To wonder why more people don't use reusable nappies?

[GinGeum]

I know this will be controversial and I know there will always be some circumstances when they are not suitable, but since becoming a parent, I've not come across a single other parent using reusable nappies.

Everyone I know has also said they were never mentioned to them at all by antenatal classes/midwife/anyone. In the hospital, none of the staff we encountered had any idea what our baby was wearing.

Surely now we are all thinking about reducing plastic, disposable nappies should be fairly high on the list of things to cut down on? Programmes like the war on plastic on BBC barely mentioned disposable nappies. Even switching to reusable wipes would make a huge difference.

AIBU to wonder why reusable nappies aren't promoted more?

The chemicals in disposables terrify me and I dislike the idea of having to use extra creams. With reusable nappies, we only need the nappy! No barrier cream required

That's down to your child's skin, not the nappy. We use disposables and DS has literally never had nappy rash (I suspect because his skin is dry - the skin under his nappy is actually some of his least sore skin, and apparently in general it's very rare for a baby to get eczema in their nappy area), and there are plenty of people upthread whose DC got nappy rash in reusables. Some babies are just much more prone to it than others.

Great topic to bring up! :)
I have 8 monthn old twins and for ages I felt like this was an excuse/reason for me to use disposable nappies cos I had so much more to do than everyone else.
With a little bit of knowledge i now feel i have even more of a duty to lessen the in environmental impact me and my babies cause. Its all about your perspective.
I am only just venturing into the world of reusable nappies and i live on a very tight budget so cant afford to buy so many upfront, but bit by bit i intend to change over. As i understand it, they have a throw away liner and i already use 100% biodegradable wipes...looking to change to reusable too.

Really wish this was talked about in parent to be classes and in hospitals as a viable option. Until then, maybe if other mums see me managing to use reusable with twins, they will consider it an
Option for them too

I've been intrigued to use them to save money. When buying nappies I've never thought oh shit I'm destroying the planet, so maybe if they were advertised and the reasons to use them where advertised I'd have chosen cloth nappies.

Also I've recently seen you can get cloth sanitary towels! I never knew they existed until last week please tel me I'm not the only one who didn't know this!

I intended to use washables and arranged to borrow a trial set of different types (our county offers a trial set for two weeks rather than a grant towards the cost).

It was awful. I met the trial woman to pick them up and she was completely overwhelming and a big lactivist, who made it sound like it would be impossibly difficult as my baby had formula as well as BFing (she went on and on about this!) which would apparently make them a lot harder to wash. This turned out not to be true but I didn’t find out until several years later!

She also totally bamboozled me by waving different types around with different fastenings and you use this liner with that one but no liner with this other one!

I had PND and was already rather overwhelmed (I’d arranged the trial whilst still pregnant and did the pick up at six weeks). She made it sound so complicated and difficult I didn’t think we’d cope so we didn’t use them for the trial, and just handed them back unused. I avoided interacting with her as I didn’t want more pressure about BFing so she won’t have had a clue how offputting she was about the nappies!

Ironically, I’d been using washable sanitary towels for about 15 years before being pregnant so really I should have been the ideal candidate for washable nappies if it hadn’t been for the trial woman being so awful!

Yep I used cloth nappies with liners to flush down the loo.
And my children also had soft thin flannels from bodycare for cleaning their face and hands.
I never use wipes in my home for anything.
I grew up with using flash and washing up liquid for cleaning. I buy flash concentrate and dilute into a spray bottle with water

@ginandgingers92
Where did you get your £50 stash from, I am keen and have persuaded DH with the idea of saving money. But he is really not keen on second hand, which is a shame...

There are brilliant cloth libraries , google and see if you have one local.
I was able to borrow a whole pile of them and test what brands worked and what didn’t.

Unfortunately I was late to the game and my son was a year old, he is a big boy and I found the cloth nappies far too bulky for him . However bad I used them from birth he would have been use to them and wouldn’t have seemed as uncomfortable.

However there wasn’t anything difficult to manage about them and even if we switched to using half in half it would be such a massive improvement for the environment.

@SCC26 Hiya :) so the majorly of mine were second hand, from UK cloth Facebook page, but I also have a number of Alva and Littles and Blooms, which you can get for around £4/5 with 2x booster, brand new, from eBay, Amazon or Lilly's Cloth Nappies
:)

SCC26 unless you buy second hand, or you plan on having several kids you'll use them for, you won't save money, and the environmental impact is very limited.

Well, despite my feelings on why i didnt use them first time round I've decided on the back of this thread that if baby number 2 does appear (just started trying) I'm going to give them a bash. I've just found out my local council (Bradford if anyones interested) does a free starter kit with a few nappies to try. I doubt we'll go full on cloth nappy but a few will be a worth a go.

Some quite telling assumptions on here about women’s roles: it seems it’s assumed that in families using cloth laundry is done primarily by women, who don’t work, with high earning husbands and children who shit gold.

I work full time, have an almost 4hr round commute, am by far the major earner in my family, and share childcare and household tasks with my partner (sometimes 50/50, sometimes 70/30, sometimes 10/90 depending on our schedules). No cleaner (alas), no nanny, no live in washerwoman. My 8month old does the regular solid but slightly smelly poos.

