Faith
10-20-2005, 02:50 PM
Diaper Genie
Babies without diapers? No thanks.
By Emily Bazelon
Posted Friday, Oct. 14, 2005, at 11:27 AM PT
They smell and cause rashes. The disposable kind is expensive, mass-produced, commercially packaged, and filled with clingy little polymer pellets. Who wants to defend the diaper in light of all its sins? It's a wrinkled-nose stance that's hard to get excited about, especially when the imagined au naturel alternative is "a baby's bare bottom bouncing through the house," as anthropologist Meredith Small fondly put it in a New York Times op-ed this week.
Small was celebrating the diaper-free baby movement, which promises that you can teach your months-old or even weeks-old infant to use the potty, all the while "promoting strong baby-parent bonds, fulfilling natural human instincts." Unlike their predecessors in the long-running debates on toileting, the latest proponents of early potty training mercifully refrain from remonstrating that you'll turn your child into a mess of an adult if you wait too long to introduce her to the toilet (or make her anal if you start too soon). Still, however gently, the diaper-free gurus are preaching a dogma. And before parents sign on to it—or, far more likely, feel guilty for being too exhausted to try—it's worth remembering why diapers became indispensable in the first place, and what parents give up if they jettison the little sinners.
For more information go to diaperfreebaby.org
Babies without diapers? No thanks.
By Emily Bazelon
Posted Friday, Oct. 14, 2005, at 11:27 AM PT
They smell and cause rashes. The disposable kind is expensive, mass-produced, commercially packaged, and filled with clingy little polymer pellets. Who wants to defend the diaper in light of all its sins? It's a wrinkled-nose stance that's hard to get excited about, especially when the imagined au naturel alternative is "a baby's bare bottom bouncing through the house," as anthropologist Meredith Small fondly put it in a New York Times op-ed this week.
Small was celebrating the diaper-free baby movement, which promises that you can teach your months-old or even weeks-old infant to use the potty, all the while "promoting strong baby-parent bonds, fulfilling natural human instincts." Unlike their predecessors in the long-running debates on toileting, the latest proponents of early potty training mercifully refrain from remonstrating that you'll turn your child into a mess of an adult if you wait too long to introduce her to the toilet (or make her anal if you start too soon). Still, however gently, the diaper-free gurus are preaching a dogma. And before parents sign on to it—or, far more likely, feel guilty for being too exhausted to try—it's worth remembering why diapers became indispensable in the first place, and what parents give up if they jettison the little sinners.
For more information go to diaperfreebaby.org