Apparently, some poorer women are having trouble purchasing diapers.

[conuly]

http://lat.ms/1c83WX5

The comments are full of the usual "poor babies should suffer because their parents should never have had kids!" and "LOL, cloth diapers are cheaper than disposable, you idiots!!!" sentiments that we all love and cherish.

The latter really pisses me off. It's right up there with "if you can't afford to pay the rent, sell the fridge!", "just start buying your rice 50 pounds at a time, it's cheaper that way!" and "duh, stop drinking $4 lattes every day!" in the annals of useless advice. Sure, cloth diapers are cheaper in the long run (if your childcare will accept them and you are able to wash them at the laundromat, and certainly don't mind that extra load or two every week), and I'm all for them, but if these people can't afford $20 to buy a pack of diapers, what makes the commenters think they can afford the $100 - $200 outlay (their estimate, not mine) for cloth? You can't borrow that money from your next 5 paychecks!

Being poor costs money. If the advice was any good, don't you think people would already be following it?

Comments

[kyrielle]

Yeah, exactly. And not all laundromats will let you do that, and actually, if you add two loads per week at the laundromat I do my quilts at, that's going to run you about $5 a week, which is...$20 a month. Which is admittedly less than disposable diapers, but you haven't saved as much as it sounds like, especially after you add in soap. And that's assuming you want to run them through laundromat-class machines on the cheap, never giving an extra sanitize cycle, and that you never have to rewash to strip them when they start not absorbing properly, and....

Yeah. :P

[conuly]

Now some of them are saying that people without ready access to a washing machine should just wash them in the sink. Because all poor people have that much free time, and none of them might ever want to, I don't know, not have poo in the sink!

[crystalpyramid]

Isn't this exactly the kind of thing WIC is for? Doesn't WIC cover diapers?

[conuly]

Not around here it doesn't.

http://diaperdifference.org/advocacy/frequently-asked-questions

[ksol1460.livejournal.com]

Let'em eat cake!

(I know she didn't really say that.)

Jay

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

"If the advice was any good, don't you think people would already be following it?"

No, actually, because I see tons of people not following sensible advice that would save them money, improve their health, and otherwise make their lives better, without costing them a penny.

Seriously, does everyone you know brush and floss twice a day, stretch every day, drink 8-10 glasses of water every day, avoid processed and chemical-laden food, keep their eyes on the road while driving, read to their kids every night.... etcetera etcetera? How about all the folk who've been advised by their doctors to quit the bad habits that are likely to kill them, or who've been advised by their friends and relations to stop wasting money and screwing around? No indeed. There are tons of people out there who stubbornly refuse to follow any advice at all, and then blame anyone and anything but their own stubborn folly when things go badly for them.

Yes, it is stupid and selfish to get pregnant when one can't afford to care for a child, but all the good advice in the world won't stop some women from doing it anyway, and then what? Their babies can't go without diapers, so if the mamas can't or won't scrape up the money to buy them, somebody else has to. And naturally that 'somebody else' is going to resent having to do it.

The sensible thing would be to subsidize all mothers of preschool children, the way some more-enlightened countries do, and then it wouldn't be about "the poor" any longer.

[conuly]

The 8 glasses of water thing is a complete myth, I'll have you know. You don't lose that much water most days, and you get some back in the form of food and whatnot. No, really, look it up. I don't know how it got started, even.

As far as brushing and flossing go, I actually do do both twice daily myself. I thought I was typical!

I would love to automatically provide aid for all kids (and health care, and free daycare, and decent parental leave....), but, you know, that's socialism and we can't have that.

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

Actually, it's "half your body-weight in ounces", meaning if you weigh 160, drink 80 oz., or eight ten-oz. glasses - more if you weigh more, less if you weigh less.

I looked it up. The Mayo Clinic (http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/water/NU00283) says:

"Everyone has heard the advice, "Drink eight 8-ounce glasses of water a day." That's about 1.9 liters, which isn't that different from the Institute of Medicine recommendations. Although the "8 by 8" rule isn't supported by hard evidence, it remains popular because it's easy to remember. Just keep in mind that the rule should be reframed as: "Drink at least eight 8-ounce glasses of fluid a day," because all fluids count toward the daily total.

That's the quick-and-dirty 'Layman's version". If you want to see the actual research findings, go to the National Institute of Health, Water, Hydration and Health (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2908954/):

"As a graphic acknowledgement of the limited database upon which to express Estimated Average Requirements for water for different population groups, the Committee and the Institute of Medicine were forced to state “While it might appear useful to estimate an average requirement (an EAR) for water, an EAR based on data is not possible”. Given the extreme variability in water needs that are not solely based on differences in metabolism, but also on environmental conditions and activities, there is not a single level of water intake that would assure adequate hydration and optimum health for half of all apparently healthy persons in all environmental conditions. Thus, an Adequate Intake (AI) is established in place of an EAR for water.

