a month.
Spock! A classic. My parents, when raising me in the '80s and '90s, had a copy of his book and tried their best to follow what it said. I still recall the cover with the smiling baby. An amusing anecdote my father now has retold many times over (as fathers do) is that despite Spock's best advice there was something that I refused to do. His friend, a psychologist, pointed out that while Spock's advice might be good, my father could not expect me to behave as described because I had not read the book.
Another thing that's interesting here to me is the two fingers below the diaper to avoid sticking the infant with the pin. Two fingers under the diaper is still standard enough guidance that we and others we know received it at the hospital when diapering our child, though the reason expressed was one of tightness. I wonder if perhaps the former is the origin and the latter is a backformation.
And finally, the environmental question. Since my wife and I are quite old[0], and I want us to have more than one child I have pushed our household to the extreme end of consumerism[1]. We live in a 2 story flat in San Francisco, and until recently we had a changing station downstairs and two upstairs, with a diaper pail by each.
Here I encountered the problem that plagues anyone who has many battery-powered appliances - what convenience you gain in use, you lose when it comes to replace batteries. The Diaper Genie tall can we have is a very effective device at keeping smells in, but multiple cans means the time between replacement is doubled - something which you are rapidly made aware of by your senses[2], when it's time to replace the bag. The convenience is still worth it.
I do have a friend with more children than us, who will probably continue to have more children than us, whose family uses cloth diapers. So it is not an impossible task, and for someone adequately concerned about the environment and appropriately disciplined, perhaps quite straightforward to do.
1: my rationale was that by easing the difficulties of pregnancy, I might reduce any resistance my wife might have to having the next child.
2: "Pain, even agony, is no more than information before the senses, data fed to the computer of the mind. The lesson is simple: you have received the information, now act on it. Take control of the input and you shall become master of the output" - Chairman Shen-ji Yang.
Checking to see if you're able to fit two fingers underneath a dressing to make sure it's not too tight and won't cut off circulation is standard practice in health care; not just diapers.
Favorite memory of diaper genie was after the pail is full, and you slice off the captured diapers, was slinging the long sausage link like string of diapers into the apartment dumpster. Ah the memories
Oddly enough I have a whole bunch of the lithium-ion ones with a USB-C connector in the side. Keeping a specific charger around for batteries sucks but I have a lot of Anker chargers so this works quite well.
These batteries have usb-c charging with a charging LED and come with a usb-a to 4x USB-C cable. Pretty convenient.
In comparison, the duracell batteries have a pretty good lifetime, but just go dead. They also don't work in the cold.
the nimh batteries are rechargable and somewhat convenient, but have a short lifetime. This seems to be because they are 1.2v and the devices think they're low on power more easily, plus their self-discharge is lots faster than other batteries.
Interesting side note. In some countries such as Japan the sale of adult diapers has now overtaken baby diapers. Pretty sad to think about. Wonder how manufacturers in other countries are thinking as birth rates drop.
Diapers are no problem, as other folks have mentioned. The hard part for me is the over-the-top hypervigilance. One little breathing change, and I was halfway across the house to her room before I realized I was even awake. I could feel every sharp corner and tripping hazard in the house as if they were gouging my own skin.
If you look at many other cultures, e.g. African mothers carrying their babies on the back. They don't have need for diapers. What many people in the west where we have been so trained on diapers don't know is that babies can be potty trained very early (<3 month). There are quite a few resources on this (search for infant potty training).
There is absolutely no way a 3 month old is potty trained. As in, the 3 month old infant can communicate and use a toilet. They likely can't even hold their head up at that age.
That's what we did. Our baby was doing the well known spraying right after removing the diaper the first few days. So we decided to put him on the potty on his second week following advices of parents who did that too: timing, sound cues... In his second month, he already understood the patterns. Since then, he will sometimes pee in the diaper as we are not doing the zero diaper method and he understood it's not that uncomfortable to pee in the diaper. He will poop in the diaper once a week when we are too distracted or when he is having digestive issues with a newly introduced food. No smelly trash, never waking up with a diaper full of poop, no red skin, happier baby. Highly recommended if you have the right environment to implement this method.
Nowadays some parents went back to opting for cloth diapers. Apart from the obvious environmental aspect, there's the idea that ultra absorbent and comfy diapers disincentivize babies from signalling that they are about to poop. Apparently, babies can communicate when they need to go even quite early on, in what's called "elimination communication". This also makes them a lot easier to potty train later on.
I used cloth diapers to great effect with my two kids. We'd use disposable ones when going out, but for around the house (and at daycare, bless them!) we were able to use cloth. I think we saved a pile of money, and yes, they were both trained pretty early.
