Use of Diapers if of recent origin in India,started some 15 years back.
When my children were growing up, we had under-wears, what is called as ‘Jatties’
These are made of thin cloth and dry faster.
We also tore up the Dhoti(Indian Men’s wear, a wrap around around the midriff to suitable lengths for use for the children.
This we continued till they were 3 to 4 years.
When I was a child , I am informed by my sister in law that they used to leave me naked till I was 4!
When the child wets, when it has no cloth around it, the place was swiped clean with Cow’s Dung.
Cow Dung as many may not know is an effective disinfectant.
The child washed around the parts,
Now the trend is Diapers.
They slap some contraption around the child’s loin and leave it at that.
Brand advertising keep screaming at you, soft, smooth,enough room for ventilation etc.
The child develops rashes.
Then you apply some special cream!
Now new brands claim to be rash proof.
Parents remove these Diapers once in two hours or so.
If the Mother were to be a working woman and leaves the child to a Baybysiiter, well, the Diaper will be removed whenever she felt like it or she remembers.
All the while the child will be wet not withstanding the ‘Absorbent Technologies’
Bed wetting was problem we never faced.
Now It has assumed Psychiatric proportions, thanks to Freud!
With all this advances, the bonding( !) between the mother and child is less as compared to what it was, as people of the present day of ‘Unhygienic way of bringing up children’
Their Science now says that the old way encouraged bonding better!
Story:
Diapers
When Jada Shapiro decided to raise her daughter from birth without diapers, for the most part, not everyone was amused. Shapiro scattered little bowls around the house to catch her daughter’s offerings, and her sister insisted that she use a big, dark marker to mark the bowls so that they could never find their way back to the kitchen.
But “elimination communication,” as the diaper-free method of child-rearing is called, is finding an audience.
Shapiro, who is a doula, a birth and child-rearing coach, says it is practically now a job qualification to at least be able to offer diaperfree training as an option to clients. Caribou Baby, an “ecofriendly maternity, baby and lifestyle store” on the border of artsy Greenpoint and Williamsburg , has been drawing capacity crowds to its diaper-free “Meetups,” where parents exchange tips like how to get a baby to urinate on the street between parked cars…
Parents are drawn to the method as a way of preserving the environment from the ravages of disposable diapers, as well as reducing the laundering of cloth diapers and preventing diaper rash. Many of them like the thought that they are rediscovering an ancient practice used in other cultures , though they tend to gloss over the fact that many of those cultures had never heard of Pampers . But mostly, they say, they like feeling more in touch with their babies’ most intimate functions.
“I think for a lot of parents, the motivation is just to be more in tune with what their kids’ needs are,” Adriane Stare, proprietor of Caribou Baby and herself a diaper-free mother, said on Thursday, about a week after holding her most recent meetup. Another meeting was written about on Thursday on the news Web site dnainfo.com; the next is May 14.
Stare said she “EC’d ” her oldest son, Damien, who is now almost 4, and is doing it again with her second boy, Loren, who is almost 4 months old. Stare watched for cues that meant her baby needed to go to the bathroom or was going to the bathroom, like a certain cry or squirming or a grimace . Then, she began associating those cues with her own noises , like “sss,” or grunting. After a while she could make those noises — the elimination communication — to the baby while holding him over the toilet or the sink for perhaps 20 seconds, and he would go to the bathroom on command or refuse if he was not ready.
There are misses, she admits, but even cleaning up a small mess on the floor is easier, she says, than laundering diapers…
Asked whether the practice was a health hazard, Jean Weinberg , a spokeswoman for the New York City health department said: “Really the only infectious disease problem at hand has to do with hand washing. Otherwise, it’s just a general sanitation issue.”
Shapiro, a founder of Birth Day Presence, a childbirth education studio in Park Slope and SoHo, said most clients laughed when they heard about elimination communication, but one or two in every group signed up. At three weeks, her daughter could hold her bowel movements until she was put over the bowl, she said.
“I have absolutely been at parties and witnessed people putting their baby over the sink,” she said. One client took her baby and her bowl to a party, held her naked baby over the bowl, “and she just did it at this person’s party in the corner, but obviously they were close friends,” Shapiro said.