Bottom line: no, it is not a myth. There is a big difference between a "myth" and a lack of hard data. There is certainly no argument that "half your body-weight in ounces" is not an Adequate Intake unless you're doing hard labor in the heat - and yeah, of course you can have some of it as tea or soup or whatever - and there is also no argument that it's an excessive amount for anybody, of any age. Therefore call it a reasonable guideline rather than a rule if you prefer.

Y'know what, here in my realtime life I'm surrounded by people who pooh-pooh all such guidelines. They don't want to hear it about the water, or the carbs, or the chemicals; they're gonna eat what they want, drink what and when they feel like it - mostly caffeine with either sugar or artificial sweetener - forget their vitamins, skip breakfast, and sit around as much as they want. It wouldn't matter if every medical professional in the world agreed on exactly what they ought to be putting in their bodies, because they wouldn't follow the recommendations even so, but since the medical professionals haven't agreed on any hard-and-fast recommendations, they use "It's a myth" and "Doctors don't really know" as excuses to persist in their denial.

And they look like train-wrecks. Some are ten years younger than me, and look ten years older. They can't walk a flat mile, let alone 15 miles; they have no energy - even those who aren't notably overweight are manifestly not very healthy. Whereas I, who have been taking shit since my teens for being a 'health nut', can still out-walk, out-dance and out-swim most people half my age, and sometimes have to pull out my drivers' license to prove that yes, I really am over 50. So where's the proof of the pudding?

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

Good on you for brushing and flossing twice daily every day. If you were typical, this country would not be having such a dire crisis in dental care. I struggle with brushing and flossing - it's my worst task, despite my having obtained the most efficient tools for the job and cultivated mental discipline to get me past the squick of it all. Brushing right after meals is out of the question, but fortunately there's those little flossers these days; so much better than the horrid waxed string of yore.

Meh, socialism. So what if it is? Then Medicare is socialism too, and we don't see the generation that remembers the Cold War clamoring for an end to that, now do we? If Medicare is good enough for Congress, it's good enough for the citizens, and the program is already in place - just expand it; Medicare for All.

We could very easily have free day-care by making Child Development a required course in High School, putting a sliding-fee center in each school and having each student work in it as an aide for a semester (after completing a semester of book-learning.) However, I sincerely believe that children should stay at home with their mommies for the first three years - or with their daddies, aunties, grannies, nannies, whatever, but at home, not in group care.

The simplest way to ensure this is to pay the mommies a living wage, defined as what it would cost to hire a nanny at minimum wage, including unemployment and Social Security and all that, for 40 hrs. a week for the first 3 years; 20 hours a week for the next 2 years, 10 hours a week for the next 2 years. Then the mommies can either stay home or hire someone else, and neither the mommies or the nannies have to live in poverty.

Of course, along with this I'd abolish all child-support from unmarried fathers, and cut all their paternal rights as well: make it as it used to be, that only legal husbands are legal fathers, but with this difference, that mothers are not dependent upon them for support. A child belongs solely to the mother - all rights and all responsibilities - unless someone else has legally contracted with her to share them.

Think of it - there'd be no more welfare mothers, no more deadbeat dads, no more 'domestic prostitutes' forced to live with abuse to keep a roof over their childrens' heads. There'd be no more exhausting, humiliating interrogations and paper-chases to determine 'eligibility': the monthly checks start automatically when the baby is born. Think of all the money this would save our nation in bureauocracy!

Obamacare disgusts me. It's nothing but a bail-out of the insurance companies, those blood-sucking middlemen who are largely responsible for creating the health-care crisis. If universal Medicare is "socialism", then what is it when the government requires citizens to purchase services from private for-profit corporations? Isn't that fascism? Shit, we're not even "purchasing services" - what we're being forced to do is to engage in gambling, with our health at stake, with companies who make no secret about how much the odds are never in our favor.

[conuly]

Although I think that most kids are better off with one on one time than in group daycare, I would still prefer to see it as a subsidized option (along, again, with decent parental leave!) for those people who just aren't that good at staying home with young kids.

It needn't be an either or thing. If you get, say, three years parental leave, maybe you could put your kid in preschool two days a week starting at age 2 and then save up the parental leave so you only put the kid in three days a week for the first few months of school at 3, or whatever.

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

If Mama gets three years' fulltime pay and three years part-time, she can choose for herself when to go back to work, and pay someone else - in her own home or in theirs - on either a regular or occasional basis.

I'm seriously opposed to group care for toddlers. Sure, it's better than leaving them home with a disabled grandparent or unemployed boyfriend, but that's not saying much. I've worked in some very excellent day-cares, where the standards and caregiver ratios were well above average, and still those children were observably not getting many of their developmental needs met, because the very nature of group care doesn't accommodate that. It's why I went to private nannying when my daughter was a year old.