Nobody wants them, even free... I guess I'll just throw them all out eventually, I've offered to new parents and they're all horrified by the concept
Our baby was capable of sending these signals when she was a few weeks. So most pees she does hanging above the sink. This saves so many diapers, crazy. And much more comfortable for her to never have a wet butt, not even a minute. Would recommend!
I think within the next few months we can actually get her to go to the potty by herself. She’s 15 months now.
This industry wasn’t just good. It did destroy babies sensitivity to soiling.
Agreed - like the sibling comment, we also used cloth diapers with our two kids. They were actually great. The ones we had were basically two-part construction: there was an outer shell with adjustable snaps for appropriate sizing, and an inner liner that absorbed the moisture. Both were easily washable. Like other parents we knew who did this, we added a small hand-held sprayer / bidet wand to one of our toilets and used it to hose off the diaper and liners. We would then toss them in the washing machine. I think these also provided more cushion for the kids’ bottoms and they both ended up sitting and scooting on them pretty fast. Also like the others here, we used disposables on the go / on vacation. Just my two cents, but we loved our cloth diapers.
We had cloth diaper service for our two children, where they'd deliver a huge stack of nice soft thick cotton squares, and take away the dirty ones, once a week. They barely smelled, especially in the beginning before solid foods start. They were excellent as burpy cloths on the shoulder too. Disposable diapers were more excellent for outside, and at later times for sleeping through the night when we realized that the absorbency was better for sleep. We definitely felt better about the environment with the reusable cloth ones.
First few paragraphs I was trying to guess how this was going to turn out to be a metaphor for AI. The modern disposable product is the LLM, right, and the cloth diaper is doing things yourself? But, no, it really is just an article about baby poo.
I’ve seen the cotton diapers my parents used for me and I don’t see how they could have competed with any lackluster version of the disposable diaper mentioned in the article.
I use cloth diapers, but modern disposable diapers can hold a lot, a lot of pee. Significantly more than any cloth diapers can. This means a lot less blowouts with disposables.
Do people claiming cloth diapers have lower environmental impact just ignore the vast amounts of water and chemicals you use to wash and reuse them? I'm not so convinced they are that much better than disposable ones.
Same goes for financial aspect, washing (water/electricity)+washing gel vs picking them up in the store where I'm going anyway. Daily expenses on disposable ones are negligible to outweigh the convenience.
I can see only good reason for cloth being health reasons since there were cases when materials inside irritated babies skin sometimes, even famous brands had this issue and you have to figure out which brand works best for your kid.
I would make same argument about murdered Christmas trees vs artificial ones, I'm using my artificial Christmas trees for 9th year, meanwhile neighbors have their murdered trees transported by trucks to shop, then they transport them by car to their homes, then they throw them away after 2-3 weeks at home making mess on street expecting waste collection service collecting them (from everyone's money) with trucks and dispose them.
> I can see only good reason for cloth being health reasons since there were cases when materials inside irritated babies skin sometimes, even famous brands had this issue and you have to figure out which brand works best for your kid.
The large amount of plastic in disposable ones seems like another mark against them health-wise.
Our kids have been out of diapers for a couple of years. We loved these bamboo diapers[0] Nearly as good as pampers. Much softer and much better for the environment. I have no relationship to the company.
And disposables dropping at 10cents a pair. Holy crap! I thought they were expensive now.
Finally we had a crazy trustee in our condo assoc that wanted us to scrape the poop off before we threw diapers away in our community barrels (in sealed bags of course). We just smiled and nodded.
As an American, I’m embarrassed because it’s a thought-terminating cliché, but I hear great “modern marvels”-type stories about innovation like this and think, “we used to be a country…”
it is recommended (search, you'll see) that at home you don't wash your underwear with your other clothes because there is a nonnegligible amount of fecal matter and associated bacteria remaining after washing.
extending that notion to nappies being community washed in large vats (separated by mesh bags and kept separable?) is horrifying. I suppose they put in some chlorine bleach to sterilize? Still, chlorine bleach might whiten the masticated corn kernels but...
I think your imagination is much worse than reality. While your home laundry is arguably questionable (a lot of the sterilization occurs in the drier!) industrial laundry is a different ballgame altogether. How do you think hospital bedding gets cleaned? Most if not all industrial laundromats do regular testing of cleaned items to test for bacteria, organic matter, etc.
A nappy service is very likely to do a much better job than you'd do at home.
I enjoyed the article. Nappies are very impressive and something I never really thought about before becoming a parent.
Reminds me of something I often slightly chuckle about as a parent.