I can still find the time to chuck a wash on.

My point is, use cloth or don’t use cloth, but don’t make out that those doing it have either uniquely charmed lives or are constantly knee deep in shit. They’re probably just normal people doing very marginally more laundry, and in the process not sending thousands of nappies to landfill.

Ok I used and sold cloth. I din't always have a drier. I tried a trial kit before I bought some but ended up using some terry squares as my base. I used cloth with 3 different childminders. I got some nappies free, some second hand and some new. I used all year round.
Also today I looked after 3 children for 3 hours in that time I had 2 babies that neede change of clothes due to nappy leaks they happen in all nappies. (yes these ones were in disps.)

It's not all or nothing, and if it's not for you use cloth wipes they are soo much better.

I tried really quite hard with reusables with 2 kids but eventually was defeated.

No issue with washing them. We used micro fibre ones which dry really quickly.
But they generally needed to be changed more often and still leaked.

Switched to naty which are supposed to be biodegradable.

I do think the upfront cost is limiting - of course cheaper in long term but you don't know if you're going to get on with them or not.
That said I got lots of second hand ones of different brands fairly cheaply on eBay.

I have four children and for the first two used only cloth nappies, and probably would have asked the same question as you OP.

I now have four children. Third child wore cloth part time for the first six months only. Why?
-I had two lodgers that I shared washing machine with so couldn’t always use machine when I wanted to. Used to end up staying up til ridiculous hours just so I could get the washing on. (One lodger also complained about nappies as thought it disgusting)

• had no garden and no dryer so hard to get even normal washing dry let alone cloth nappies
• Baby used to get nappy rash after a couple of days in cloth which would only clear up after a couple of days in disposables
• Baby could sit and roll in disposables but not in cloth, felt like was restricting development
• relied on hand me downs/charity shops and eBay bundles to clothe baby and found that most of the clothes didn’t fit well over the nappies. Small baby too so sizing up wasn’t really an option. Didn’t have this problem with first two children so assume clothing is slimmer cut than ten plus years ago
• found that the nappies never seemed to get completely clean and all the washing/strip washing/rinsing etc took ages only for them still to smell a bit and have stains. Not sure what I did wrong to make them smell as didn’t have this problem first time round.

Fourth child has literally only done about three weeks of cloth.

• The smell issue from dc 3 remains

-still no garden -with four children I am already constantly washing/hanging up washing/taking down washing/folding washing and the thought of extra loads doesn’t fill me with joy right now when there are other things I am struggling to keep on top of -same clothing issue -dc4 gets eczema and got it really badly around the bindings of the wraps.

I’d like to try again but not sure I can overcome all of the issues

I currently use eco disposables (yes they still go to landfill but are better in the manufacturing at least) but I always, always flush poo! I don’t want shit in the bin!

I didn't use them cos I got better things to do with my time than adding a heap of extra washing and headfvcks. I didn't wanna carry a wet, dirty nappy home, I'd rather bin it.
Baby stage was survival, I wasn't adding extra anything

I think all this talk of it taking seconds to chuck a wash on is a little misleading too, yes it only takes seconds to put a wash on, but the hanging up to dry takes longer, especially when you’re relying on airers indoors and hanging one load up means clearing it of the previous load, except half of that still isn’t dry so still needs to hang somewhere, then you have to fold and put away the rest of the load... (washing is currently the bane of my life 😉)

I think all this talk of it taking seconds to chuck a wash on is a little misleading too, yes it only takes seconds to put a wash on, but the hanging up to dry takes longer, especially when you’re relying on airers indoors and hanging one load up means clearing it of the previous load, except half of that still isn’t dry so still needs to hang somewhere, then you have to fold and put away the rest of the load... (washing is currently the bane of my life 😉)
Shopping was the bane of my life as I walked to the shops - no room for masses of disposables, but the thing I hate is putting bins out.
Honestly the life saver for me when it rains is point an electric fan at the washing - we now have a ceiling fan.

People keep mentioning nappy libraries. Nearest to us didn't post and was a train and two bus journeys away or three buses. As I said I was ill after having ds (must have been at least two months, it's thankfully a bit of a haze now), so really not up to that much traveling on my own. Plus DS fed constantly.

On the plus side for the environment, the whole thing was so traumatic I stuck at just the one DC...

every time your child gets shit on their clothes, do you just throw them away, or is that a totally different kind of poop going in your washing machine?

Thats exactly what i did. i wasnt scraping shit of knickers during toilet training, i wasnt trying to save a onesie from a poo explosion

because my 13 year old won't have anything to do with them and wees like a fountain.

I’ve never known anyone to empty the poo from the nappy into the toilet. I didn’t realise that was even a thing! They go straight in the bin

Me either, just went straight to the bin here. Same with everyone ive known, even with multiple kids over several years

Don't you have to keep buying different sizes as they grow ? I can't see how this works out.

Plus I agree, I barely manage the washing now.

@yellowbeard, you can, but many nappies are “birth to potty” size, which adjusts with folds and poppers. Wity nu first child I used disposables initially when he was so tiny. With my second, I had some tiny cloth nappies, which I used from about 6 weeks - 4 months. Both were in “birth to potty” size cloths from around 4 months.