Cloth diapers are great if you have a washer and or dryer in your home or with a washer but no dryer, a place to hang them to dry on a laundry line in the back yard.
But that just isn’t an option for many poorer families or even many middle class families. And if you don’t or even if you do but have to work out of necessity and have to put your baby in a daycare or use a sitter, disposable diapers are pretty much the only option. Even with rinsing and bleach, imagine going to a public laundromat with a pile of dirty diapers. Imagine being the one using that washing machine afterwards.
When I lived in an apartment with no in apartment washer and dryer, using the laundry room it cost $1.75 per washer (and these were not very big washers, in fact they were on the small side) and $1.50 per dryer that often didn’t completely dry the clothes so if you needed to dry them more, you had to put in another $1.50 in – no adding a quarter for extra time. Then they raised it to $2.00 per wash and $1.75 per dryer. I did better by going to the laundromat but it still wasn’t cheap and I hated the laundromat – you think the “people of Walmart” are bad, I could tell you some stories about the “people of the laundromat” that would make the “people of Walmart” seem like candidates for the local country club in comparison. Sometimes I’d buy a couple of pizzas for their family and go to my niece’s house to do my laundry and when my nephew would ask me to house and cat and dog sit for them, one of the perks was bringing my laundry and using their high tech front load washer and huge dryer : )
My niece and her husband gave birth to triplets 10 months after their first daughter was born and spent a small fortune in disposable diapers. Being that they were the parents of multiples, they did get some discounts the first few months. She was a stay at home mom for their first 5 years and when she did go back to work it was as a teaching assistant in their school district so she had flexible hours and would be off work when they were off school.
But even with using disposables, that first two years before they were potty trained her washer and dryer was running close to 24-7 just with clothes and bedding for the 4 babies and the adult clothes – hers, her husbands who worked construction and her HS age daughter and step son. Seriously their washer and dryer was constantly running and their water bill was huge.
When her mom had her older sister back in the mid 70’s, the first year she used cloth diapers but her mom had paid for a diaper service but for the next two, born less than a year apart and she had to go back to work to make ends meet, she went to disposables.
My best friend used cloth diapers for her first child. She used cloth because she wanted to be more environmentally friendly, and this was in the early 80’s. She was a bit of a neo-hippy earth mother back then. She also insisted that she would only feed her son healthy and organic foods and would never let him eat junk food or watch TV.
Then she got pregnant with her second child three months after her son was born.
With two toddlers in diapers, she went to disposables and I remember the time I went to visit her and she giving her son a small bag of Cheetos and telling him go watch TV and share the Cheetos with his sister just so she could have a few minutes of adult time talking with me.
“, imagine going to a public laundromat with a pile of dirty diapers. Imagine being the one using that washing machine afterwards.”
That makes NO sense. Do you think that everyone that washes diapers at home has two washers? I can think of a lot of yuckier things that could be in a public washer.
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