I’ve often encountered non-parents, particularly teenagers, who remark how the thought of changing nappies horrifying and a really big deal. But as any parent knows, changing nappies is really one of the easier parts of looking after babies and toddlers.
I had read so many casual internet comments about infants being horrible and how unbelievably difficult it was that by the time I actually had kids, it seemed almost mild by comparison.
It's not an easy thing, but some of the histrionic claims about child raising on the internet are really out there. It's no wonder kids are horrified by the thought.
> It's not an easy thing, but some of the histrionic claims about child raising on the internet are really out there.
Have you considered that objectively difficult infants/toddlers/children exist? Children with O.D.D., for instance, show symptoms early, but diagnosis usually doesn't come until much later.
Perhaps the comments you came across online were from the parents of those kids.
-A parent of a very challenging child with Level II Autism
I can 2nd this. As a parent of a level II autistic son and then 6 years later a now 1 year old girl that does not appear to have any autistic traits. We delayed having the 2nd child by years because the first was so draining. They are night and day. During parental leave I found it hard to play with my son in ways where he acknowledged that it was fun. He mostly did repetitive activities alone like flexing a folding rule or similar. My daughter is completely different. As parents our son Ahmad thought us a lot about not projecting our expectations onto the children and meeting them where they are.
I think that might be the thing. Parents whose children are more challenging might more often "be at wits end" and turn to online communities for guidance, help, or other insights, whereas parents whose children are not as challenging just breezes through, and thus do not end up as a data point online on how difficult parenthood is.
Also, even though I don't know you, I am certain that you are a good parent, and that you are doing your very best, and that your child is lucky to have you as their parent. :) Stay strong.
Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
No one remembers when their friends or family tells “we are doing well everything is nice”.
Everyone passes on or remembers horror stories.
This is true of many communities. The internet is full of complaints because people rarely take the time to say just “my car works just fine”. There’s no value in that info. People go out to talk about it when they have a problem, that’s a real conversation starter.
Discussion groups aren’t a balanced slice of how the overall situation looks like. They tend to sway towards the negative side because discussing about everything being fine gets old fast.
It's not that. IME people with kids with actual conditions are somewhat less likely to complain, and are far, far less prevalent than mums who just inhabit "complaining about my kids" culture.
I’m on hour five of putting this child to bed.
One similar funny experience I had was that I've never had any trouble with poop or diapers, but a family member said "Just wait till she starts eating solids!" and then she started eating solids and there was no step function in experience. Changing her was still the same.
I had a similar experience to your family member. I have a 2 year old and when she started eating solids, the smell got to me much more than before.
Still not too hard but much harder in my case ;-).
Well, the smell definitely changes, but otherwise it was obviously the same.
But like it was mentioned already, changing diapers remains the easy part .
My kids were considerably larger and smellier when they started eating solids, but still nothing crazy. Changing diapers is basically nothing, but having all the stuff that they need related to diapers and just being at the age when they are in diapers is mildly challenging if you travel a lot.
People have different personalities and so do infants. Parents can find one child easier than another and this changes from person to person.
How strong the family and well situated the family is also likely plays a factor.
My second child's terrible 2s is approximately 600x worse than her sisters.
Joking aside, it's actually surprisingly way way tougher.
> It's not an easy thing, but some of the histrionic claims about child raising on the internet are really out there. It's no wonder kids are horrified by the thought.
Could 'the horrors of parenting' be something that is promoted to younger people, to discourage then from having children? A sort of governance marketing to help address the perceived issue that there are simply too many people?
Governments usually rather have homegrown babies, where they can influence everything from day one, than importing different ones.
So .. if this is a conspiracy, it would have come from a private entiety (like club of rome, who lamented overpopulation a long time ago).
But I don't think so. Lamenting and whining has just become a sport for some.
There's an accelerating population crisis. Who would have motive to push birth rates lower than they even are, and how would they "push them"?
The world has enough people and can trivially import some from places with too many to places with too few.
That process has some social complexities, because as it turns out, human cultures are not all the same.
> But as any parent knows, changing nappies is really one of the easier parts of looking after babies and toddlers.
For sure, probably because stinky diapers are visceral but psychological challenges aren’t, yet I think most parents would agree about having to dig far deeper into our inner resolve to deal with age-appropriate behavioral issues.
When I had my first, she pooped in her diaper as I was holding her at the dinner table.
Then I looked up and my mother came running towards me, all excited to be able to change a diaper for the first time in seven years.
> who remark how the thought of changing nappies horrifying and a really big deal
It’s a similar experience to changing parents diapers when you are an adult and they are end of life. Seems horrific, then you just do it.
