The Business of Baby: What Doctors Don't Tell You, What Corporations Try to Sell You, and How to Put Your Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Baby Before Their Bottom Line

Author:Margulis, Jennifer [Margulis, Jennifer]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2013-04-16T00:00:00+00:00

Amount Americans spend on plastic diapers: $27 million/day

Average cost of plastic diaper: $0.25

Average cost of high-end, one-size-fits-all cloth diaper: $20

Cost of diapering a child in disposables: $2,400/child

Cost of diapering a child in cloth: $480/child

Average number of plastic diapers needed for 1 baby for 1 year: 3,000

Average number of cloth diapers needed for 1 baby for 1 year: 24

Cost to practice infant pottying: $1.00 (for a mixing bowl to use as a potty)

Errol Matherne: A Better Way to Care for Your Kids

Twenty-nine-year-old Errol Matherne, who lives in San Antonio, Texas, checks on his five-year-old, two-year-old, and eleven-month-old every morning. He works nights and can’t go to sleep until he assures himself that his children are safe. He used to be completely against cloth diapers, but now he and his wife own a baby store that specializes in natural products and holds free monthly workshops on how to use cloth. It was when his oldest son, Tristan, was just a few weeks old and Errol was about to be deployed that his thinking about diapers totally changed.

Right after he was born, my son Tristan, our oldest, got a very violent and bloody diaper rash. His penis and testicles were red and inflamed and raw. He had bloody blisters in between his legs, thighs, and butt. He was in so much pain he couldn’t sleep. When we wiped him he was in pain. It even hurt him to put ointment on him. We tried everything. We bought every over-the-counter diaper cream, the kinds you get from Babies “R” Us or Walmart: Desitin, Burt’s Bees, Boudreaux’s Butt Paste. We went to the doctor and got a prescription for Nystatin cream. We tried switching diaper brands and tried every name brand and off-name brand of disposable diapers. Nothing worked.

We were totally desperate to figure out something to make our son feel better. It’s very hard to see your baby in pain like that. I was getting ready to be deployed to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, to be a guard for detainees. Before I left, one of the girls in my wife’s moms’ group showed her a cloth diaper. Brooke came home and said she thought we should try that.

I snarled at it. I got the big lip about it. I didn’t like the idea of washing poopy diapers with your clothes. Using cloth diapers just seemed like way too much trouble. Instead of just throwing a diaper away, you actually had to deal with it. I thought it was gross. And I thought it would be too much of a burden on my wife while I was gone.

But two days after Brooke put Tristan into cloth diapers, his rash completely cleared up. Now my son wasn’t screaming in pain anymore, he was finally comfortable and could sleep through the night. I didn’t care what fixed it. I was just so glad the rash was gone.

When I got back from deployment and Tristan was a little older, I started changing diapers. I was surprised that everything with cloth diapers is actually very simple.

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