|
Home : WASTE : Diaper Free |
|
Diaper Free Baby or Elimination Control
There are always the old fashioned cloth diapers. However, this counters our way of life on two levels. Firstly, we have only built one room of our house and our storage tanks are still fairly limited. This means that our water is precious to us and the extra laundry, which we do by hand, would use up a valuable resource. Secondly, we use our laundry water on the garden, making that resource go a little further. If we were to put human waste into the equation, we would have to put it all on our compost pile, a genuine loss for the food producing plants. There are some biodegradable disposable options, which we would be able to compost ourselves. However, they are expensive and hard to come by where we live, making them a less than perfect solution. Besides, there is always the chance that a company might lie about their product, attaching the label biodegradable for added profit. We started wondering what the rest of the world does. Not everyone has the money for or even access to diapers, so how do those people deal with the natural needs of their babies? We did some research and came across the notion of diaper free babies, dubbed Elimination Communication (EC). This is the process whereby parents watch their babies for the signals that they need the bathroom and then put them somewhere they can go. In a nutshell, potty training from birth. It is based on the principal that even newborn babies know when they need the bathroom, feeling the muscles stretch as the bladder or colon fills. What they lack is the ability to undress and move themselves to an appropriate place, or the knowledge that an appropriate place exists. When you place a child in diapers, they learn that this is the place to go and do not gain control of those muscles until potty training at age two or later. However, if from the very start (or whenever you can) you allow them to associate a place and noise with the action of elimination, they will learn to control their muscles far sooner.
Now, at nearly six months old, he is almost out of diapers. We use a mixture of cloth diapers and biodegradable disposals to catch the accidents, but need little of either. He pees in them at night and on road trips, when he sleeps soundly. And occasionally he still pees in a diaper during the day, usually when he is too busy playing to let us know or when we are inattentive. However, he has only pooped in a diaper once in the past three months, and that was on a road trip. He suffers from zero diaper rash and we use maybe two diapers a day. Over the months, the size of his bowels as well as his control over them have increased. Plus his bowel movements are now far less frequent and more regular than when he was a newborn, making the whole process far easier. And he has recently started to complain when we put a diaper on him, as he cannot get both his feet in his mouth with a diaper in the way. This is a great step, as he has an added incentive not to be in a diaper. Pretty soon he will be totally diaper free all day long. He can already sit unaided on the potty and in a couple of months he will be able to get to and on it on his own. If you are striving for a self-sustainable homestead, eliminating your waste products should be a priority. EC not only contributes an enormous amount to that goal, it also lets your child enjoy a dry and happy bottom from the beginning of his or her life.
|
|
|||||
| HOME ENERGY WATER SHELTER FOOD WASTE TRANSPORT DONATE STORE CONTACT | |||||
| SITE MAP SAFETY LINK TO US ADVERTISING TERMS OF USE | |||||
When preparing for the arrival of our son, Leo, our single greatest concern was the issue of diapers. It is estimated that a child will use an average of 2500 diapers in the first year alone, and some children stay in diapers for several of years. Considering that most people use non-biodegradable disposable diapers that end up in a landfill, this is a big problem, and we were not prepared to contribute to it. So what to do? 