Babies are easier because they leave the faintest stain on the diaper the first week or so.
Then it becomes more but not much scent, like a training period. And it's really only 4-6 months that it begins to get foul.
Another advantage for the baby side is a hack I can't believe more people don't do. Just notice when they make a very recognizable face or start grunting then hold them over the toilet.
False positives are no big deal (just a fun change of scenery for the baby), for false negatives you change the baby as normal.
Easier the first week? Have you forgotten the meconium days? I mean it’s nothing crazy but that stuff was so sticky. We thankfully didn’t have any total blowouts but talking to parents who do it sounded pretty rough to clean up comparatively.
Maybe ours was weird then? We just didn't have much volume of that.
No amount of it is pleasant but it still felt, even at the time, like training wheels on a diaper.
Our first kid’s poops came out with velocity. For the first month or two, every poop change was also a full outfit change. We are very glad that our second kid’s poops come out at a normal speed, so that it is just the normal amount of drool which necessitates the new outfits instead.
It's easier because your child is like an extension of yourself. I think changing your own kid's diaper is a walk in the park unless there's a big mess!
A soldier adjusts to the horrors of war in the same way, fwiw. ;)
Oh, there’s definitely hard parts of having kids—but changing diapers isn’t really one of them.
The truly hard part is putting them to sleep
At 8pm, and then 10pm, then 10:30pm, then 12am, then 2am, then 3:30am, then 5am.
As an expectant first time parent, this is the bit that I'm bracing for most.
Relax: it only lasts a few months. Rarely more than 60 or 70.
Or waking them up for school... (A correlated problem)
My mutant power is the ability to put babies to sleep. Before I had my own I'd put other people's kids babies to sleep easy peasy. It's something I've been able to do since I was a teenager.
I agree, I never found changing diapers that difficult or bad. I was also hardened by years of chronic insomnia so the sleep disruption wasn't a big deal, I took most of the night-time duties to let mom sleep.
The thing I remember being most annoyed about was cleaning all the bottles. That was really obnoxious.
Honestly the hardest part of changing diapers is when they get bigger and insists on wiggling everywhere while you are changing them
Eh. Apart from sleep/scheduling it's probably the worst part about babies. We just had our first boy and we're adjusting to the whole penis spraying piss everywhere...thing. I didn't realize just how far they could spray. Also, somehow the back of his clothes keep getting wet while he's fully dressed in and in a diaper which completely boggles my mind.
Personally I'm really bad with smells, though. Even with hundreds (thousands?) of diapers changed I still really have to focus on not losing my lunch on the bad smelling ones.
Toddlers...yeah.
> I didn't realize just how far they could spray.
i’m assuming you’re the mom? ;) Yes the pressure starts off strong, can easily fly onto their face lol. happened to me…fun times.
> somehow the back of his clothes keep getting wet while he's fully dressed in and in a diaper which completely boggles my mind.
We just solved this recently with our baby boy. I can try to offer some tips. He likely needs a different diaper size, or (more likely), his penis isn’t correctly facing downward when putting the diaper on. 1st secure one side, and before you secure the other, peek at his penis (looking into the diaper from the side - near his hips). Make sure it’s pointed straight down and adjust if necessary. then quickly strap the other side. Basically you want the diaper to gently and firmly keep that penis pointed down all day. When boys are about to pee, the penis becomes briefly erect. If the diaper is not firmly holding that penis down, the penis can easily drift sideways and shoot urine in a weird direction. When this happens the urine can leak around the hips and up the back - instead of going into the absorbent pad. A quick test - when you change his diaper, is his penis still pointed down? If not then that’s the issue. If it is, try other troubleshooting steps.
Girl diaper changes are “easy” in this regard.
Two things that helped us: 1) "activate" the diaper [0], they are tightly pressed for transport and have to unfold the fabric to soak well. 2) Make sure the side guards are up, tight fit around the legs and a short pull around it to adjust them and not have the guards folded under the seam also helps.
[0] https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0700/5519/8950/files/brief...
> Yes the pressure starts off strong, can easily fly onto their face lol.
Into their face? Try onto the ceiling or a 6-8ft arc in any direction. One of my coworkers warned me so I usually had the situation under control but my wife had only ever changed girls (young cousins and kids she babysat), thought she was prepared but wasn't.
Size diapers based on the amount of pee not on the size of the baby.
That was life changing advice for me.
If you have a pee-er, the make a pee-pee tee-pee to place over the wenis to protect from errant spays.
I think our baby boy peed on his face once when getting changed and decided never to do that again. While I think our daughter might take it as a matter of pride to pee and poop while being changed, after the diaper is off.
