diapers

Did you know that the newest frontier in giving is diapers? As I found out this past weekend while reading the paper, a suburban mom named Kristen Grode is herself surprised to see that the nonprofit she launched this spring to build Minnesota's first diaper bank, collecting diapers from the public and then delivering them to agencies that help struggling parents, coincides with the burgeoning of a national movement on diaper rights. Yale University held its first "diaper colloquium" earlier this year; the first national study on "diaper needs" was recently released; and a national campaign to improve access to diapers has been launched in Connecticut. "The humble diaper, it seems, is becoming a new frontier of social policy. Advocates argue they are an essential need for children and parents, much like infant formula and food stamps, which are available through the government."

(Kristen Grode. Elizabeth Flores, Star Tribune)

Truly; I am in favor of the government helping. And I have great respect for the work of nonprofit organizations. And am awed by the willingness of this nation's public--friends, neighbors, local communities--to reach out and help each other.

But what ticks me off in this case, is all that's missed.

sexual child vs. sexualization of childhood

We were at the pool this morning and my 2-year old daughter was not happy about wearing her swimsuit. I can't blame her. I hate wearing a swimsuit myself; that cold sticky feel when it's wet. So I always wear a bikini, even now, with my droopy belly. In any case, she wanted hers off and had we been in Norway, I would gladly have let her run around naked as do all the other kids there through the toddling years. But when I once let my daughter run around naked for a little bit here here while I was getting us ready to leave the pool, even a friend of mine (a very laid-back art history teacher) made a comment. Here all little boys and girls wear swim trunks or swimsuits, or bikinis. Which I find ridiculous. I mean, putting a bikini top on a 2-year old girl, as if there was something to cover up?

(My daughter, Lilly, in her swimsuit at the City pool.)

My daughter has one of these bikinis, courtesy of her American grandma, and she'd probably feel more comfortable in it. But I refuse to let her wear it with the top. And a few years ago, I read in the newspaper that a mom at a pool in one of Minneapolis' suburbs had been arrested for letting her 2-year old daughter wear only a bikini bottom with no top.

I brought this up to another mom at the pool this morning, and she thought in our small college town, people wouldn't mind. So I'm considering testing the case. And protest if they make an issue out of it.

Sure, children are born sexual beings, as asserts sexuality educator Debra W. Haffner in From Diapers to Dating. A Parent's Guide to Raising Sexually Healthy Children. But in our culture, they are sexualized in a way that is not healthy but rather a symptom of our culture's unhealthy relationship to sexuality, as discusses Sallie Tisdale in Talk Dirty to Me: An Intimate Philosophy of Sex.

elimination communication

While I was still pregnant, some friends of mine asked what kind of diapering we'd use. We hadn't thought much about this, but our friends--who were expecting a baby around the same time as us--had done their studies and explained our options. Cloth diapers. Disposable diapers. Eco-friendly diapers. Diaper services.

But nobody suggested we'd have our baby go diaper free till I was just about due.

We picked up Christine Gross-Loh's book The Diaper-Free Baby: The Natural Toilet Training Alternative just in time for our baby's arrival and were just amazed by how sensical going diaper-free seemed. After all, it's how babies have learned to toilet train for millenniums and still do in many parts of the world where disposable diapers are scarce.

As Gross-Loh writes in the latest issue of Mothering, "as mindful parents, we aim to be respectful of our children and to be responsive to their needs. In many areas of parenting, this may not feel like a struggle." But, other areas of parenting "may not feel as intuitive, in part due to the strong and confusing cultural messages that surround us" (p. 70, May-June 2010). Toilet training is one of these areas.

Elimination communication is just not a big part of our culture's ideology. Instead, we train our babies--who're born with an instinct to stay clean and with an awareness of their elimination, which they display through body language and other nonverbal ways of communicating--to be okay soiling themselves and even wearing their own waste for a short period. And then, when they are toddlers, we expect them to retrain and regain an awareness of their elimination and no longer soil themselves.