Also, if he’s still healing from birth, that problem solves itself over time as swelling reduces and it starts to naturally point in the preferred direction on its own
We got a top hat plus potty for ours. We put her on after every diaper and it’s surprising how often they go! After a while they know to hold it until they sit in the potty
Nappies are no big deal but I honestly think it's simply some switch in the parents' brains that goes "let's not worry too much about this, it needs doing". You filter out the gross and you simply do it on autopilot.
I sometimes wonder about the people who must clean messy public restrooms. All of the gross, none of the "but it's for the sake of a cute human that I love".
I used to clean bathrooms in a Manhattan shopping mall. I now have a tiny human. Cleaning the bathrooms was much, much more disgusting. It has been nearly 15 years and I still think about the horrible things I witnessed at that job. Changing my daughter’s diaper doesn’t even register to me as a gross thing to deal with.
Any particularly uh, pungent anecdotes to share?
Agreed. Baby stage has sleep interruptions but is otherwise super easy. Changing diapers is easy. Feeding is easy. Trying to figure out why they're crying is easy (almost always hungry, tired or poopy). The problems start for real when babies start crawling, walking, having opinions and talking.
Our son is 3.5 years old and it's super fun and rewarding but I'm not going to lie, it's hard to get lectured by a toddler about the difference between a Majungosaurus and Carnotaurus or a T-Rex and Giganotosaurus. Or have him ask me why the Velociraptors in Jurassic Park don't look like the paleontologists' current consensus on what they looked like... Or the million other super specific questions I need to come up with answers to (and I don't really want to discourage him as my parents did me). So even though he can currently use the washroom 100% independently, infant stage was still 1000x easier.
> Baby stage has sleep interruptions but is otherwise super easy.
Your assertion does not correlate with my lived experience. But dirty diapers was definitely not the biggest issue.
> Feeding is easy.
Mileage may definitely vary on that one.
Was just talking to my wife about this yesterday. Our son is 10 months old so we're still in the diaper stage, and it's really not a big deal. Since disposable diapers and baby wipes became a thing, not really sure why anyone complains about it.
Compared to trying for hours to get him to sleep, or dealing with the sheer panic we felt when we had to have him rushed to the hospital, a poopy diaper is nothing.
It also helps that newborn poop doesn't smell particularly bad. It only starts smelling like poop when they start eating real food.
Before I had children I've never even think changing nappies is a big deal, I've noticed the movie/TV show mentioning the sleep and didn't realize how bad is it, you have practically no proper sleep for a year, that would be the main reason why I didn't want third child.
> But as any parent knows, changing nappies is really one of the easier parts of looking after babies and toddlers.
When you have twins, or triplets, or more... Nothing at all is easy. Unless you're privileged (or have help), their early years become your living life's only work.
> ... encountered non-parents ...
One reason why I hold anxiety for infants at orphanages or under care.
Our family uses cloth diapers (except when we’re traveling). We chose them because we don’t trust the chemicals in disposable diapers that come into contact with such a sensitive area. They’re a bit labor-intensive, but having a washer and dryer helps a lot.
We did the same thing, more to avoid throwing away the plastic waste and keeping things reusable than out of any paranoia about chemicals.
But they worked well. We just did laundry every day for the first year and a half. Whether that's a net positive for ecological impact, or a negative is an open question.
Is there a pre-cleaning step at all? Or do you toss them right in to the washer? Do they get their own load?
It's explained in the article. First quote:
> You want a covered pail partially filled with water to put used diapers in as soon as removed. If it contains soap or detergent, this helps in removing stains. Be sure the soap is well dissolved, to prevent lumps of soap from remaining in the diapers later. When you remove a soiled diaper, scrape the movement off into the toilet with a knife, or rinse it by holding it in the toilet while you flush it (hold tight).
> You wash the diapers with mild soap or mild detergent in [the] washing machine or washtub (dissolve the soap well first), and rinse 2 or 3 or 4 times. The number of rinsings depends on how soon the water gets clear and on how delicate the baby’s skin is. If your baby’s skin isn’t sensitive, 2 rinsings may be enough.
The technique hasn't changed much.
We had a lidded bucket, dump any solids into the toilet, fold any remaining mess inside, put in bucket. We primed the bucket with water into which we put tea-tree oil (for scent and disinfectant purposes). Some people will use the toilet as a pre-rinse; never did it myself.
We used nappy liners, a piece of paper to catch the worst of the poo. And 'wraps' on the outside. The nappies had poppers; you could popper them differently as they grew.
On wash day, empty the water from the bucket into the toilet, lift the nappies individually into the [front-loading] washing machine.
We bought our cloth nappies on eBay, already second-hand. We passed them on still usable years afterwards.
I did start potty training as soon as they went on solids, well before they could sit unaided! We used baby-sign, and I tried a couple of elimination communication techniques. Baby-sign was great, they could tell us they needed potty before they could talk; first child even made a new toilet sign to differentiate between wee/poo.
We had compostable nappies for times when we needed them - too rainy to dry clothes, too sleepy, backup for when they wee/poo on the nappy as you're putting it on them when you're out and about.
Only thing we'd wash with the nappies was soiled clothing (baby grows) or towels we'd lie on the bed to change their nappy on. A month or so in we got a changing table (Ikea).
That’s disgusting and probably worst for the baby. Especially:
> We bought our cloth nappies on eBay, already second-hand. We passed them on still usable years afterwards.
Why? A wash at 90°C pretty much sterilizes them?
If there is poop on them you need to scrape it off.
We bought a pack of thin disposable diaper liners. These go inside the diaper and catch most of the business. They then get thrown away (but it’s much less waste/garbage than an entire diaper)
They do get their own load. The ones we have tell you to run them in the wash twice.
You throw away linen every time your kid wees?
We did as well. We were fortunate to have a good diaper service in the neighborhood. I think it was less expensive than disposables.
When my mother gave birth to my younger brother, she started using cloth diapers on him, worried about the environmental impact of disposable diapers like the ones she used on me during my childhood. She went back to disposable in less than a month.
You were definitely worth an environmental catastrophe, but your mom wasn’t so sure your brother was worth it. I hope you hold that over him.
Yeah the environmentalists are always happy to make other’s life harder (for the nature) but not their own.
Spock! A classic. My parents, when raising me in the '80s and '90s, had a copy of his book and tried their best to follow what it said. I still recall the cover with the smiling baby. An amusing anecdote my father now has retold many times over (as fathers do) is that despite Spock's best advice there was something that I refused to do. His friend, a psychologist, pointed out that while Spock's advice might be good, my father could not expect me to behave as described because I had not read the book.
Another thing that's interesting here to me is the two fingers below the diaper to avoid sticking the infant with the pin. Two fingers under the diaper is still standard enough guidance that we and others we know received it at the hospital when diapering our child, though the reason expressed was one of tightness. I wonder if perhaps the former is the origin and the latter is a backformation.
And finally, the environmental question. Since my wife and I are quite old[0], and I want us to have more than one child I have pushed our household to the extreme end of consumerism[1]. We live in a 2 story flat in San Francisco, and until recently we had a changing station downstairs and two upstairs, with a diaper pail by each.
Here I encountered the problem that plagues anyone who has many battery-powered appliances - what convenience you gain in use, you lose when it comes to replace batteries. The Diaper Genie tall can we have is a very effective device at keeping smells in, but multiple cans means the time between replacement is doubled - something which you are rapidly made aware of by your senses[2], when it's time to replace the bag. The convenience is still worth it.
I do have a friend with more children than us, who will probably continue to have more children than us, whose family uses cloth diapers. So it is not an impossible task, and for someone adequately concerned about the environment and appropriately disciplined, perhaps quite straightforward to do.
0: if you want to see what happens when you have a baby near 40, https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Pregnancy
1: my rationale was that by easing the difficulties of pregnancy, I might reduce any resistance my wife might have to having the next child.
2: "Pain, even agony, is no more than information before the senses, data fed to the computer of the mind. The lesson is simple: you have received the information, now act on it. Take control of the input and you shall become master of the output" - Chairman Shen-ji Yang.
Checking to see if you're able to fit two fingers underneath a dressing to make sure it's not too tight and won't cut off circulation is standard practice in health care; not just diapers.
Ha, much simpler explanation then.
Favorite memory of diaper genie was after the pail is full, and you slice off the captured diapers, was slinging the long sausage link like string of diapers into the apartment dumpster. Ah the memories
Haha! I'm still living this. Down the garbage chute you go, diaper sausage!
Been close to 20 years for us. Enjoy the kids while they are young!
Oh yeah. I slinged it into a high-floor garbage chute. Then I felt it was wiser to bag the whole thing.
Thanks for the link! I've never seen this documented in a wiki format on the internet before, truly cool.
Glad you liked it!
> plagues anyone who has many battery-powered appliances
costco sells these AA+AAA coast lithium ion batteries that are 1.5v and seem to have high capacity and long charge time.
Seems better than either duracell disposables or the nimh rechargables that I use.
I've got the duracells from Costco. I've go to try these. Thanks for the tip.
Oddly enough I have a whole bunch of the lithium-ion ones with a USB-C connector in the side. Keeping a specific charger around for batteries sucks but I have a lot of Anker chargers so this works quite well.
These batteries have usb-c charging with a charging LED and come with a usb-a to 4x USB-C cable. Pretty convenient.
In comparison, the duracell batteries have a pretty good lifetime, but just go dead. They also don't work in the cold.
the nimh batteries are rechargable and somewhat convenient, but have a short lifetime. This seems to be because they are 1.2v and the devices think they're low on power more easily, plus their self-discharge is lots faster than other batteries.
FWIw I’ve had no problems with smells from our Ubbi Steel diaper pail which uses regular garbage bags. (Do use thicker bags though.)
This is the first thing I read this morning and I'm not even a dad yet (or maybe never).
I miss this side of HN nowadays.
Interesting side note. In some countries such as Japan the sale of adult diapers has now overtaken baby diapers. Pretty sad to think about. Wonder how manufacturers in other countries are thinking as birth rates drop.
Diapers are no problem, as other folks have mentioned. The hard part for me is the over-the-top hypervigilance. One little breathing change, and I was halfway across the house to her room before I realized I was even awake. I could feel every sharp corner and tripping hazard in the house as if they were gouging my own skin.
There was no feeling like the night my son started crawling on his own and we suddenly realized everything needed to be baby proofed even more.
Suddenly you couldn't put him down and he'd roughly stay wherever you left him.
Everybody thinks they baby proofed until their kid goes mobile.
Bloomberg has a long read about this: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-05-01/why-uk-gu...
(pottty training strategy changes were apparently somewhat pushed by researchers close to disposable diaper industry)
If you look at many other cultures, e.g. African mothers carrying their babies on the back. They don't have need for diapers. What many people in the west where we have been so trained on diapers don't know is that babies can be potty trained very early (<3 month). There are quite a few resources on this (search for infant potty training).
With the hope of receiving a reply with proof....
There is absolutely no way a 3 month old is potty trained. As in, the 3 month old infant can communicate and use a toilet. They likely can't even hold their head up at that age.
https://www.babycenter.com/baby/diapering/infant-potty-train... indicates that a potty can be introduced from 4- to 6-months old. Potty trained by 18 months is much more reasonable.
That's what we did. Our baby was doing the well known spraying right after removing the diaper the first few days. So we decided to put him on the potty on his second week following advices of parents who did that too: timing, sound cues... In his second month, he already understood the patterns. Since then, he will sometimes pee in the diaper as we are not doing the zero diaper method and he understood it's not that uncomfortable to pee in the diaper. He will poop in the diaper once a week when we are too distracted or when he is having digestive issues with a newly introduced food. No smelly trash, never waking up with a diaper full of poop, no red skin, happier baby. Highly recommended if you have the right environment to implement this method.
Have you had success with this? I was aware of this when I became a parent but it was impossible to find the space or energy amongst everything else.
Also, where in Africa?
I read several books on this topic but had no luck until about six months in. I also never tried the bottomless for a day or week approach so
Seems easier to just sit em in the backyard and hit em with the hose
This has interesting side effects below freezing temps. Icicle babies don't smell at all until they thaw.
They hold their poses better when they are frozen too.
Nowadays some parents went back to opting for cloth diapers. Apart from the obvious environmental aspect, there's the idea that ultra absorbent and comfy diapers disincentivize babies from signalling that they are about to poop. Apparently, babies can communicate when they need to go even quite early on, in what's called "elimination communication". This also makes them a lot easier to potty train later on.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elimination_communication
I used cloth diapers to great effect with my two kids. We'd use disposable ones when going out, but for around the house (and at daycare, bless them!) we were able to use cloth. I think we saved a pile of money, and yes, they were both trained pretty early.
Nobody wants them, even free... I guess I'll just throw them all out eventually, I've offered to new parents and they're all horrified by the concept
My parents used cloth diapers for me, and then later reused them for years around the house as rags.
Haha, we got second-hand cloth diapers. Figured it can't be worse than what our little one is going to do to them!
Our baby was capable of sending these signals when she was a few weeks. So most pees she does hanging above the sink. This saves so many diapers, crazy. And much more comfortable for her to never have a wet butt, not even a minute. Would recommend!
I think within the next few months we can actually get her to go to the potty by herself. She’s 15 months now.
This industry wasn’t just good. It did destroy babies sensitivity to soiling.
Agreed - like the sibling comment, we also used cloth diapers with our two kids. They were actually great. The ones we had were basically two-part construction: there was an outer shell with adjustable snaps for appropriate sizing, and an inner liner that absorbed the moisture. Both were easily washable. Like other parents we knew who did this, we added a small hand-held sprayer / bidet wand to one of our toilets and used it to hose off the diaper and liners. We would then toss them in the washing machine. I think these also provided more cushion for the kids’ bottoms and they both ended up sitting and scooting on them pretty fast. Also like the others here, we used disposables on the go / on vacation. Just my two cents, but we loved our cloth diapers.
We had cloth diaper service for our two children, where they'd deliver a huge stack of nice soft thick cotton squares, and take away the dirty ones, once a week. They barely smelled, especially in the beginning before solid foods start. They were excellent as burpy cloths on the shoulder too. Disposable diapers were more excellent for outside, and at later times for sleeping through the night when we realized that the absorbency was better for sleep. We definitely felt better about the environment with the reusable cloth ones.
I thought "Elimination Communication" was the technical term for Trump tweeting from the toilet.
This was really interesting! I’d never considered how challenging it is to manufacture and mass produce them.
The books it mentions of business/corporate histories look worth a read too.
First few paragraphs I was trying to guess how this was going to turn out to be a metaphor for AI. The modern disposable product is the LLM, right, and the cloth diaper is doing things yourself? But, no, it really is just an article about baby poo.
Good read!
I’ve seen the cotton diapers my parents used for me and I don’t see how they could have competed with any lackluster version of the disposable diaper mentioned in the article.
I use cloth diapers, but modern disposable diapers can hold a lot, a lot of pee. Significantly more than any cloth diapers can. This means a lot less blowouts with disposables.
Do people claiming cloth diapers have lower environmental impact just ignore the vast amounts of water and chemicals you use to wash and reuse them? I'm not so convinced they are that much better than disposable ones.
Same goes for financial aspect, washing (water/electricity)+washing gel vs picking them up in the store where I'm going anyway. Daily expenses on disposable ones are negligible to outweigh the convenience.
I can see only good reason for cloth being health reasons since there were cases when materials inside irritated babies skin sometimes, even famous brands had this issue and you have to figure out which brand works best for your kid.
I would make same argument about murdered Christmas trees vs artificial ones, I'm using my artificial Christmas trees for 9th year, meanwhile neighbors have their murdered trees transported by trucks to shop, then they transport them by car to their homes, then they throw them away after 2-3 weeks at home making mess on street expecting waste collection service collecting them (from everyone's money) with trucks and dispose them.
> I can see only good reason for cloth being health reasons since there were cases when materials inside irritated babies skin sometimes, even famous brands had this issue and you have to figure out which brand works best for your kid.
The large amount of plastic in disposable ones seems like another mark against them health-wise.
Our kids have been out of diapers for a couple of years. We loved these bamboo diapers[0] Nearly as good as pampers. Much softer and much better for the environment. I have no relationship to the company.
And disposables dropping at 10cents a pair. Holy crap! I thought they were expensive now.
Finally we had a crazy trustee in our condo assoc that wanted us to scrape the poop off before we threw diapers away in our community barrels (in sealed bags of course). We just smiled and nodded.
[0]https://dyper.com/
That site is worth visiting just for the wavy scrolling marquee text that's actually selectable. Very satisfying!
As an American, I’m embarrassed because it’s a thought-terminating cliché, but I hear great “modern marvels”-type stories about innovation like this and think, “we used to be a country…”
Great read. Being an engineer in the mid 20th century must have been fun and satisfying.
We pay for a diaper service. The price is comparable to disposables. The population density where I live helps with the price I'm sure.
it is recommended (search, you'll see) that at home you don't wash your underwear with your other clothes because there is a nonnegligible amount of fecal matter and associated bacteria remaining after washing.
extending that notion to nappies being community washed in large vats (separated by mesh bags and kept separable?) is horrifying. I suppose they put in some chlorine bleach to sterilize? Still, chlorine bleach might whiten the masticated corn kernels but...
I think your imagination is much worse than reality. While your home laundry is arguably questionable (a lot of the sterilization occurs in the drier!) industrial laundry is a different ballgame altogether. How do you think hospital bedding gets cleaned? Most if not all industrial laundromats do regular testing of cleaned items to test for bacteria, organic matter, etc.
A nappy service is very likely to do a much better job than you'd do at home.
Is this the first written reference to having a poop knife?
Asking the hard hitting questions.
It was always implied in the expression "cut the crap"
Hmm, I thought the other poop knife apocryphal story was older, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352409X1... but the oldest reference I could find there was 1953, while the Spock book is older.
Sa